Zola, II: L'Homme de Germinal (1871-1893) (review)

Abstract

This second volume of Henri Mitterand's still incomplete monumental three-volume biography of Zola covers the nearly two dozen years during which the novelist published Les Rougon-Macquart. Despite the book's imposing length, it is not and does not pretend to be exhaustive. As in Volume I, Mitterand concentrates on what, we may presume, is not only of greatest concern to him, but also most likely to interest the broad French public for which he is writing. (Volume I, published in 1999, has already been awarded a Grand Prix de la Ville de Paris.) But those aspects of his subject that he has chosen to emphasize, he treats with immense insight and precision, [End Page 181] as well as exceptional story-telling skill. He does so, furthermore, in extraordinarily rich detail. As we know, Zola was one of the most widely observed as well as, in many, if not all, respects (for he also had his secret side and was adept at wielding masks) the most self-revealing of writers. The number of sources now readily available to his biographers (much of it largely thanks to Mitterand's own labors over the last fifty years) is extremely vast. In this second volume, he has once again taken full advantage of his unrivaled command of this material along with many as yet generally less accessible sources.