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| Birth Name(s) : Emile Zola |
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Full Emile Zola Biography
Émile Zola (2 April 1840 – 29 September 1902) was an influential French writer, the most important example of the literary school of naturalism, and a major figure in the political liberalization of France.
Emile Zola was born in Paris in 1840. His father, François Zola, was an Italian engineer with French citizenship, and his mother was Emilie Aubert. The family lived in Aix-en-Provence, in the southeast when he was three years old. Four years later, his father died, leaving his mother on a meagre pension. In 1858, the Zolas moved to Paris, where Emile became friends with the painter Paul Cézanne and started to write in the romantic style. Zola's widowed mother had planned a law career for him, but he failed his Baccalauréat examination.
Before his breakthrough as a writer, Zola worked as a clerk in a shipping firm, and then in the sales department for a publisher (Hachette). He also wrote literary and art reviews for newspapers. As a political journalist, Zola did not hide his dislike of the French Emperor Napoleon III, who had used the Second Republic as a springboard to become Emperor.
During his early years, Zola wrote several short stories and essays, four plays and three novels. Among his early books was Contes á Ninon, published in 1864. With the publication of his sordid autobiographical novel La Confession de Claude (1865) attracting police attention, Hachette fired him.
After his first major novel, Thérèse Raquin (1867), Zola started the long series called Les Rougon Macquart, about a family under the Second Empire.
More than half of Zola's novels were part of this set of 20 collectively known as Les Rougon-Macquart. Set in France's Second Empire, the series traces the "hereditary" influence of violence, alcoholism, and prostitution in two branches of a single family: the respectable (that is, legitimate) Rougons and the disreputable (illegitimate) Macquarts, for five generations.
As he described his plans for the series, "I want to portray, at the outset of a century of liberty and truth, a family that cannot restrain itself in its rush to possess all the good things that progress is making available and is derailed by its own momentum, the fatal convulsions that accompany the birth of a new world."
Although Zola and Cézanne were friends from childhood and in youth, they broke in later life over Zola's fictionalized depiction of Cézanne and the Bohemian life of painters in his novel L''uvre (The Masterpiece, 1886).
He risked his career and even his life on 13 January 1898, when his "J'accuse" , was published on the front page of the Paris daily, L'Aurore. The newspaper was run by Ernest Vaughan and Georges Clemenceau, who decided that the controversial story would be in the form of an open letter to the President, Félix Faure. Emile Zola's "J'accuse" accused the highest levels of the French Army of obstruction of justice and antisemitism by having wrongfully convicted a Jewish artillery captain , Alfred Dreyfus, to life imprisonment on Devil's Island. Zola declared that Dreyfus' conviction and removal to an island prison came after a false accusation of espionage and was a miscarriage of justice. The case, known as the Dreyfus affair, had divided France deeply between the reactionary army and church, and the more liberal commercial society. The ramifications continued for many years; on the 100th anniversary of Zola's article, France's Roman Catholic daily paper, La Croix, apologized for its antisemitic editorials during the Dreyfus Affair. As Zola was a leading French thinker, his letter formed a major turning-point in the affair.
Zola was brought to trial for criminal libel on 9 June 1899, and was convicted on 23 February, sentenced, and removed from the Legion of Honor. Rather than go to jail, Zola fled to England, but he was soon allowed to return in time to see the government fall.Portrait by Edouard Manet (1868)
The government offered Dreyfus a pardon (rather than exoneration), which he could accept and go free and so effectively admit that he was guilty, or face a re-trial in which he was sure to be convicted again. Although he was clearly not guilty, he chose to accept the pardon. Zola said, "The truth is on the march, and nothing shall stop it." In 1906, Dreyfus was completely exonerated by the Supreme Court.
Zola died in Paris on 29 September 1902 of carbon monoxide poisoning caused by a stopped chimney. He was 62 years old. His enemies were blamed, but nothing was proven. (Decades later, a Parisian roofer claimed on his deathbed to have closed the chimney for political reasons). Zola was initially buried in the Cimetière de Montmartre in Paris, but on 4 June 1908, almost six years after his death, his remains were moved to the Panthéon.Gravestone of Émile Zola at cimetière Montmartre; his remains are now interred in the Panthéon.
The biographical film The Life of Emile Zola won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1937. The film focuses mainly on Zola's involvement in the Dreyfus Affair.
“If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, I will answer you: I am here to live out loud.” - Émile Zola
"Civilization will not attain perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest." — Émile Zola
"...but I affirm, with intense conviction, the Truth is on the march and nothing will stop it." — Émile Zola |
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