The Debacle
by Émile Zola
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Book Summary Information
Author: Émile ZolaTranslator: Leonard Tancock
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1973-03-30
ISBN: 0140442804
Number of pages: 512
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Book Reviews of The Debacle
Book Review: The Seven Wonders of the World of Novels
Summary: 5 Stars
You can have fun listing the other Six, but everyone's list should include Emile Zola's 20-volume "Macquart-Rougon" story of almost everything in 19th C France. Zola began the series with "La Fortune des Rougon" in 1871, and continued to produce almost a novel a year until 1893 (Le Docteur Pascal). "La Débâcle", next to last in the series, was published in 1892. The debacle of the title was the humiliation France suffered in the Franco-Prussian War begun in 1870, just in fact when Zola was beginning his chronicle. Historians have tended to treat that war as an opera buffa on the part of the French and as a triumph of Machiavellian state-building on the part of Bismark's Germany. Zola includes both these themes in his account, with a scathing portrayal of the rank incompetence of the politicians and generals of France's Third Empire; the bulk of the novel depicts the disastrous battle of Sedan, during which Napoleon III himself was captured by the invading Prussians. But Zola measures the human cost of 'modern' war, not just in blood and rubble but also in its perversion of human behavior, its stimulation of our most bestial instincts, while also dramatizing the heroic courage of individuals and the ineffable loyalty of comrades. The battlefield scenes in Le Debacle are as vivid in words as any in the flickering visuals of a movie theater. So are the horrors suffered by non-combatants. The misery of the defeated common soldiers, imprisoned without shelter or food while their officers are paroled, is terrifying. The Franco-Prussian War was a bizarre hybrid of old and new, of Napoleonic battlefield set-piece strategies and of mechanized 'total' warfare of the sort that had evolved from the American Civil War. Zola apparently researched intensively in preparing to write Le Debacle, his only historical novel, and he succeeded brilliantly in capturing that moment of transition from war as Glory to war as unthinkable Catastrophe. Le Debacle is surely one of the greatest war novels ever written, rivaled only perhaps by War and Peace.
Zola's two chief characters, the peasant corporal Jean and the educated Parisian enlisted soldier Maurice, though profoundly dissimilar in character, become 'wedded' in the rites of combat and survival. Both are sublimely believable fictive personages, whose welfare the reader can't help but 'pray for'. They are also emblematic of the two sides of French society as Zola perceived it -- conservative and radical, of the land and of the city -- and thus the literary inevitability of their encounters and re-encounters achieves more significance than mere plot-driven coincidence. Zola is magnificent in his ability to depict Jean and Maurice as real mortal men and yet as avatars of their nation. There are dozens of lesser characters in Le Debacle as well, from the unnamed ploughboy who works his field while the artillery battles rage to the sternly compassionate surgeon Barouche to Napoleon III, and Zola gives each his due in human portraiture. The women of Le Debacle, more vulnerable and yet more heroic amid the slaughter, are as well realized and individuated as the men. There are unquestionably touches of 19th C melodrama in Le Debacle, but there is an underlying thematic logic to Zola's tale, that justifies any and all literary legerdemain.
I read this translation of Le Debacle, by Leonard Tancock, many years ago, and I've used it as a crutch in re-reading the novel in French. Zola is hard to translate convincingly. If his language is rendered in the syntax and vocabulary of his British contemporaries, it can sound peculiarly stuffy and almost prurient; if it's 'slanged' into the style of 20th C American writers à la Hemingway, it can sound comically anachronistic. The translation barrier is worst in the novels of manners and amours. It's considerably less problematic in Le Debacle, because of the subject matter. Once the battles start raging, the syntax is universal. This translation is quite British; Americans will find themselves bemused at times, but on the whole it's remarkably faithful to the original, and powerfully vivid.
I suppose the translation barrier is one reason why Zola is underappreciated in the Anglophone world. Only thirteen of the twenty Macquart-Rougon novels are currently available in any English form, and many of the translations are decades old and stylistically inept. If you can only read Zola in English, I strongly recommend The Debacle as the best stand-alone first choice.
Summary of The Debacle
Conservative and working-class, Jean Macquart is an experienced, middle-aged soldier in the French army, who has endured deep personal loss. When he first meets the wealthy and mercurial Maurice Levasseur, who never seems to have suffered, his hatred is immediate. But after they are thrown together during the disastrous Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71, the pair are compelled to understand one other. Forging a profound friendship, they must struggle together to endure a disorganised and brutal war, the savage destruction of France's Second Empire and the fall of Napoleon III. One of the greatest of all war novels, "The Debacle" is the nineteenth novel in Zola's great Rougon-Macquart cycle. A forceful and deeply moving tale of close friendship, it is also a fascinating chronicle of the events that were to lead, in the words of Zola himself, to the murder of a nation'.Classics Books
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