The Conquest of Plassans (Les Rougon-Macquart Book 4) Read Free Page B

Rougon-Macquart wolves. That curse too is a metaphor, just like the animal metaphors that run through Zola’s fiction and Naturalist writing generally, and a further endorsement of those who viewed his fiction as humanly diminishing. It is in keeping, of course, withthe ‘natural history’ dimension of Zola’s plan to treat his characters with the detachment of the scientist observing animals in their habitats, but it also provides, paradoxically, an opportunity for him to use the imagery of a nature red in tooth and claw for poetic ends. The Rougon-Macquarts themselves are described as predators and opportunists, cunning and watchful as wolves. Antoine Macquart for instance is frequently called a wolf, while Félicité is described, in
The Fortune of the Rougons
, as having ‘the keenest scent in the whole family’. While their machinations might be subtle and complex, we are never far, with the Rougon-Macquarts, from animal instinct and the law of the jungle.
    Marthe and François Mouret and their children are the only characters we feel sympathy for. Perhaps in the case of Mouret, who tries, albeit half-heartedly, to stand up for his principles and set himself against the town’s hypocritical bourgeois, we even feel something like affection, and are moved by his helpless descent into humiliation and insanity. Mouret has Republican sympathies, and Zola takes care to depict him as harmless but weak, well-meaning but changeable and compulsive. As with his wife and cousin, Marthe Rougon, we are given from the start small proleptic indications of the mental decline to come: Mouret is rash then apathetic, indecisive and then decisive in the wrong direction; he wavers, changes his mind, punishes his wife, and sends his children away but fails to notice the way in which he himself is being sidelined, manipulated, humiliated, and finally destroyed. Marthe is presented as weak-minded, yearning, passive, and unfulfilled. She is, as Faujas rightly surmises, ready to be lured into religion, a focal point for her hysterical tendencies and thwarted sexuality. Marthe’s faith is obsessive and erotic, and she becomes Faujas’s creature in ways that alienate her from her husband and children and help further the schemes of Faujas and Félicité.
    Faujas conquers the town through religion, and he conquers it through the women, first by encouraging them to donate to a project, a religious centre, the ‘Work of the Virgin’, for the protection of working-class young girls, and then by using his hold over the women to attain power over their husbands, who are, by a symmetrical process, encouraged to start up a youth club. One of the great literary figures Zola evokes in
The Conquest of Plassans
is Molière’s classic figure of Tartuffe, a religious hypocrite who poses as a man of faith in order to win over the gullible Orgon and gain his daughter’s handand her inheritance. Tartuffe, like Faujas, is a lodger who gradually gains control over the household, though unlike Faujas, Tartuffe only fools Orgon and his devout mother.
Tartuffe
is a comedy that ends well, whereas
The Conquest of Plassans
is a tragedy that ends in melodramatic catastrophe. At one point in this novel, Mouret even calls Faujas ‘le tartuffe’, and the name is still used in French to designate a religious fraud with ulterior motives that are in fact worldly, materialistic, and wholly unspiritual. 4
    The secondary characters in
Plassans
, a small-town bourgeois society and its minor aristocracy, are presented as hypocritical, sour, vain, and greedy, riddled with snobbery, poisoned by rivalry, two-faced and weak. While they are capable of low cunning, they too become instruments in Félicité’s and Faujas’s game. Zola held Napoleon III and those who served him in contempt, and his own politics were Republican. He never hid his disgust, in fiction or in journalism, for the Imperial regime, and much like Marx (who in
Eighteenth Brumaire
excoriated the corruption