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THE DOWNFALL

(LA DÉBÂCLE)

_A STORY OF THE HORRORS OF WAR_


BY

ÉMILE ZOLA


TRANSLATED BY ERNEST A. VIZETELLY

WAR CORRESPONDENT 1870-1


_NEW AND REVISED EDITION_


CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY

1893




PREFACE


Before the present translation of M. Zola's novel, 'La Débâcle,'
appeared in 'The Weekly Times and Echo,' in which it was originally
issued, the author was interviewed for that journal by Mr. Robert H.
Sherard, whom he favoured with some interesting particulars concerning
the scope and purport of his narrative. By the courtesy both of Mr.
Sherard and of the proprietor of 'The Weekly Times,' the translator
is here able to republish the remarks made by M. Zola on the occasion
referred to. They will be found to supply an appropriate preface to the
story:--

'"La Débâcle" has given me infinitely more trouble than any of my
previous works. When I began writing it, I had no conception of the
immensity of the task which I had imposed on myself. The labour of
reading up all that has been written on my subject in general, and on
the battle of Sedan in particular, has been enormous, and the work
of condensation of all that I have had to read has been all the more
laborious that on no subject has more divergence of opinion been
expressed... I have read all that has been written about the battle
of Sedan, as well as about the unhappy adventures of the luckless
Seventh Army Corps, in which is placed the fictitious regiment which
plays the leading _rôle_ in my novel. And the digestion has not been
an easy task. Each general, for instance, has a different version to
give of the why and the wherefore of the defeat. Each claims to have
had a plan, which, if it had been followed, would have averted the
disaster. Another difficulty has been that I took no part in that
campaign, not having been a soldier, and that for my information on the
life and experience of those who went through the campaign in general,
and the battle of Sedan in particular, I have had to depend on outside
testimony, often of a conflicting nature. I may say, however, that
in this matter I have been greatly helped by the kindness of persons
who are good enough to be interested in my work, and as soon as it
became known that I was writing a book about the war and about Sedan,
I received from all parts of France manuscript relations written by
people of all classes who had been present at the battle, and who sent
me their recollections. That was most excellent material--indeed, the
best, because not to be found anywhere else. An "Anecdotal Account of
the Battle of Sedan" was sent me by a gentleman who is now professor at
one of the Universities in the South. A long, ill-spelt letter came to
me from a gamekeeper in the North, in which he gave me a full account
of the battle as it impressed him, who was a private soldier in the
Seventh Army Corps at the time. I have masses of such documents, and it
was my duty to go through everything that could throw any light on my
subject.

'The subject was to be War. I had to consider War in its relation
to various classes of society--War _vis-à-vis_ the bourgeois, War
_vis-à-vis_ the peasant, War _vis-à-vis_ the workman. How the war
was brought about--that is to say, the state of mind of men in
France at the time--was a consideration which also supplied me with
a number of characters. I had to show, in a series of types, France
who had lost the use of liberty, France drunk with pleasure, France
fated irrevocably to disaster. I had to have types to show France so
prompt to enthusiasm, so prompt to despair. And then there were to be
shown the immense faults committed, and to show by character how the
commission of such faults was possible, a natural sequence of a certain
psychological state of mind of a certain preponderating class, which
existed in the last days of the Empire. Then each phase of action had
to be typified. The question of the Emperor and his surroundings--I
had to have characters to explain "the sick man" and his state at the
time. I had to show how it was with the peasants of the period, and
hence to equip a character or two for that purpose. The Francs-tireurs
played an important part in the epoch; it therefore became necessary
for me to incarnate these, to create a typical Franc-tireur. The spies
and spying had their influence on the whole; I had to have a spy. By
the way, the spy in my book is one of the few German characters that
I have created--four or five--this spy and an officer or two. Then,
having thus, with a stroke of the rake, dragged together all that I
could find as likely to illustrate my period, both historically and
psychologically considered, I wrote out rapidly--the work of one
feverish morning--a _maquette_, or rough draft of all I wanted to do,
some fifteen or twenty pages.

'It then became necessary to see the places, to study the geography
of my book, for at that period I did not know where my scenes were to
be laid, whether on the banks of the Rhine, or elsewhere. So, with my
rough draft in my pocket, and my head teeming with the shadows of my
marionettes, and of the things that they were to do and to explain, I
set off for Rheims and went carefully over the whole ground, driving
from Rheims to Sedan, and following foot by foot the road by which the
Seventh Corps--already then decided upon as the _milieu_ in which my
novel was to develop--marched to their disaster. During that drive I
picked up an immense quantity of material, halting in farmhouses and
peasants' cottages, and taking copious notes. Then came Sedan, and
after a careful study of the place and the people, I saw that my novel
must deal largely, for the full comprehension of my story, not only
with the locality, but with the people of the town. This gave me the
_bourgeois_ of Sedan, who play an important part in my tale. Little
by little, the geography gave me also the physiology of my book. Each
new place that it became necessary to describe supplied its type, its
characters.

'So, on my return to Paris, I was in an immense workshop or yard
surrounded with huge mountains of hewn stones, mortar and bricks, and
all that remained then to do was to build the best structure that I
could build of these materials. But before that, the architect's plan
was necessary, and that I next carefully evolved. My plan of work is
most rigorous. Each chapter is marked out in advance, but it is only
as I am writing that the various incidents which I have collected fall
into place.... My labour has been one of reconciliation of divergent
statements in the first place, and of condensation in the second. I
had to reduce to one page what I could easily, and without prolixity,
have treated in a dozen pages; so that with each page, nay with each
sentence, I have been confronted with the question what to leave out
and what to say. Then, when each page was written, I began to torture
myself with the doubt whether I had left unsaid things I ought to have
said, whether I had sacrificed good to inferior material.

'"La Débâcle" is divided into three parts. The first part treats of the
action of the luckless Seventh Army Corps, in which is the fictitious
regiment in which my hero or heroes are placed. I say heroes, because
I have really two heroes in this story. One is Jean, of my novel
'La Terre,' who is a corporal in this regiment; the other is a new
character named Maurice, who goes through Sedan as a private soldier.
Between these two men a great friendship exists, and, indeed, it is
from this friendship in the face of death and danger, this comradeship
of arms _malgré tout_, that I draw the chief effects of sentiment with
which my novel is seasoned. For "La Débâcle" is not a love story.
The female characters in it play only secondary _rôles_; there is no
love-making worth speaking about, at the most, only the "intention" of
love, the indication of courtship. Jean and Maurice, my two heroes,
moreover, present types of the France of the day. Maurice, who is
represented as a young man who has recently been admitted to the bar,
is the man of the world--light, cynical, sceptical, the type of the
France of the Empire, embodying her grace and her faults. He is the
type of the France that, sated with pleasure, rushed to disaster. Jean
represents the new social _couche_, a new stratum, and is in some way
emblematic of the France of the future. Now, I will confess that when I
began writing my book, and had this idea of this friendship, I expected
to be able to produce by its means a much greater effect than I think
I have done. This friendship has not yielded all that I had hoped for
from it.

'The first section of eight chapters opens with allusion to the
trifling defeats on the frontier, it shows the Seventh Corps crowded
back on to Rheims; but the principal subject of these chapters is the
terrible march from Rheims to Sedan. It is an epic event, pregnant with
the irony of fate, and, to my thinking, one of the most tragic military
episodes that history records. There is no fighting described in this
part; indeed, the only battle that I describe is Sedan. The tragedy
lies in the exposition of the faults that gradually led up to the
terrible disaster. The reader follows the movements of this ill-fated
corps, knowing what a terrible shadow of defeat, disaster, and death
overhangs it. It was a wonderful corps, and the way it was managed was
wonderful in its crass stupidity.

'My second part is entirely devoted to a description of the battle of
Sedan in all its phases, seen from all sides. I have omitted nothing
which can help to a comprehension of that enormous episode in the
histories of France and of the world. Now we are with Napoleon, now
with the Emperor of Germany, now with the _bourgeois_ of Sedan, now
with the Francs-tireurs in the woods. Each movement of troops that
contributed to the final _dénouement_ is exposed. I have endeavoured to
be complete, but as I have said, I had too little space for the immense
amount of material in my hands. I have also endeavoured to speak the
plain truth without either fear or favour. The reader will be aroused
to compassion with the sufferings, bodily and mental, of the heroic
and martyred army, just as he will be aroused to indignation at the
conduct of its chiefs, which fell little short of downright dementia.
It has been my duty to be severely critical, and I have not shrunk from
the responsibility of wounding, where it was right and just to do so,
susceptibilities which I see no reason for respecting. I dare say there
will be some outcry at my blame, but I am indifferent, having spoken
the truth.

'The last part of my novel is played out in Sedan, after the battle.
From thence the reader follows the rest of the history of the war as
it develops itself in other parts of France, until it culminates in
the outbreak of the Commune and the final collapse of Paris in a sea
of fire and an ocean of blood. The last chapter of the book is an
account of Paris in flames, of Paris with its gutters running with
blood. I hope by this means to produce a gradation of effect--the
catastrophe of Sedan, which ends the second part, followed up by the
still greater catastrophe of the last chapter. To resume: The first
part of my novel is the march from Rheims to Sedan; the second is the
catastrophe of Sedan, from inception to _dénouement_; and the third the
collapse not of Paris alone, but of the whole of old-time France, with
the _dénouement_ of the burning of Paris, the flames of which clear
away not only an old _régime_, but a whole psychological state, and
prepare a fresh field for a new and regenerated people. For observe,
that my book, as far as outward construction goes, divided into three
parts, may also be divided into a novel of historical and a novel of
psychological interest. It tells a tale of many adventures, but it also
aims to give a full list of psychological studies of French society as
it was at the outbreak of the war.

'My novels have always been written with a higher aim than merely
to amuse. I have so high an opinion of the novel as a means of
expression--I consider it parallel with lyrical poetry, as the highest
form of literary expression, just as in the last century the drama was
the highest form of expression--that it is on this account that I have
chosen it as the form in which to present to the world what I wish to
say on the social, scientific, and psychological problems that occupy
the minds of thinking men. But for this I might have said what I wanted
to say to the world in another form. But the novel has to-day risen
from the place which it held in the last century at the table of the
banquet of letters. It was then the idle pastime of the hour, and sat
low down between the fable and the idyll. To-day it contains, or may be
made to contain, everything; and it is because that is my creed that I
am a novelist. I have, to my thinking, certain contributions to make
to the thought of the world on certain subjects, and I have chosen
the novel as the best way of communicating these contributions to the
world. Thus "La Débâcle," in the form of a very precise and accurate
relation of a series of historical facts--in other words,