Emile Zola and the Bicycle

 

One of the projects I undertook during the Covid lockdown that commenced nearly two years ago was to read the twenty volumes of Emile Zola’s Rougon-Macquart saga written from 1871 to 1893.  I was drawn to Zola not only by his wide-range of novels, many of which rank among the finest in French literature, but also by the no small matter of his largely overlooked role in the creation of the Tour de France.  

His highly charged indictment of the French judicial system, “J’Accuse,” one of the most famous and impactful diatribes ever, published in a special edition of a Paris newspaper in 1898, lambasting the conviction of the Jewish army officer Alfred Dreyfus for treason three years previously, calling it a “ghastly miscarriage of justice” and “the most outrageous fraud imaginable,” resulted in not only Dreyfus gaining his freedom from the life sentence he was serving on Devil’s Island off the coast of South America, but also the establishment of the newspaper that gave birth to the Tour de France.  

The most popular sports daily newspaper in France at the time, “Le Velo,” sided with Zola and Dreyfus.  Several of the paper’s biggest advertisers, including Michelin, were on the opposite side of this extremely divisive issue, so withdrew their adversing and provided the funds to start up a rival daily sports paper, “L’Auto,” in 1899 with Henri Desgrange as its editor. Three years later, still straining to gain readers, Desgrange decided to sponsor a bike race around France to drum up interest in the paper.  The ploy was a success beyond anyone’s imagining. 

Since Zola was instrumental in reviving interest in the Dreyfus Affair, making it a cause célèbre throughout France, he can be given credit for there being a Tour de France, as without his intervention the newspaper that created The Tour, the first of such national tours, would never have come into existence.  Zola died in 1902, a year before the inauguration of The Tour, so the honor of being Father of The Tour is accorded to Desgrange, a larger-than-life figure who directed The Tour with an autocratic hand up until his death in 1940.  His initials grace the Yellow Jersey and a towering monument honors him near the summit of the Galibier, one of the premier climbs in the Alps.  By all rights Zola should share some of that glory.

Zola had long been a champion of the oppressed.  Early in his career he said, “I will always be on the side of the vanquished.”  His stated aim was “to live in a constant state of rage against pretense and deceit and the mediocrity that surrounds us.  One must rise up from the newspaper each morning boiling with indignation over the imbecilities in its pages.”   He directly all that fury into the Dreyfus case and countless other issues.

His novels were strong indictments of all strains of social injustice, siding with the downtrodden while seething with disgust for the elites that kept them in a state of subjugation, from politicians to the Catholic Church and those of wealth, so he was happy to champion the cause of Dreyfus, especially since his conviction had a strong element of anti-Semitism, which he had railed against calling it a scourge of the times.  He hadn’t been involved in the case until a supporter of Dreyfus brought to his attention the many irregularities of the military’s case against Dreyfus and its ongoing efforts to suppress any efforts to reveal them.

When he learned the extent of the travesty, he put the full weight of his considerable power as the most read author of the period behind freeing him, culminating with his full page indictment of all those who had conspired to convict Dreyfus.  The “J’Accuse” headline screamed out in the largest type the newspaper had available.  The 300,000 copies of the special edition were more than any of his books had sold.  He minced no words in accusing over two dozen individuals, including generals and handwriting experts, of being complicit in the conspiracy, knowing full well he could be held libel for his forthrightness.  

Less than a month later he was put on trial for libel, a trial which became known as “The Trial of the Century,” rivaling any before or since, capturing the interest of all of France and beyond.  It went on for two weeks and attracted mobs of supporters and enemies and legions of gendarmes to control the crowds, who every day shouted “Down with Zola!  Death to the Jews! Drown the kikes!”  Earlier, the publication of “J’Accuse” launched the most violent wave of anti-Semitism ever experienced in France extending all the way to Algeria with attacks on Jewish homes and businesses.  

Zola needed a police escort to and from the trial.  There was fear of riots and looting from the country’s many anti-Semites and rabid supporters of the military if the jury rendered a verdict of innocence. The publisher of the newspaper that ran “J’Accuse,” Georges Clemenceau, who later became prime minister of France, later said, “If Zola had been acquitted, none of us would have left the court house alive.“  Hollywood made a movie of the trial starring Paul Muni, “The Life of Emile Zola,” that won the Oscar for the best picture in 1937. 

Zola was found guilty.  He appealed and was tried again and again convicted.  He obliged the urging of friends and immediately fled the country taking a ferry across the Channel to England, though he was prepared to martyr himself and do his time, commenting, “If I had to spend a year in prison, I would have bicycled every morning for an hour in the prison courtyard and written the rest of the time.” 

Yes, he was an early, well-known adherent of the bicycle. The bicycle was such an integral part of his life that his long-time publisher and close friend Georges Charpentier consoled him after one of the many times the prestigious French Academy rejected his bid for membership, not to let it weigh upon him and that “it shouldn’t disturb your sleep or diminish the pleasure of bike riding.” 

His day wasn’t complete without an afternoon ride.  He would joyfully ride the twenty-one miles from his home outside of Paris to his apartment in the city.  When his whereabouts were unknown after his trial and conviction, there were reports that he had been seen crossing the border from France into Switzerland on a bicycle and other reports that he had crossed into Holland on a bicycle.

The bicycle doesn’t turn up in any of his Rougon-Macquart novels, as the bicycle was in its infancy at the time.  It isn’t until his subsequent trilogy of city novels that the bicycle makes its first appearance in the second of them, “Rome,” published in 1896, with the lone mention of “a bicyclist speeding along noiselessly, his machine sparkling in the sun.”

But his following book, “Paris,” offers a full-fledged ode to the bicycle.  The pleasure of riding a bicycle rescues the disillusioned, tormented priest, who is the central figure of the trilogy, from his torpor, and gives him a reason to live.  The burden of life and whether one is better off dead than alive is a constant theme of Zola’s writing.  All too often his books end with suicide.  

In “Paris” the priest, Pierre, is introduced to bicycling by the girl friend of his brother.  He is immediately smitten by the woman and riding a bicycle.  Zola lends his supreme eloquence to praise the bicycle as “boundless hope, delivery from every shackle, absolute freedom of motion through space.  Nothing can inspire one more gloriously—one’s heart leaps as if one were in the very heavens.”  No one has better described the glory and sensation of riding the bike.  

He goes on to describe other benefits—“the healthfulness of the open air, the delight which exercise brings, the pleasure of roaming in all freedom through the midst of nature.”  When a group of cyclists gather at a cafe, he describes a scene common to wherever cyclists come together—“Bicycling became the one topic of conversation until the end of the meal. Thomas gave an account of the latest improvements introduced into Grandidier’s machines; and the others talked of the excursions they had made or meant to make with all the exuberant delight of school children eager for the open air.”  

He celebrated riding fast, “the joyous intoxication of speed, the rapturous feeling of darting along breathlessly when the grey road flees beneath one.”  He pays tribute to riding uphill asking, “is there not even a pleasure in effort…it’s amusing to overcome obstacles…a little ascent which does not try one’s limbs too much rouses and inspires one. And it is so agreeable to find one’s self strong, and able to go on and on in spite of rain or wind or hills.”  And best of all, he comments on the peace that riding a bicycle can bring, allowing the tormented priest to feel “far removed from the rest of the world.”

Zola also recognized cycling as a liberating force for women, writing “the facilities which cycling affords people for going out together tend to great intercourse and equality between the sexes; the wife and children can follow the husband everywhere and friends of the opposite sex are at liberty to roam hither and thither without astonishing anybody.  In this lies the greatest advantage of all: one takes a bath of air and sunshine, one goes back to nature, to the earth, our common mother, from whom one derives fresh strength and gaiety of heart.”

Pierre’s female companion calls cycling a “capital education for women” and adds, “If ever I have a daughter I shall put her on a bicycle as soon as she is ten years old, just to teach her how to conduct herself in life.  Women are allowed no initiative, no exercise of judgement or decision, so that at times they hardly know how to cross a street to such a degree does the traffic alarm them.  Well, I say that a girl ought to be set on a bicycle in her childhood and allowed to follow the roads.”

Coming upon this ode to the bicycle redeemed the ordeal of plowing through book after book of depressing tales of despair and misfortune of the destitute and oppressed—Parisian slum dwellers, peasant farmers, prostitutes, small shop owners, struggling artists, miners, soldiers—all barely coping with the ordeal of life.  It was not the antidote I needed  in the time of Covid. No matter how hard I rooted for characters mired in misery, prone to self-destructive behavior, to rise above their circumstances, it was to no avail.  His stories continued to take one bad turn after another leaving a sour taste in my stomach. Zola unrelenting focused on the wretched, objecting to the literature of the time which preferred to present a rosy picture. “One develops a thirst for bile,” he said, and so he served up.  Despite the brilliance of the writing, it was more demoralizing than inspiring.  Zola himself confessed, “I cannot reread my own words without becoming deeply sad.” 

One biographer, Graham King, noted, “Only a few determined readers have ever read the twenty volumes of Zola’s Rougan-Macquart chronicle from the first word to the last.” It’s not so much having to turn so many pages, but rather having to endure the onslaught of so much disastrous and disheartening behavior and having to wallow with so many sorry souls rooted in one hell or another.  Zola is unrelenting in his pessimistic view of the human predicament, bitterly and ironically titling one novel “The Joy of Life,” rendering it anything but, debating the elemental question of whether life is worthwhile.  The title of another novel,  “The Beast in Man,” could have been applied to every one of his novels. 

Early in his life after finishing school without passing his final exams Zola spent two years living among the dispossessed of Paris, struggling to get by initially working as a clerk, then giving that up to write.  He was forced to pawn from time to time whatever he could for a piece of bread, as he fought to establish himself as a writer.  He well knew the torments of the working class, and he never forgot what it was to be poor.  It was his mission to bring attention to the plight of the disadvantaged and to portray it as vividly as he could, establishing a new level of realism in literature.  

He was decried by many for his lurid portrayals of the appalling and shameful living conditions of the poor and disadvantaged. That came as no surprise to him, as he wrote, “He who seeks the truth offends decency.” All his books were serialized in newspapers shortly before they were published as books.  At times so many readers objected to the sordid agony of his characters that papers discontinued the series.  Zola didn’t object as it just brought more attention to his writing.  His stated mission was to “grab the public by the throat. They may get angry, but they don’t forget.  If not nightmares, I must give them something they’ll remember.”  That included graphic murders, castration, a gruesome abortion, agonized deaths from hunger and alcohol and smallpox and countless other csuses, and one continual spiral into the abyss after another.  

His eleventh book in the series, “The Ladies Paradise,” about a good-hearted young woman working in a giant department store, was celebrated as at last a book with a happy ending, though it was rife with the agony of all the small shops driven out of business by the monolith, an all-too-familiar, timeless story.  It was a rare novel of his that didn’t have to be refined by his English publisher to be more suitable for the British audience. His English publisher, who also introduced “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” to Great Britain, went to pains to tone down the bleakness of his books after serving three months in prison for publishing such dire tales. Zola was the only author to have his books banned in England during the nineteenth century.   During the trial the jury protested having to listen to the passages the prosecuting attorney deemed objectionable.  He said reading them pained him too and he was happy to desist.  

His book, “The Masterpiece,”  book number fourteen, loosely based on his childhood chum, Paul Cezanne, who he grew up with in Aix-en-Provence and enticed to join him in Paris, could have been another with a happy ending, but Zola couldn’t help himself and had it conclude with another punch-to-the-gut tragedy of catastrophic proportions.  Zola’s dim view of life cast a pall on all he wrote.  He often described sunsets as being “melancholic” rather than with adjectives suggesting the beauty of the setting sun.

Zola dedicated his first book to Cezanne, “Claude’s Confession,” one of four before he began his prodigious twenty-volume series, indicating the close bond they shared. Zola achieved success before Cezanne and gave him money from time to time to help him out.  Letters of affection between the two live to this day, quoted in biographies, so it came as a shock to Cezanne and his fellow artists that Zola elected to portray him so harshly.

Zola well knew the struggles of those in the arts, his own as well as Cezanne’s and countless others, which “The Masterpiece” documents with agonizing realism.  It was one of the few books he wrote that didn’t require the intense research he was known for in novels on mining and farming and railroads and war and  prostitution and the priesthood and developers and a department store and the stock exchange.  But he doesn’t allow Cezanne to triumph in the end.  Cezanne was so upset he never spoke to Zola again. Other artists, including Renoir, likewise took affront that Zola chose to portray a broken artist rather than a triumphant artist, as many were.  The painter Antoine Guillemot, who advised Zola on the book, said, “Happily, the real world is not so sad,” words that can be applied to all his novels.

Anatole France, one of France’s fifteen Nobel Prize winners for literature, though not Zola despite two nominations, was appalled by his depiction of the sorry lot and desperation of peasant farmers in “La Terre,” the fifteenth book in his series.  He called it “a lofty pile of ordure” and declared the world would be better off if Zola had never been born.  He wrote, “Never before has man made such an effort to debase humanity, to insult its image of beauty and love, to deny all that is good and all that is noble.”  

Tolstoy too took great affront for his for dwelling upon the farmer peasant’s plight and aberrant behavior, depicting them as repulsive animals moved only by lust, anger and greed.  Yet both gave him vigorous support for his defense of Dreyfus.  France even delivered a stirring eulogy at his burial, calling him the conscience of mankind.  Zola’s wife was hesitant about allowing France to speak at the burial still feeling the sting of some of his harsher words, but felt assured he would not revive his negative comments on his writing, even though he liked “L’Assommoir” so much he read it ten times.

“L’Assommoir,” seventh in the series, was his first book to achieve widespread sales and acclaim and to be translated into English.  It at last gave Zola financial independence and the means to buy a house outside of Paris far from the bourgeoisie.  It offered a harrowing, heartwrenching portrayal, such as had never before been seen, of the struggles of the working class poor suffering one setback after another leading to prostitution, dependency on alcohol and pitiful death.  The temperance movement embraced the book, much to the surprise of Zola. It was made into a play that had a run of more than a year.  For the hundredth performance Zola made it a matinee available for free to the working class, who approved of his bringing to light the dire conditions of their lives regarding the novel as a lesson and not an insult. Many of his novels were made into plays, which could be more profitable than book sales.

Two books later, “Nana,” a novel about a prostitute/actress who seemingly every man of wealth in Paris lusts after and showers with money and jewels, was so highly anticipated that there was a huge bidding war among newspapers to serialize it. The newspaper that won the rights plastered the city with billboards—on walls, trams and the cylindrical urinals that had emerged all over.  It even sent out men with sandwich boards promoting the serialization. It’s initial run of 55,000 copies sold out on the first day and went on to outsell all his books except the later “The Debacle.”

Around the time of the publication of the book in 1880 his mother died and also his close friend Gustave Flaubert, whose “Madame Bovary” in 1857 created an even greater furor than any of his books.  Flaubert was nineteen years his senior.  He and Zola and the Russian author Ivan Turgenev, living in Paris, had regular dinners with other writers.  They proudly referred to themselves as “the hissed authors” all condemned for their writing.  The death of these two people hit Zola so hard it took him two years to write his next novel, the longest he had gone between books.

Having suffered in poverty during his early years, he was attentive to the financial side of writing.  He launched his Rougon-Macquart series as a deal with a publisher to pay him 500 francs a month, enough to live on comfortably, in exchange for two novels a year for five years.  He had just a brief outline of what those novels would be, other than that they would involve two sides of a family, the somewhat respectable, ambitious Rougons and their illegitimate, neurotic and unstable counterparts the Macquarts, a name he chose for the harshness of its pronunciation, reflecting their seedy side.  

His publisher went bankrupt after two years, but another publisher, the aforementioned Charpentier, who had faith that Zola would one day find a wider audience than he had had, stepped in and stood by him for the rest of his career.  Though Zola fell short of writing two novels a year, he expanded his series to twenty volumes with just a vague idea of the subject of each, as they all stood independent of one another, each featuring a character who had made a usually brief appearance in a previous novel, such as Nana as the rebellious daughter of the couple in “L’Assommoir” whose lives end in disaster.  He was recruited by a politician to write a novel on striking miners, which resulted in “Germinal,” one of the more powerful in the series that was made into multiple movies including one starring Gerald Depardieu.  

He planned on writing a novel about the brutality of war for his penultimate novel, though not knowing which war he would choose.  When it became known that it would focus on the Battle of Sedan during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, he received dozens of first-hand accounts from soldiers, assuring the verisimilitude of his account of France’s humiliating loss to Germany.  Grunt soldiers appreciated how well he captured the poisoning effects of warfare, but the military brass not so much.

Zola had finished his city trilogy and was preparing to embark on a quartet of books he referred to as “the Gospels,” what he considered the four cardinal principles of human life—“Fruitfulness,” “Work,” “Truth” and “Justice”—before he became engulfed in his Dreyfus-libel trials.  During the eleven months he spent he England, up until Dreyfus was brought back to France and was exonerated, he wrote the first novel in the series, as well as the first short story he’d written in years “Abilene”, and the first that included a bicycle.  The bike had no significance other than it commences with the narrator out on a bicycle ride coming upon a haunted house.  

But the bicycle is given another fine tribute in “Fruitfulness,” the novel he wrote while in England.  A bride enlists it the means of conveyance for her wedding party, as it is “the most modern style.”  She and the groom and her maids of honor (her three little sisters aged eleven, nine and seven) along with her thirteen year old brother all rode bicycles to the betrothal, with the rest of the wedding party just behind transported by wagon.  The bride and groom led “the nuptial march with majestic amplitude.”  The three little girls on bikes proportioned to their size followed “with berets on their heads, and their hair down their backs, waving in the breeze, looking adorable, suggesting a flight of messenger swallows skimming over the ground and bearing good tidings onward.”  The boy though flitted all over—“he did not behave very well; for he actually tried to pass the royal couple.”  They are caught by rain but dash on, undeterred.

The thirteen year old boy elsewhere in the story gives a young girl a lesson in riding his bicycle.  As he explains the operation of the bike, the girl “looked on with glowing eyes, full of admiration and covetous.”  She gets in trouble with her parents who do not wish to oblige her with a bicycle, regarding this new-fangled invention as an object suitable only for the bourgeoisie. 

The bicycle was firmly planted in Zola’s consciousness during his time in exile, as the road outside of where he was staying was graced by a steady stream of cyclists, mostly women, giving him no end of pleasure.  In France he had objected to women wearing skirts on bicycles, preferring the more practical “rationals” that some women cyclists wore, but applauded the English women in skirts writing, “The English women are most elegant in skirts, very gracious on their bicycles, and sit straight on the seat, draped in long folds.” He was happy to note the many cyclists were running errands and shopping, not simply out for a pleasure ride, as in France. 

His letters to his wife and his mistress contain frequent mentions of the cyclists.  In one letter he asked his mistress to bring his cycling clothes when she came for a visit with their two young children, his only offspring.  He enjoyed riding with his mistress, who was twenty-seven years his junior.  The children were not quite old enough to bicycle, but he promised them bikes when he returned to France, one of the first things he did upon his return.  The book his daughter Denise wrote about her father includes many mentions of bicycle excursions they shared during the remaining three years of his life after he returned to France.   Her final memory of Zola came after a bike ride to meet him for an outing on his boat “Nana” on the Seine.

He met his mistress Jeanne when she came into his household at the age of twenty to serve as his wife’s maid.  When the three were on a six-week holiday together his wife unwisely encouraged Zola to go bicycling with her as she was unsteady on the bike, and could only manage riding a tricycle, initiating their affair.  When they returned to Paris the maid left the household with Zola installing  her in a nearby apartment.  His wife didn’t learn of the arrangement until three years later when they had two children.  She was furious, but came to accept the situation, becoming a benefactor of the children.

Zola took up photography in his later years and even rigged up a camera on his handlebars to take photos.  He had a camera in England and took quite a few photos of women on bicycles.  His granddaughter published a book of his photos.  Nearly ten per cent of the 208 photos in the book include a bicycle,  among them his wife and mistress on bikes. 

He gives just one mere mention of the bicycle in his last two novels.  It came in “Work,” his penultimate novel.  The bicycle is lumped in with “an infinity of vehicles” making transport and locomotion easier than it had been. His final book “Truth” was published posthumously after his sudden death in 1902 asyphiated by fumes as he slept in his Paris apartment.  It wasn’t  proven at the time, but years later a workman confessed on his deathbed that he had plugged up his chimney the evening before his death and cleared it the next morning, removing evidence of the sabotage.  Zola long received death threats for his support of Dreyfus.  His wife just barely survived, revived by a doctor. 

His premature death denied him the pleasure of witnessing the phenomenon of the first Tour de France and all that followed.  Though the race would no doubt have eventually found birth, it was his vociferous resuscitation of the Dreyfus case that led to its creation as early as it was in 1903, a year after his death, thanks to the struggling newspaper that wouldn’t have come into existence if it were not for Zola’s “J’Accuse” stirring the Dreyfus furor that gripped France for years.   His role may not be acclaimed for helping to launch the premier annual sporting event in the world, but six years after his death he received one of the ultimate honors the French can bestow.  His remains were transferred from the Montmartre cemetery where he had been interred to the Pantheon.  

Dreyfus, who knew he had Zola to thank for his freedom, attended his first burial and this one as well.  So did miners, who he had so grimly portrayed in “Germinal,” grateful to Zola for bringing attention to their lives.  Also among those in attendance at the Pantheon was a man with a gun who took two shots at Dreyfus, just wounding him, but demonstrating the hold his case still had on the French nearly a decade after his acquittal.  Zola, forever linked to the Dreyfus case, stirred the ire of many. Demonstrators protested this honor and dozens were arrested.  The sale of his books plummeted after “J’Accuse” and many cheered his death.  An Italian newspaper, the birthplace of his father, ran a cartoon after his death of a priest spitting on his grave proclaiming, “Take that, you beast!  You pornographer!  Corruptor!  Traitor!  Foreigner! Damned Scum!”

Throughout his life he generated as much wrath as adulation. Though he was never elected to the French Academy, he was made a member of the Legion of Honor, proudly wearing the red ribbon at all times, even while in exile in England, at least until he had the honor withdrawn.  His friend the writer Edmond de Goncourt summed up his career as that of a man “who made perhaps more noise during his lifetime than any other.”  He certainly did rile many, and proudly so. But he should also be known for his accolades to the bicycle and planting the seeds that germinated in the Tour de France.  The several biographies I read of Zola, including one strictly devoted to his time in England, varied in the amount of space they devoted to his bicycling, but none made the link to the Tour de France.