The Debacle

FIRST EDITION. One of the numbered copies on Holland paper.

This nineteenth volume of Les Rougon-Macquart “is to Tolstoy what the seventeenth was to Dostoevsky” said Mitterand. To each his Napoleon, to one the great, to Zola the small.

“There is no longer any need to hide or excuse our defeats. We must explain them and accept their terrible lesson,” writes Zola in Le Figaro. La Débâcle, a superb title for its acuity, that of an Empire at the end of its decadence, absurdly flexing its muscles, unable to see the powerful and organized enemy approaching. Defeated, deposed, Napoleon III escapes to London and leaves France scarred, amputated of its billions, its army, its youth, Alsace and Lorraine. The assessment is terrible but, to his country defeated on all fronts, Zola does not forbid hope: “And yet, beyond the still roaring furnace, vigorous hope was reborn, deep in the great calm sky, of sovereign limpidity. It was the certain rejuvenation of eternal nature, of eternal humanity, the renewal promised to those who hope and work, the tree that sprouts a new powerful shoot when the rotten branch, whose poisoned sap yellowed the leaves, has been cut off.” The hated Empire is dead, Zola declares that now, spring can come.