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” says Mitterrand. 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 coming. Defeated, deposed, Napoleon III escapes to London and leaves France bruised, amputated of its billions, its army, its youth, Alsace and Lorraine. The assessment is terrible but, to his country defeated at all levels, Zola does not forbid hope: “And yet, beyond the furnace, still howling, tenacious hope was reborn, in the depths of the great calm sky, with a 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 throws a new powerful shoot when the rotten branch has been cut, whose poisoned sap yellowed the leaves”. The hated Empire is dead, Zola declares that now, spring can come.