Paris (Zola novel)

Paris is a novel by Émile Zola, published from 23 October 1897Beginning of the serial publication: Le Journal, in: Gallica. to 9 February 1898, during the Dreyfus affair, as a serial novel in the newspaper Le Journal. It is the third part of the novel cycle Les Trois Villes, and its final installment after Lourdes and Rome.

This volume recounts the adventures of the cycle's central character, Abbé Pierre Froment, who returned to Paris after two unsuccessful journeys. The protagonist hopes to find deliverance from his suffering in a capital that had been transformed under the Second Empire and then the Third Republic, and which was also being shaken by social movements. Paris thus concludes the trilogy recounting Abbé Froment's desperate search for a solution to his anxieties and his loss of faith.

This novel can be regarded as an expression of Émile Zola's commitment to raising awareness of the inequalities caused by modernity. It is also a chronicle of political life at the end of the century: the numerous cases of corruption, such as the Panama scandal; and the emergence of the anarchist movement. The author alternates between descriptions of the dominant upper-bourgeois and capitalist society of the 19th century and the social misery of this "fourth estate"Édition Folio Classique, livre premier, p. 63., of which Zola became one of the fiercest critics. Paris is therefore a social drama.

With this novel, Zola completes the depiction of social conditions that he had begun with Les Rougon-Macquart. In doing so, he also brings to a close the 19th-century tradition according to which the novel was to serve as a mirror of society, as Stendhal famously expressed it in Le Rouge et le Noir:

In the tradition of Balzac, Stendhal, Sue, Flaubert, and Hugo, Zola places the final stone in the majestic edifice of 19th-century realist literature. In doing so, he also contributes to the great Romantic myth of Paris that has endured through the centuries.

Publication

Paris was the third and last novel of Zola's Three Cities trilogy. He finished the novel in the Parisian summer of 1897. It was published in serial in Le Journal starting October 23.

Analysis

Critic Edmond Lepelletier wrote that the plot of Paris was a premonition of the coming Dreyfus Affair.

Paris (Zola novel)

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