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Émile Zola's Volatile Utopia RALPH GHOCHE Émile Zola’s Volatile Utopia Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute The essay explores the role played by anarchist thinking on Zola’s as they are in late nineteenth-century anarchist thought, had only a short-lived effect and have been utopian city in Travail (1901). While Zola did not consider anarchism given little or no attention since. This oversight is to be a viable political ideology for the ideal city portrayed in the particularly relevant today given the continued ten- dency to purge the modern utopian imagination of novel, he found it to be a revelatory model for its artistic culture. its internal tensions and complexities. Travail Drawing from anarchist agitator Peter Kropotkin, Zola conceived of excerpts in L’Aurore, a progressive newspaper with the residential area as the antithesis of the city center. This essay socialist and anarchist leanings. Two years earlier it will examine the contradictory facets in this piece of early twentieth- of the Third Republic’s handling of the Dreyfus affair. The serialized delivery of the novel was ap- more salient tensions in modernist utopias as a whole. instruction manual, bringing the reader through the arduous stages of transforming a small town rife with misery and class antagonism into an exemplar I know of no better bomb than a book. those gathered. The symbolist poet Stéphane Mal- —Stéphane Mallarmé1 larmé responded with the phrase cited above. departed from the utopian genre as practiced by late Symbolists had long evaded social and political nineteenth-century reformers such as Edward Bel- - reality in favor of a kind of reverie that only poetry lamy and William Morris, who presented glimpses of archist sympathizer by the name of Auguste Vaillant an ideal order as though connected to the real world set off a bomb at the Chambre des Députés in central quickly changing during the turbulent years of the only through dream.7 Paris. The eleventh banquet of the literary journal La . Also present among the writers and Travail tells the story of Luc Froment, a young Plume, presided over by the sculptor Auguste Rodin, engineer whose observations of the social inequity was in mid-session when journalist Paul Brulat en- scribbled: “During troubled times, folly abounds, and - tered the room. Brulat announced the fateful news the guillotine is much less able to effect change than clair compel him to found a new society based on the 2 Downloaded by [Ralph Ghoche] at 15:46 11 March 2013 of the nearby attacks and surveyed the opinions of is a new ideal.” theories of early nineteenth-century social reformer Travail Charles Fourier. Fourier’s system, grounded in the - belief that one could discover a social correlate to ary society of the future (Figure 1). Newton’s law of universal gravitation, purported to Travail has appealed to groups that have sought reveal the perfect combination of personality types to transform the very real shape of the city. Accord- needed to lead society towards a more perfect future. ing to one commentator, socialists, anarchists, and the working classes quickly embraced the novel and “No revolution, evolution through Fourier.”9 devoted countless night courses to its study.4 A based his vision of an ideal city on the newly liberated prime inspiration for Tony Garnier and Filippo Tom- passions of its populace, imagining such a system maso Marinetti, the vision of an ideal city described as entailing the destruction of social hierarchies and - tural and social imaginary of the twentieth century. personality traits of the individual. Despite a precari- And while its farsighted portrayal of political and ous beginning, Froment’s ideal city, aided by hard technological structures had a formative impact on Figure 1. progressive factions during the twentieth century, industrial processes, grew rapidly as workers realized on canvas. the advantages of a system based on an equitable 32 social order. By establishing a small enclave where the and social harmony. Further, electric cars buzzed made of nature “his servant and paradise.”12 But in passions of free association and just labor were the around the city streets, their energy tapped from the sun’s rays. Following Fourier’s ideas, glass-covered - would become contagious throughout the surround- arcades protected residents from seasonal tempera- nate underbelly of society surfaces in Travail. While ing areas. This is exactly what happens in Travail. By ture changes. Plans were even afoot to build an arti- many progressive readers appreciated the highly the novel’s end, the entire city of Beauclair has been mechanized and ordered character of the ideal city, engulfed by the ideal city, which expands ceaselessly evenly lit at all hours of the night (an idea proposed the artistic culture of the ideal city was of an entirely towards the horizon. different kind. of controlling the movement of the clouds so as to and highly mechanized city were prescient, albeit have unvarying rain watering the crops. Additionally, largely optimistic. For example, electricity replaced an experimental industrial and residential commu- coal in the ovens that transformed the iron mined city, backbreaking work having been passed on to nity located in the north of France and inspired by near Beauclair into commodities such as rails used to humanoid machines “having arms and legs like the Fourier’s Phalanstery (Figure 2). “House of glass, expand train routes (rather than the weaponry the slaves of old.”11 In short, all of the earth’s forces mistrust of one’s neighbors,” he observed in the town had originally produced); this promoted peace carnet d’enquêtes he customarily kept for his liter- ary research. The brick complex, with its introverted layout centered around interior glass-covered court- yards, left “no solitude, no freedom,” and none of the valued “risks of a free and adventurous life.” same mold.” of communal housing projects. Human individuality and independence, traits so dear to the culture of the European metropolis, were put at risk by such restrictive systems. As a counterpoint to the col- Downloaded by [Ralph Ghoche] at 15:46 11 March 2013 attention to the capacity for art and architecture to stimulate variety in the city. - came in large part from the ideas of anarchist writer philosophy voice through the character of Lange, a ceramist of exceptional talent and conviction. But Lange went well beyond the anarchism proposed by Kropotkin; he embraced the more radical wing of an- archic thinking that believed in what was called “pro- paganda by deed,” or the use of violent means to Travail and before the town’s transformation, Lange returned again and again to his cherished dream of setting the town ablaze by fashioning a series of Figure 2. colorful ceramic pots with powerful explosives con- GHOCHE 33 cealed within and depositing them at the doorsteps “the lilac blues, dandelion yellows and poppy reds of the institutions of power and authority.14 commitment to the intrinsic necessity of art; art - Lange’s daydream evoked similar exploits by was “as necessary to human existence as the daily tween the massive greens of the surrounding trees.”22 bread.” Like Kropotkin, Lange believed that artistic of the most famous anarchic events, the bombing expression should pervade all walks of life, embed- of the houses seemed to giggle amidst of the green- of the Café Terminal adjacent the Gare Saint-Lazare, ded in the very surfaces of objects of everyday use. ery, with no smoke to tarnish the purity of the air.” - At the core of the anarchist aesthetic philosophy was Lange’s theory of the arts was no mere utopian tive artist.” In Henry’s subsequent letter of defense a tension between the desire for art to be ubiquitous he quoted the character Souvarine, an anarchist and inimitable, an opposition that would eventually of the ideal city mirrored the real-life agitations of Germinal: “All discussions manifest itself in the Deutscher Werkbund debates about the future are criminal since they hinder pure between Henry Van der Velde and Hermann Muth- and simple destruction and slow down the march esius on the question of aesthetic standards. For the architect Frantz Jourdain, who would design of the revolution.” This quote also encapsulated 24 Jourdain scrutinized Lange’s outlook when he argued, “No compromise, the hierarchy between art forms with the same sense it was all rotten, there was no choice but to bomb explained, Lange’s creative control over the pots, the old society, and raze it to the ground.” plates, statuettes, vases, and ornamental fantasies traditions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries A contemporary French poet, Laurent Tailhade, he produced was mitigated by “the haphazard effect had unjustly relegated utilitarian art forms to the saw these acts as sublime: “Who cares about the les hasards du feu) which seared the bottom rungs of artistic merit. Understandably, the victims if the act is artistic? Who cares about the effects of uncontrollable natural forces onto the ex- disappearance of vague humanity, if, by that dis- claimed that it had done more damage to art than 17 Lange envisioned his works enlarged to the scale “an epidemic of cholera or an invasion of cossacks.” Tailhade thought his words wise until he himself was One must, according to him, “blow up, and promptly, injured in the anarchist bombing of the Café Foyot in of the ideal city manifested Lange’s main principles this wall impeding the forward movement and steady for the anarchic city. Unlike other parts of the city, march of ideas.” Traditions or institutions that strange for a culture that regarded individualism as which followed an orthogonal grid, the residential - the apogee of historical evolution. area obeyed no system or overarching logic and its tic practice would have to be done away with.
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