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Abstract
In Degeneration (1892), Max Nordau included Émile Zola in his theory that fin-de-siecle artists were a danger to society. According to Nordau, the 'false science' in Zola's Naturalist novels would erode social progress in their alleged preoccupation with disease, sexual deviancy and amorality. This article proposes that degeneration is, however, a valuable lens to understand Zola's novel La Debacle (1892). The work depicts a sickly Napoleon III during the FrancoPrussian War (1870-71), whose illness is metonymised with France's politics, history and nationhood. In portraying the human body as a site of morality and coupling it with notions of illness and cure, this article demonstrates the capacity of Zola's literary-medical aesthetics to acknowledge the body's wider cultural and sociological importance.
Key words
Nordau, Zola, degeneration, La Debacle, Napoleon III
"Ego-maniac", "filthy pseudo-realist", "anti-social vermin": these are some of Max Nordau's accusations against fin-de-siecle artists and writers in his seminal work Entartung (Degeneration), published in Germany in 1892 (1993, 557). Nordau was protesting about the degeneracy of the works produced by these individuals, and he counted Zola as one of them. This article will compare Nordau's concept of degeneration with Zola's novel La Debacle, which was published in the same year. By examining Nordau's degeneration theory as metonymic links between the body, society and morality, we shall see that it helps illustrate Zola's vision of the decline of the French nation. Degeneration theory provides a beneficial framework for expressing the political corruption of Napoleon III and the Second Empire and fits very well with Zola's Naturalist aesthetic.
For Zola, political corruption materialises as a physiological corruption of the body and this precipitates a national decline on all levels. La Debacle recounts the end of the Second Empire (1852-70) when France is soundly beaten in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 and is consequently at a low ebb. Zola shows the cause of defeat to be various degenerate bodies, as Nordau would understand them. Not only are these bodies in decline and experiencing sickness, but they are, critically, sites of morality. This article will consider the medical paradigm of Zola's aesthetics, which is capacious enough to encapsulate the moral as well as the physiological. We shall, therefore, explore the sick bodies of Napoleon III and the bourgeois...