PARIS

Author:  Émile Zola

Year: 1963 (1898)

Publisher: Panstwowy Instytut Wydawniczy

Language: Polish (Translator Eligia Bakowska)

“It suffices not, to be charitable. Henceforth, one must be just. Indeed, where justice prevails gruesome misery disappears and charity shall be made redundant”, Émile Zola concludes in his third and final instalment of his Three Cities-suite, “Paryz” (“Paris”) from 1898. The novel opens with Father Pierre Froment’s, the Catholic priest who has lost faith in everything except mercy, trying to deliver a handout to an impoverished house painter who is withering away in a putrid flat in one of the many disadvantaged areas of the city. Deeply moved by the dying man’s squalor, Father Pierre tries to solicit help from his connections in the higher spheres of society. He is met with an abundance of passionate assurances of goodwill but a stupefying shortage of action. By the time, the rich and wealthy have made room in their agenda to admit him to a charity-funded asylum, the old man has perished. In one powerful scene, Zola destroys libertarianism and holds up socialism as the only viable solution to acute poverty. No one should have to beg to survive. Everyone has the right to survive. Socialism will do in a hundred years, what the church failed to do in a thousand.

In effect, Zola takes the opportunity to broaden the picture, pushing back the anti-Catholicism theme in favour of a critique of the political and economic elite of Paris at the time. In the first book of the series, “Lourdes”, Father Pierre looks for a miracle and finds simony. In the second book, “Rome”, he looks for Christian mercy and finds papal despotism. In Paris, he finds himself in a world of political intrigues, family feuds, terrorist attacks, love, and desire and ends up challenging society as a whole. The final battle is between the old and corrupt on the one hand, and the new and just on the other. The old is represented by tradition, nobility, political elite, and the church. The future holds liberty, technology, atheism, and love.

Liberty, to Zola, is the liberty from social form and conventions; what John Stuart Mill calls “the despotism of custom”, where individual freedom is curtailed by the invisible shackles of social expectations. Zola illustrates this social prison by the use of all the ways the nobility was entangled in all kinds of outré convention breeches and shocking promiscuity while all the time parading a crumbling facade of piety and moral superiority in order to safeguard their privileges.

Technology is a central point in Zola’s vision of the future. In “Paryz” it is personified by Father Pierre’s elder brother Guillaume and his three sons who all in their own way contribute to considerable (and altogether unlikely) advances in mechanics,  handicraft, and chemistry, no doubt inspired by the invention of dynamite by Alfred Nobel three decades earlier. Technological development, in Zola’s world, not only guarantees the continued security of a people but represents the only true profession to which a person of intellectual means should remain devoted.

Atheism is the ultimate liberation of the citizen from the medieval darkness of history, and sine qua non for the modern man to take on the challenges of the coming age. Zola envisaged a future where Christianity would be relegated to the realm of mythology alongside pagan deities and cosmologies and which people of the future would look to as curious but nonsensical part of history. A rejection of a superior, omnipresent, and omnipotent power is bound to afford a twofold stimulus to individual action: 1. by doing away with the pacifying fear of punishment, and 2. by nullifying the passive hope for divine intervention.

Love, finally, is given as the goal of every person. Love for the fellow human beings, love for family, and love between man and woman. All these three types of love come together for Father Pierre Froment and challenge him to his final battle on the border of antiquity and future, sacrifice, and happiness.

Paryz is the most interesting, fast-paced, and accessible volume of the whole series. In contrast to the previous two books, the side plots are absorbing and coherent, and considerably more relevant to a modern reader which in a way would probably be disappointing to Zola. It seems in terms of social justice, despite massive strides, we have made less progress since 1898 than Zola would have anticipated.

My copies of "Lourde, "Rzym, and "Paryz" in Polish translation were handed down to me by my mom who in turn inherited them from my grandmother. Translations into English are my own from the Polish source.