II
Mon Aristide, c'est le spéculateur né des bouleversements de Paris.
Zola, 6 November 1871, Letter to Louis Ulbach
My Aristide is the speculator born of the upheaval in Paris.
No literary work takes on the discourse of haussmannization more directly than Zola's La Curée. That La Curée (1872) does not figure among the central texts of the nineteenth-century novel alongside L'Assommoir (1877) and Germinal (1885) or among the best known works in the Rougon-Macquart series—Le Ventre de Paris (1873), Nana (1880), Au Bonheur des dames (1883), and L'Oeuvre (1886)—is only partially imputable to the somewhat scattered nature of the novel. La Curée is an ambiguous work—an ambiguity that derives ideologically from Zola's ambivalence. As in his journalistic pieces at the time, Zola condemns the Second Empire without reserve and without rest. The title announces the judgment: la curée signified the mad scramble for booty and political spoils.[9] Yet Zola simultaneously celebrates the new Paris, the beautiful city that serves as backdrop for the corrupt society he denounces. He celebrates as well, almost against his better judgment, the unscrupulous financier whose phantasmagoric speculations define the novel. Aristide Saccard reaps a fortune from his insider's knowledge of the plans for the reconstruction of the city (he has worked to effect in city hall). Notably, this consummate speculator shows no more compunction in fleecing his wife than in swindling the state. Domestic and public corruption merge in the speculator as agent of modernity.
The phenomenon of la curée is not an individual enterprise. Saccard's fraud mirrors the thorough corruption of postrevolutionary society. "My novel would have been impossible before '89." [10] By abolishing the barriers erected by caste and tradition, in Zola's view, the Revolution legitimated every ambition, sanctioned every appetite, and is ultimately answerable for the decadent society that the novelist depicts in La Curée and the other novels that take the Second Empire as their setting. Notwithstanding his unrelenting denunciation of that society, Zola cannot help admiring his protagonist's phenomenal energy and acuity. Renee Saccard, when she finally recognizes how abominably she has been used by her husband, stands in awe of the
man who is the very incarnation of willpower. He is not so much immoral as amoral, almost a force of nature, grand by his very excesses. Aristide Saccard bespeaks the contradiction and the conscious tension between the collective project of La Curée and the individual who both realizes that project and escapes it. This ambivalence captures the ambiguity of haussmannization, caught as it is between the old and the new, at once destructive and constructive, the name of a single individual and the dehumanized statement of a process.
Zola's first mention of the novel appears in 1869, when he promises his publisher a work on the "shady and unbridled speculations of the Second Empire . . . determined by the demolitions and constructions of M. Haussmann" (353). It is the moment when Haussmann's manipulation of credit and debit financing of the great works of Paris comes under increasing criticism. Zola actually starts writing a year or so later, in the spring of 1870, after Haussmann's dismissal as prefect of the Seine and just before the disastrous rout at Sedan that ends the empire in September. "The Terrible Year"—Victor Hugo's epithet for the period that extends from the declaration of war in July 1870 to the suppression of the Commune in June 1871—intervenes and turns a work conceived as a novel of contemporary society into a historical novel. As Zola indicates in the preface to La Fortune des Rougon (1871), work on the series began well before the defeat of the empire. But the logic of the work requires that defeat, "the terrible and necessary denouement of my work." La Curée, in consequence, becomes "the tableau of a dead reign, of a strange era of madness and shame."[11]
La Curée finally appears in serial form in November 1871. If one takes an admittedly rare but logical sense of the term monument— "that which serves as a document or archive"—La Curée becomes a literary monument to an old regime, an essential document in the archive on which future generations will draw for their history.[12] Zola's larger project of the social and natural history of a family under the Second Empire aims at constituting just such an archive of the parallel destinies in family and regime.
The terrible year of 1870-71 turns the urban renewal of Paris—haussmannization—into history, ties the renewal to a particular regime and a certain individual, both safely in the past. In the event, there is considerable continuity. Although Haussmann was dismissed before the end of the Second Empire, the projects that he initiated
were long-term enterprises, and many were not completed until well into the Third Republic. Garnier's splendiferous Opéra, for one striking example, was opened to the public only in 1875. Still, the Paris that took shape over the Second Empire, which is in large measure the Paris of today, was the city envisioned by Napoléon III and realized by Haussmann. It too is a monument as well as a record.
But if they are monuments, La Curée and remodeled Paris are very equivocal ones. Beyond the question of what, precisely, the monuments are to recall, there is the incongruity of a moving and dynamic monument—something of a contradiction in terms. For where monuments are (usually) stationary, these urban texts definitely are not. La Curée assumes movement—the furious rush for self-advancement. Haussmannization too, as the suffix signals, is a process—of destruction or construction, as the case may be—and, consequently, movement. Moreover, Zola like Haussmann is very much concerned with change—social, political, economic, scientific—and specifically with the emergence of a modern society. Paradoxically, the novel as monument welcomes movement of every sort, destructive as well as constructive. The one cannot be construed without the other. The marked ambivalence of contemporary as well as latter-day assessments of haussmannization has a great deal to do with whether the point of reference is the past or the future, the destruction of old Paris or the construction of the modern city.
The paradox sharpens when the text makes clear that the structuring mobility of La Curée is a function of the immobile, the stationary—namely, l'immobilier, property or real estate. Indeed, the mobilization of the immobile (the destruction of buildings, the reapportionment of property) and also the reverse, the compensatory immobilization of the mobile (that is, the translation back into real estate of the speculative profits realized from the original destruction) are what haussmannization is all about. Zola's title suggests what the novel demonstrates, namely, that this mobility concerns individuals less than it does the pattern of social practices within which those individuals necessarily operate. In every domain the fixed yields to fluctuation. L'immobilier becomes le mobilier.
Here is the significance of the speculative fever that dominates the novel. Investment in real estate (l'immobilier ) once the most conservative of investments, becomes extraordinarily volatile and immensely profitable for those able to manipulate the system (rather like invest-
ments in junk bonds in the 1980s). For the novelist this is the very stuff of drama. The government floats bonds to finance the public works, and deficit spending becomes the order of the day. In a much discussed pamphlet, "Les Comptes fantastiques d'Haussmann" ("The Fantastic Accounts of Haussmann," 1867-68, in Le Temps ) Jules Ferry plays off Offenbach's recent operetta, Les Contes d'Hoffmann (The Tales of Hoffmann ) to denounce the financial manipulations of haussmannization. With the substitution of "Saccard" for "Haussmann," the title could serve as a subtitle to La Curée.
Saccard is not Haussmann. The prefect is a shadow presence in the novel; he never appears directly (though his boulevard is mentioned). Historically, the prefect defended himself vigorously against charges of personal profiteering, and subsequent commentators concur in this assessment. But the practices that he set in motion fostered speculation on a grand scale. As Zola sees it, "other cities imitated Paris, and individuals imitated these cities."[13] Yet if Saccard is not Haussmann, he assuredly is the projection of haussmannization. The very name suggests depredation, with its resonance of saccager ("to sack") and gens de sac et de corde ("cutthroats"), quite as much as the money bags that Aristide himself has in mind when he takes the name. In contrast to Haussmann, whose static patronymic fixes him as "man of the house," the man who presides over the construction of the new Paris without partaking of it, Saccard's name conjures up movement. However ignoble the character, Saccard's dynamism places him on the side of modernity and, for Zola, on the side of genius. In the city and in the novel the massive manipulation of texts engenders the prevailing sense of unreality. Exploitation in turn reinforces the connections between the written texts of the city and the city-text itself. A ville-texte under construction, Haussmann's Paris engenders a villefiction in Zola's novel.
A metaphor, an image, and the ubiquitous symbol of mobility, money figures the tension between the stable and the speculative that governs the novel. Money reifies the mobility that it both signifies and makes possible. Money is, first of all, in the usage that dates from the nineteenth century, a liquid asset.[14] It literally flows through the novel: a "mounting wave of speculation whose foam was going to cover all Paris . . . the hot rain of coins falling straight on the roofs of the city" (109); "the rain of gold" (111 ); "the streaming of the cash register" (164); "this river of gold" (165). However, liquidity has its dangers. Ready money is not capital and too easily flows through one's fingers.
Zola's appraisal of Saccard's assets elaborates the contradiction inherent in the metaphor: "The river of gold finally had a spring. [Saccard has just sold property to the state at a monumental profit.] But it was not yet a solid fortune, dammed up, flowing in an even and continuous stream" (324). As his less wealthy but more prudent accomplice Larsonneau points out, Saccard is much better at producing money than he is at holding onto it (326).
In Zola's imagery, money is as solid as it is liquid. Zola invokes the traditional solidity of the gold coin: "the handful of guineas" ("les poignées de louis," 164) and "the real money that he threw by the shovelful on the shelves of his iron safe" ("les vrais écus," 325). The traditional forms of money like the écu and the louis (neither current in mid-nineteenth-century France, though louis was used to designate the twenty-franc coin) reach to the ancien régime and to a long line of literary misers that stretches from Molière's Harpagon in L'Avare, compulsively clutching his purse (cassette ) to Balzac's Old Grandet of Eugénie Grandet in his obsession with the gold coins that he doles out to his daughter one by one. Zola makes it clear that this "real money" is for show, and more precisely, for the tableau vivant at the costume ball, where the riches of the earth are represented by piles of twenty-franc coins, "coins spread out, coins piled up, a multitude of coins. . . . a modern strongbox . . . in the middle of Greek mythology" (284). The more solid the money, the more allegorical, as the audience is well aware. This tableau vivant plays out Zola's allegory of haussmannization.[15]
Even more than the liquidity, the textuality of money makes wealth ephemeral in La Curée. Money, in this world of frenetic speculation, partakes at once of the materiality of an artifact that stands on its own and the immateriality of a text that must be read. Zola departs from the familiar metaphors of liquidity and materiality in his insistence on the absolutely conventional nature of money; that is, there is no necessary relation between the possession of gold or property—the solid, material assets by which a fortune is customarily gauged—and wealth. Convention and convenience determine which goods are designated as immobilier and which as mobilier. Property bought on credit is far more the latter than the former, and the banker decides. Against the standard invocations of the solidity of "real money," Zola sets the rampant textuality of modern banking paraphernalia and practices—bank notes, stock titles, promissory notes, paper sales under real and false names, evaluations of property, even marriage contracts. To
be sure, Zola is not the first novelist to deal with speculation. Balzac in fact predicts the frenzied speculation in Parisian real estate in César Birotteau 1 838), which he defines succinctly as an "abstract business, . . . whereby a man skims off revenues before they exist, . . . a new Kabbala!' (6:241-42). The difference is that, for Zola, a whole society practices what the Baron Nucingen alone ("the Napoléon of finance," 6:241) could manage forty or fifty years previously.
Its "authentic" organic origin in nature reinforces the value of gold. Because gold is irreducible to any other element (and no element is reducible to it), the value of gold is maintained by the limited nature of the substance. (The Eldorado into which Voltaire sends Candide dramatizes the destruction of that value by abundance.) Paper, however, is a composite substance, the components of which vary with the producer. Its value has no requisite connection to its composition. Paper has only the value assigned to it by use. Moreover, it can be produced at will. Saccard's genius lies in his ability to convince all of Paris that his speculations are "as good as gold." But this is precisely the fiction of all paper money. Going off the gold standard is so traumatic a move for so many in the twentieth century for the very good reason that it removes the correlation between resources in kind (gold) and national wealth.
Because Saccard's is a paper fortune ("In truth no one knew whether he had solid, clear capital assets," 163), he must turn himself into an alchemist. He must transform one substance into another, entirely different and unrelated substance. Saccard himself, more modern, likens the projected transformations to chemistry: "You'd say that the whole quartier is bubbling in some chemist's beaker" (113). Saccard must turn a manufactured product into a natural substance. Paper, itself a product of human ingenuity, is far less substantial than gold, a product of nature. Yet Zola contends in La Curée that this is the competition by which contemporary society is determined. Saccard's success tells us that, contrary to traditional economic as well as literary expectations, paper wins out.
Like the text of the novel, indeed of any work, the authority of these papers must be guaranteed. The issuing institution in mid-nineteenth-century France—the state—stands at the center of the corruption in La Curée. The preoccupation of Aristide's sister, Sidonie, with the recovery of the English debt pushes this contradiction to the extreme. The issuing institution—the Stuart monarchy—is as bankrupt as the France of Napoléon III after September 1870.
Sidonie and Aristide are two of a kind. Brother and sister alike work to convert paper into money. He succeeds where she fails, but the fixation is exactly the same. Sidonie's investment (she spends two months and ten thousand francs on research in British libraries) does not pay off, and the seventeenth-century certificates that she holds turn out to be worth no more than the paper on which they are printed. Aristide's speculations pay off because the government writes, that is, issues, the texts in question. It acts as both author and authority to legitimate the conversion of paper into money.
La Curée vividly demonstrates that the paper revolution is not the least of the revolutions of the mid-and late nineteenth century. The modern system of banking, based on credit and investment, is put in place at this time. The Société Générale du Crédit Industriel et Commercial in 1859 and the Crédit Lyonnais in 1863 are intended to provide capital for commercial development. The Crédit Foncier de France in 1852 provides the necessary momentum for the Parisian real estate market. The whole system is not unlike an elaborate fiction in which people must believe for it to work. (Haussmann becomes a political liability for the emperor when the failures of the Crédit Mobilier and the Compagnie Immobiliére in 1867 bring to light the rampant corruption on which Zola draws for La Curie. ) Aristide banks on the future, Sidonie on the past. There is no question who will win.
There is another paper revolution, one that directly concerns Zola and every writer. The discovery of a process for making paper out of cheap wood pulp cuts the cost of publication and opens the way for a vast increase in the production of books of every sort. In 1889 the Bibliographie de la France registers some fifteen thousand new book titles, almost double the seventy-six hundred titles registered in 1850. And books are only part of this paper revolution—journals and masscirculation newspapers flood the market. The overproduction intensifies the competition among writers and engenders an anxiety of failure. Octave Mirbeau, a follower of Zola, sees literary production as "more threatening" every day:
Books rise, overflow, spread; it's an inundation. From overcrowded bookstores breaks a torrent of yellow, blue, green, and red cascading from displays that make you dizzy. You have no idea of all the names torn from the depths of the unknown which this floodtide throws up for a moment on the crest of its waves, rolls about pell-mell, and then flings away onto a forgotten corner of the beach, where no one passes, not even beachcombers.[16]
Like every writer in this ongoing and increasingly aggressive paper revolution, Zola is a speculator. Like Saccard, Zola has a paper fortune, which he works to translate into capital assets. A few years after the publication of La Curée, the runaway success of L Assommoir would make Zola close to a millionaire. In a classic move of the translation of valeurs mobilières into valeurs immobilières, with his royalties from L 'Assommoir, Zola buys property. The house at Médan that becomes the meeting place of Zola and his disciples in the 1880s is the unequivocal sign of success in convincing readers of the authority of certain kinds of paper and the peculiar alchemy involved in writing.
Zola is and is not Saccard. Despite the condemnation of the regime, he clearly identifies with the "artist's love" that propels his creature into one deal after another and turns the simplest matter into a "gothic drama" (251). The Aristide Rougon who could not quite figure things out in La Fortune des Rougon, the first novel in the Rougon-Macquart series published just before La Curée, comes to Paris and transforms himself into Aristide Saccard, thanks to the opportunities offered by the new Paris in the making. The parallels with Zola are striking. Both Saccard and Zola come from Provence to lay siege to Paris. Like Saccard who learns about the city through a minor but key post in the municipal administration, Zola enters literary life in a subordinate position in the Hachette publishing firm. Zola too transforms himself by dint of hard work and genius from the unsuccessful student, hard-pressed journalist, and struggling author into the writer who laid claim to the legacy of Balzac.
Finally, quite as much as Saccard, Zola needed the Second Empire, and, like Saccard, he profited by its corruption, by its venality, by its immorality. "The Rougon-Macquart," he tells us in the preface to La Fortune des Rougon, "tell the story of the Second Empire through their individual dramas, from the ambush of the coup d'état to the betrayal of Sedan." Without the end that brought the fervently anticipated Third Republic but also without the beginning that established the despised empire, Zola would not have had the twenty volumes of the Rougon-Macquart cycle. Without the depredations of haussmannization and the corruption of Saccard, there would have been no La Curée. The creator's fascination with his character and beyond, with the urbanist, gives to this novel an ambiguity that belies the explicit moral and political condemnation.[17]