Money (Oxford World’s Classics) (2 page)

The history of the Second Empire can be briefly told. Following the abdication of King Louis-Philippe in 1848 a republic was declared; the workers demanded that the right to work should be guaranteed, and national workshops were created to help the large numbers of unemployed. The spirit of revolutionary reform, however, proved short-lived. Elections in April 1848 returned a mainly reactionary government, whose actions, which included discontinuing the national workshops and restricting the suffrage, provoked widespread protests which were brutally suppressed, with hundreds of thousands killed, arrested, imprisoned, or deported. In November a new constitution was established which provided for the election of a president with a fixed four-year term of office. In December, Louis-Napoleon, then aged forty, was elected President of the Second Republic by a huge majority (5.4 million votes), thanks largely to his being Napoleon I’s nephew. To avoid losing his presidency in 1852 at the end of his four-year term, Louis-Napoleon dissolved the Assembly with a
coup d’état
on 2 December 1851. Presenting himself as a liberal and a defender of the people, he restored universal (male) suffrage and promised a plebiscite to accept or reject his seizure of power. Protests broke out but were suppressed, once more with widespread killings, imprisonment, and deportation. Leaders of the insurgents, Victor Hugo among them, were forced to flee. In the plebiscite that followed, the people gave Louis-Napoleon its overwhelming approval. One year later, on the same date of 2 December, which was also the anniversary of the coronation of his uncle Napoleon Bonaparte, he was crowned Emperor as Napoleon III,
²
ruler of the Second Empire.

When Zola started to plan the Rougon-Macquart series in 1868 it was possible to imagine that the Second Empire would last some considerable time. It seemed solid enough despite various contemporaneous upheavals, such as the Italian Wars of Independence and Bismarck’s aggressive moves toward the unification of Germany. But in 1870 Napoleon III was goaded by Prussia over the issue of the Spanish Succession, for which Prussia was proposing a Habsburg prince. Napoleon, facing growing troubles on the home front and not wanting to see France sandwiched between Prussia and a Prussian-dominated
Spain, declared war, a war that ended in the humiliating defeat at Sedan, when Napoleon III and his entire army were captured.

A Third Republic was then declared. It continued the war for some months, but after a long siege Paris fell to the better-organized and better-equipped Prussian forces. The Second Empire, meant to endure for at least a goodly number of Rougon-Macquart novels, had come to an abrupt end. The Franco-Prussian War and the civil war of the Commune that followed are the subject of the novel that comes after
Money, La Débâcle
(1892). This early end of the Empire caused some problems for Zola, who had to squeeze a great number of lives and events into its unexpectedly short time-frame.

By the time Zola came to write
Money
in 1890 France had undergone a period of great industrialization and expansion. Railways were springing up everywhere, the press was growing in importance every day, and investment banks were thriving. New ideas were abroad: Karl Marx’s
Das Kapital
had been published in 1867, and Marxist ideas had taken root. All these developments are reflected in the plot of
Money
. The Republic had suffered a series of government scandals, and there was a great deal of social unrest. The Suez Canal, the subject of much animated discussion and speculation (in both senses) in the first chapter of the novel, had been opened by the Empress in 1869. In 1890 it was the Panama Canal that was occupying people’s minds. The Panama Canal Company, in spite of huge contributions from French investors, went into administration in February 1889, and one of the biggest financial scandals of the nineteenth century was just breaking. Hundreds of thousands of investors were ruined, and the government was accused of bribery and corruption. Jewish involvement in the bribery inflamed the already widespread French anti-Semitism, and Drumont’s
La France Juive
(1886), a two-volume, 1,200-page, violently anti-Semitic work, enjoyed a huge commercial success. The new flare-up of anti-Semitism in the 1880s was much the same as the anti-Semitism of the previous era, when there had been deep resentment of the powerful Jewish bankers, particularly of Baron James Mayer de Rothschild, whose role in the banking world is the model for that of Saccard’s great rival, the Jewish financier Gundermann.

There had been so many disasters in financial institutions that Zola had no lack of models for Saccard’s ‘Universal Bank’. One was Mirès’s innovative bank, the ‘Caisse centrale des chemins de fer’ (‘Central Bank of Railways’), founded in 1850, which collapsed in 1861; then in 1852 the brothers Émile and Isaac Péreire founded the ‘Crédit Mobilier’, a bank expressly intended, like Saccard’s Universal, to foster large enterprises. It played an important part in the economic surge of the period up to 1857, when a financial panic affected the Bourse, the London Stock Exchange, and even Wall Street. The shares of the Crédit Mobilier had risen with amazing rapidity, but the bank crashed disastrously in 1870. A third—and the principal—model for the Universal was the Union Générale of Paul Eugène Bontoux. Founded in 1878, it lay well outside the time-frame of
Money
, which covers the period from May 1864 to the spring of 1868, but Zola decided to overlook the anachronism since the Bontoux crash was similar to that of the Crédit Mobilier which had happened under the Second Empire. Indeed, history repeated itself sufficiently for Zola to push many features of the Third Republic back into the Second Empire without too grossly offending
vraisemblance
. Bontoux’s bank, strongly supported by Catholics and monarchists, grew extremely rapidly; it financed and built Serbia’s first railway, bought up insurance companies, and financed schemes in North Africa and Egypt, all the while speculating on the stock market and providing impressive dividends for shareholders. However, prices began to fall in 1880–1 and the bank set about buying its own shares, as Saccard would do, to try to avert disaster; but in January 1882 the Union Générale suspended payments and crashed, the fate that lies in store for Saccard’s Universal.

The failure of Bontoux’s Catholic bank further inflamed resentment of the Jewish banks, especially when Bontoux, with little justification, blamed an ‘Israelite Syndicate’ for bringing down his Union Générale. Zola, who closely followed the fortunes of Bontoux’s bank and the accounts of his trial, and who had read Bontoux’s history of the Union Générale,
³
also preserved his anti-Semitism, passing it on to Saccard in the guise of a quasi-hereditary feature: ‘Ah, the Jews! Saccard had that ancient racial resentment of the Jews that is found especially in the south of France’ (p. 78). That resentment is often
expressed in extreme and stereotyped terms of hatred of ‘unclean Jewry’ (p. 15). There is a great deal of ugly and angry defamation of Jews in the novel, an unpleasant but accurate reflection of the feelings of the time. Zola did not disguise it, though he was very far from agreeing with it. In his articles, such as ‘Pour les Juifs’,
⁴
and most strikingly in his defence of Dreyfus, Zola shows his abhorrence of such attitudes. In his open letter ‘J’accuse’, published in
L’Aurore
on 21 February 1898, he succeeded in reopening the case of the Jewish officer wrongly accused and convicted of treason and espionage. Zola’s intervention in the Dreyfus case led to his being himself threatened with imprisonment, which he avoided by fleeing to temporary exile in England. The very outrageousness of Saccard’s anti-Semitism underlines its stupidity. Its unreasonableness is further demonstrated by the fact that Saccard cannot help admiring, as well as envying, the Jewish banker Gundermann, the king of the Bourse. And if the behaviour of the Jewish Busch earns derogatory epithets, the same cannot be said for his equally Jewish brother, the Marxist philosopher Sigismond. The unbalanced anti-Semitism of Saccard is also tellingly opposed by the balanced and reasonable views of Madame Caroline, his mistress, who finds Saccard’s views astonishing: ‘For me, the Jews are just men like any others’ (p. 358).

‘It’s very difficult to write a novel about money. It’s cold, icy, lacking in interest …’, Zola remarked in an interview in April 1890. Money, greed, and ambition are the driving forces in the novel, and Zola was determined to avoid what he felt had become a conventional diatribe against money and speculation. He would not speak ill of money, he wrote in his preparatory notes, but would ‘praise and exalt its generous and fecund power, its expansive force’. He embarked on a particularly onerous period of research, studying books and documents,
⁵
as well as interrogating suitably qualified persons, such as Eugène Fasquelle (an associate and son-in-law of Zola’s publisher, Charpentier), who had spent some years working in brokerage. Few novels had been as
much trouble to prepare; Zola meticulously annotated the papers of the Bontoux trial, as well as those of Mirès and the Péreires, and studied every detail of the layout of the Bourse, visiting it almost every day for a month.

Zola’s subject was clearly topical. Banking scandals were not confined to France, and in England the fraudulent speculations of the notorious swindler John Sadleir lay behind Dickens’s creation of the unscrupulous banker Mr Merdle in
Little Dorrit
(1857). Eighteen years later, in 1875, just a few years outside the time-frame of
Money
, Anthony Trollope created the grand-scale swindler Melmotte, a man of mysterious foreign origins, in
The Way We Live Now
. Melmotte’s ambitious schemes at times seem to echo those of Saccard, wrapping the pursuit of profit in a mantle of philanthropy: ‘he would be able to open up new worlds, to afford relief to the oppressed nationalities of the over-populated old countries.’
⁶
But his schemes are only words and air, and unlike Saccard he leaves nothing of value behind him, finally ending his life with a dose of prussic acid, whereas Saccard goes on to further ventures. It is striking that one of the arguments offered in defence of Melmotte’s risky activities—‘You have to destroy a thousand living creatures every time you drink a glass of water, but you do not think of that when you are athirst …’
⁷
—is very like Saccard’s dismissal of worry about the damage his risky activities may cause: ‘As if life bothered about such matters! With every step we take, we destroy thousands of existences’ (p. 357).

In France, a number of novels on the Bourse and on banking had already been written. Among them was
La Comtesse Shylock
(1885) by G. d’Orcet, which stressed the dominance of Jews in the banking world. Count Shylock, as Henri Mitterand points out,
⁸
has much in common with Gundermann, being based on the same figure: James de Rothschild. The novel also includes a Baroness Brandorff, addicted to playing the market like Zola’s Baroness Sandorff, as well as an idealist dreamer not dissimilar to Sigismond Busch. It is reasonable to assume that Zola read
La Comtesse Shylock
, but he takes a wider overview of the banking crash, showing the way the financial world interlocks with the politics and the economy of the time, and introducing the clash between capitalism and socialism. Above all, Zola makes
of the subject an epic allegory, dominated by the riveting figure of Saccard.

Whether the novel is seen primarily as a socio-political study, a financial document, or a penetrating and poetic reflection on a society on the brink of disaster, the figure of Saccard clearly dominates it. Villain or hero, he is a peculiarly fascinating creation, one who seems indeed to have fascinated his creator. Zola does not usually allow a character to return as frequently as Saccard in the annals of the Rougon-Macquart family.
⁹
In
The Fortune of the Rougons
(
La Fortune des Rougon
) Aristide Rougon is an opportunistic republican journalist, who swiftly becomes Bonapartist when success beckons on that side. He changes his name to Saccard in
The Kill
(
La Curée
), commenting: ‘there’s money in that name’, and makes a great fortune in property speculation in the wake of Haussmann’s reconstruction of Paris. The Saccard of
Money
is a more complex and ambiguous figure than the Saccard of
The Kill
, showing moments of compassion and remorse in the midst of his ruthlessness.

A great dynamic force, he is physically only a small figure, frequently seen stretching upward to gain height—an apt metaphor for the impatient ambition evident from the moment he enters the novel. He sees himself as a Napoleon of finance, aiming to achieve with money what Napoleon failed to achieve with the sword. He is also, as his son Maxime remarks, ‘the poet of the million’. Money is his sword, his delight, his obsession. Even for philanthropic purposes, with no motive of personal gain, as in his dealings with Princess d’Orviedo, he is captivated by the sheer joy of manipulating large sums of money. Fired by ambitious schemes of grandeur, Saccard turns money into magic; it is the royalty of gold, it is a magic wand, conjuring the magic that runs right through the novel in the tinkling of fairy gold, the barrels of treasure straight out of the
Arabian Nights
, the enchanted cash desks, the magic wand of money and science working together. Saccard dreams of rivers, even oceans, of gold, the dance of millions, which will create grand, colossal things.

In his meeting with the Hamelins, brother and sister, Saccard’s
exuberant imagination takes wing, as he imagines the wonders to be performed, and makes the dreams of the Hamelins his own:

‘Look,’ cried Saccard, ‘this Carmel Gorge in this drawing of yours, where there’s nothing but stones and mastic trees, you’ll see, once the silver mine gets going, first a village will spring up, then a town… … And on these depopulated plains, these deserted passes, where our railway lines will run, a veritable resurrection, yes! The fields will cease to lie fallow, roads and canals will appear, new cities will rise from the ground and life will at last return… Yes! Money will perform these miracles.’ (p. 65)