¹ The text of this law was officially published in the Moniteur officiel on 12 May 1868.

² For statistics, see H. Avenel, Histoire de la presse française (Paris, 1900), p. 562.

³ The recent work of Henri Mitterand, Emile Zola journaliste (Paris, 1962), devotes some six pages to the Tribune. In such a limited space, of course, only the most essential facts could be covered.

⁴ A search conducted for me by the Archivist failed to find any legal trace of the Tribune. A complete file exists, however, at the Bibliothèque Nationale.

⁵ It is quite possible that Zola and Duret met because of their mutual interest in the arts, and perhaps through Edouard Manet. Manet and Duret met in Spain in 1865, just one year before the painter met Zola. The two men subsequently became close friends. Zola and Duret were pallbearers at Manet's funeral. After Zola's death, Duret acted as adviser to Mme Zola and was first president of the Association littéraire des Amis d'Emile Zola.

⁶ Its principal collaborators were Jules Claretie, André Lavertujon, Gustave-Paul Cluseret, and Jules Ferry. Lavertujon was one of the better-known democratic journalists under the Second Empire, and was for some time editor-in-chief of La Gironde (Bordeaux). Gustave-Paul Cluseret was one of the most colorful figures of the mid-century. Originally a journalist, he went to America during the Civil War and eventually became a general in the Union armies. He later founded The New Nation in New York, was active in American politics, but returned to Europe in 1867, where he once again took part in European politics. Later he was active in a newspaper called La Marseillaise, but I have been unable to ascertain if it was the paper founded by Zola and Roux.

⁷ The Goncourts wrote, on 14 December 1868: “Car il voudrait faire de grandes machines, et plus de ces articles ignobles, infâmes, dit-il, avec un ton qui s'indigne contre lui, ‘que je suis obligé de faire en ce moment dans La Tribune, au milieu de gens dont je suis obligé de prendre l'opinion idiote‘” (Journal, viii, 155).

⁸ Letters from Duret and Camille Pelletan (son of Eugène) are now in the Bibliothèque Nationale (Nouv. acq. fr. 24518 and 24522). They establish that Zola was to furnish a weekly “Causerie” and receive a salary of 4000 francs. But misunderstandings arose as soon as the paper began to appear, with opposition to Zola apparently being led by Lavertujon. On 19 June 1868 Zola was forced to write the pathetic and oft-quoted letter to Duret, asking for his support, and promising to perform the most humdrum tasks, “relire les épreuves ... redresser les phrases boiteuses” (Correspondance 1858–1871, p. 336). All references to the published writings of Zola are to the Œuvres complètes, ed. Maurice Le Blond, 50 vols. (Paris, 1927–29).

⁹ A letter to Roux concerning the censoring of Madeleine Férat illustrates this: “En un mot, tout marche bien, trop bien même. Ah! ces pauvres démocrates, sont-ils assez roulés” (Correspondance 1858–1871, p. 346).

¹⁰ See Zola's letter to Duret, dated 20 May 1868, in Correspondance 1858–1871, p. 334.

¹¹ The most important of the articles have been reproduced in my Atelier de Zola: Textes de journaux 1865–1870 (Genève, 1963).

¹² Nevertheless, the second issue already carried one of the obligatory “communiqués” by which opposition newspapers were forced to pay for the government's refutation of their articles.

¹³ Emile Zola, Les Rougon-Macquari, ed. H. Mitterand (Paris, 1960), i, 1539–40; ii, 1501–02. The Tribune article which first touched upon the Var insurrection was an extract, published on 23 August 1868, from Eugène Tenot's La Province en décembre 1851. It gave the details of the execution of a peasant named Martin Bidouré. The brutality of the incident and the legal irregularities with which it was conducted prompted its revival at the critical political moment of 1868. Zola, led by this extract to read Tenot's book, as well as works by Noël Blache and H. Maquan, used a number of incidents cited by them in La Fortune des Rougon. He never used the execution of Martin Bidouré itself, however, except in a minor way: his peasant Mourgue, shot at the end of La Fortune des Rougon, is said to come from a village called Poujols; whereas Bidouré lived in the town of Barjols. The Bidouré affair appears to have been the thread that led him to Blache's Histoire de l'insurrection du Var en décembre 1851. Zola's review of this work, published in the Tribune on 29 August 1869, was again a discussion of the Bidouré scandal.

¹⁴ F. W. J. Hemmings, in Emile Zola (Oxford, 1953), p. 58, gives 1868 as the date of Delord's history; Lorenz' bibliography (as well as Mitterand) gives 1869. If the latter date is correct, the serialization in the Tribune must have been concurrent with, if not actually antecedent to, the appearance of the volume.

¹⁵ Parallels to his passage can be found especially in La Bêle humaine, in which the relatively unimportant murder of Grandmorin becomes a political issue; in Zola's words, “c'était ainsi que le crime présumé d'un petit chef de gare ... ébranlait cette machine énorme d'une exploitation de voie ferrée ... La secousse allait même plus haut, gagnait le ministère, menaçait l'Etat, dans le malaise politique du moment: heure critique, grand corps social dont la moindre fièvre hâtait la décomposition” (p. 146).

¹⁶ The materials in the dossier of Germinal can be most conveniently consulted in E. M. Grant's exceedingly useful Zola's “Germinal”: A Critical and Historical Study (Leicester, 1962).

¹⁷ It is interesting to note that in this article Zola put into Napoleon III's mouth words that were practically Duret's: “Le symptome le plus terrible, c'est l'inquiétude du pays, l'anxiété pleine d'angoisse de toutes les classes.”

¹⁸ Given a certain intensity, these preoccupations on Zola's part became the basis for later novels. Such a case occurred in connection with the masochism of Muffat in Nana. See Auriant, La Véritable histoire de Nana (Paris, 1942), pp. 15–18.

¹⁹ This article concerns the mythical manufacture of “hommes à rire”—a project, says Zola, subsidized by the government in order to enliven the Second Empire. The text is reproduced in my Atelier de Zola (Genève, 1963), pp. 191–195.

²⁰ Zola's appreciation of observation and analysis as stylistic procedures obviously did not originate here; he had already mentioned them as reasons for admiring Flaubert. In a long review of L'Education sentimentale, published on 23 November 1869, Zola equated this highly rational attitude with “nerves,” perhaps as an attempt to distinguish it from romantic emotionalism. He detected in Flaubert's novel “des gammes soudaines de notes nerveuses”; he characterized Flaubert as writing with his “nerfs de poète”; as animating his novels with a “vie nerveuse”; of manipulating “cette pénétration nerveuse des moindres faits.”

²¹ Appendix to La Fortune des Rougon, “Notes générales sur la marche de l'œuvre” (p. 354).

²² I am indebted to Richard B. Grant who called my attention to the use of some of these words in La Confession de Claude and Thérèse Raquin.

²³ Confirmation can be found in the articles Zola wrote about the same time for La Cloche, where the same apocalyptic note is sounded. However, Zola did not begin to contribute to La Cloche until well after he began working for the Tribune. A study of the Cloche articles would go beyond the bounds of this analysis.

²⁴ It is a mark of Zola's unusual docility in this respect that on 19 July 1868 he could write to Duret, “J'ai parfaitement compris la raison de vos coupures.” There was, of course, a financial explanation: the Tribune was an important source of income during a rather lean period.

²⁵ Railroad scandals were not uncommon under the Second Empire, and one wonders if the possibility of such a story as Kahn's might not have been suggested by the frequent advertisements in the Tribune of the “Société anonyme de la banque des Chemins de fer d'intérêt local.” This company was devoted to the financing of local lines, possessed only a provisional office at 7 place de la Bourse, and was closely associated with the newspaper L'Epargne—all circumstances which would apply to Kahn's enterprise. I have been unable to determine the ultimate fate of this société anonyme.

²⁶ R. B. Grant, in his Zola's Son Excellence Eugène Rougon (Durham, N. C., 1960), pp. 47–48, has traced the historical origins of the Martineau incident. None of these sources, however, deal with press reaction to police brutality.

²⁷ “Les journaux de l'opposition continuaient à mener une campagne bruyante, les uns accusant la police d'être tellement occupée à la surveillance politique qu'elle n'avait plus le temps d'arrêter les assassins, les autres fouillant la vie du président, donnant à entendre qu'il était de la cour, où régnait la plus basse débauche; et cette campagne devenait vraiment désastreuse à mesure que les élections approchaient” (La Bête humaine, pp. 134–135.)

²⁸ Zola's remark is quoted by Hemmings, op. cit., p. 64.

²⁹ Son Excellence Eugène Rougon, p. 311.