Mother Death: The Journal of Jules Michelet, 1815-1850 by EDWARD K. KAPLANReview by: OSCAR A. HAACNineteenth-Century French Studies, Vol. 13, No. 4 (Summer 1985), pp. 302-304Published by: University of Nebraska PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23536613 .

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302 Nineteenth-Century French Studies

be giving up his most vigorous attempts to consolidate the Naturalist group

and, after a flourish in Le Figaro, giving up regular journalism.

But, despite all this, in another sense, throughout the whole period in

question, it was business as usual for Zola, the business of battling for his

ideas and works in polemics with critics, politicians, and journalists. These

letters and their informative elucidation provide us with a remarkable picture of the extraordinary cut-throat literary world in which and with which Zola

contended. Another compelling reason for his tendency to withdraw to

Médan. The editors expertly guide us through this kind of pot-bouille of the

world of journalism, with the "affaire du Henri IV" (pp. 207-09) and the

Duverdy case (pp. 257-67) setting the tone in vindictiveness and triviality.

Then, there is another intriguing strain in the correspondence of volume IV:

the increasing extent of Zola's dealings with foreign editors and translators

over adaptations and translations of his works—and the impossible task of

keeping track of them. "Quant à maintenir mes droits," he writes to a

German critic, "à quoi bon? nous perdrions; le mieux est de rester volé et

content" (p. 234). But the fame had its consolations. Appropriately, the last

letter of the volume draws together these two interesting strains when Zola

writes to Van Santen Kolff: "Je suis bien heureux de me sentir des amis à

l'étranger, ce qui compense un peu mes ennemis de France"; and, without

the slightest trace of fanfaronade, he advises his Dutch correspondent to

address his letters, to be sure to reach him, simply to "Emile Zola, France," such was the measure of his fame and notoriety by this time.

Finally, whilst naturally focusing on the letters, the reviewer of this

volume, like the rest, would be remiss in failing to emphasize its importance as a reference work. In addition to the chronological tables and the detailed

annotations, there are some sixty pages of bibliography, biographies, indexes.

When the whole series is complete, these volumes will be an impressive chronicle of an age, like the Rougon-Macquart novels themselves, appearing with the same ordered regularity.

DAVID BAGULEY

University of Western Ontario

KAPLAN, EDWARD K. Mother Death: The Journal of Jules Michelet, 1815 1850. Translated and edited by Edward K. Kaplan. Amherst: The University

of Massachusetts Press, 1984. xv + 227 pp.

An excellent translation doing justice to Michelet's poetic prose, which

interprets the original and makes it readily accessible to the reader, is a true

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Reviews 303

accomplishment. The selections from the Journal are made meaningful by

Kaplan's helpful commentary and extensive footnotes. Circumstances are

explained, hundreds of personalities are introduced. We grasp the evolution

of the historian so vividly, that we recommend Kaplan's edition to anyone

wishing to read Michelet's Journal. Kaplan's version could well appear in

French.

He is the author of a number of articles dealing with the historian, and

above all of Michelet's Poetic Vision: A Romantic Philosophy of Nature,

Man, and Woman (ibid., 1977). His editions oí L'Oiseau and L'Insecte are to

appear in the Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Flammarion). Thus Kaplan can

provide the living detail needed to appreciate the text, expressions like

"bitter death" (amara mors) or "mother death," and Michelet's persistent

effort to trace the victory of freedom over determinism, from the Introduc

tion à l'histoire universelle of 1831 to the philosophy of nature of later years.

All this is illustrated by eloquent testimony. Michelet's comments on the

Panthéon as a symbol of freedom and revolutionary France (56, 107-08)

show us the "visionary" who after his reorientation ( 1840-43), proposed "to

overthrow the defiled former altar, worm-eaten, of Christianity" (182). The

historian rises passionate before our eyes. At critical moments, we find Kaplan's psychological analysis. He explains

why the young historian would not confide dreams concerning Poinsot even

to a good friend (46), why he overlooked Poinsot's absence from home as a

child but not a later one (50), or why Athénaïs, jealous of the first wife,

Pauline, made him destroy certain passages from tht Journal in 1864. Such

detail explains far more than the particular moment; it establishes Michelet's

awareness or blindness, so he emerges frail and human, but captivating. The book provides additional texts, such as Pauline's epitaph (66), a letter

by Alfred Dumesnil to Eugène Noël describing Michelet's disturbed house

hold in 1841 (115), and the historian's later description (in La Montagne) of

his cure by mother nature, the mud baths at Acqui (in the "epilogue").

Thus Michelet's successive confrontations with death are clarified. They form a long and painful list: his grandfather (1814), his mother (1815),

Sophie Plateau (1820) and especially the death of his devoted friend, Paul

Poinsot (1821). Then his "second mother," Mme Fourcy, died in 1823, his

wife Pauline in 1839, his great spiritual love, Mme Dumesnil, in 1842; finally his father (1846) and his son by the second marriage, Yves-Jean Lazare

(1850). Edward Kaplan could have continued: Michelet's children, Adèle and

Charles, were to pass away in 1855 and 1862.

It is not so much the accumulation of tragedy as the haunting experience of death and resurrection which matters here, the idea that the individual and

institutions, even Christianity, need to die to be reborn (105, 184). This calls

for a compassionate historian (108, 142) and defines his task.

Thus Michelet came to see himself as a seer (vates, 122) enlightened by death (92), seeking out the past to divine the future as he described individual

fate in terms of universal experience. Pauline, for instance, appears as the

representative of the French spirit (80) and as mother France (95). The

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304 Nineteenth-Century French Studies

historian concluded in triumph that life vanquishes death. A friend wrote:

"You have demonstrated that death does not exist" ( 140). The book contains a helpful index where names are further identified; also

a brief but important bibliography: treatments of death in literature (Ariès,

Choron) as well as studies concerning Michelet. The references identify

corrections needed in the French edition of the Journal (215). Finally they

explain Michelet's significant habit of exhuming his dead (61, 215): at issue

was his fascination with death and decay but above all his desire to assure

permanent interment, as opposed to temporary burial.

Kaplan's attractive volume provides the focused presentation of a theme, one so fundamental as to introduce the essential aspects of Michelet. The

book is an excellent introduction to the historian and to his journal.

OSCAR A. HAAC

State University of New York, Stony Brook

GUIEU, JEAN-MAX. Le Théâtre lyrique d'Emile Zola. Paris: Librairie Fisch

bacher, 1983. 190 pp.

This book explores a neglected area of Zola's work; even the long-time reader of the Rougon-Macquart novels may be unaware that their creator

also wrote six libretti he called "poèmes," three of which were produced. Guieu's study continues and expands Lawson Carter's work on Zola's theater

which detailed his entry onto the naturalist stage, his often unacknowledged collaboration with William Busnach in adapting several of his novels for the

theater, and his turning later in life to the writing of lyric dramas. It is on the

latter works, created in collaboration with composer Alfred Bruneau, that

Guieu focuses his attention. Zola's enduring, if somewhat ambivalent, involve

ment in theater —like many of his contemporaries, he railed against its "recet

tes connues" even as he strove to find his own niche in it—is well-documented.

The theater represented for him "le côté du gain et du retentissement" and

was, literally, a new stage for his naturalist theories, offering a potential for

innovation he found difficult to resist. What may be surprising is the move

toward lyric drama, a form he particularly despised. Guieu takes this apparent

paradox as his point of departure, presenting the thesis that the lyric theater, far from being an anomaly in Zola's life or a simple diversion from his "real"

work, becomes an integral part of his esthetic and ideological development, and of his continued need to defy stereotypes. His work for the musical stage Guieu sees as a vital link between the scientific realism of the early works and

the prophetic and didactic tone of the late novels.

Guieu gives strong arguments for this growing interest; he shows that

Zola's scorn was less for the form itself than for the theaters that presented

it, especially the Opéra, in whose productions Zola sees "le triomphe de la

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