page_title: Émile Zola
section_title: Zola's optimism
hierarchical_section_title: Émile Zola / Zola's optimism
caption_attribution_description: English: A portrait of Zola by Luc Barbut-Davray, a French painter of portraits, history, and genre scenes. Painted in 1899, when Zola returned to France after exile in London. Barbut-Davray received his artistic education at the “Ecole des Beaux-Arts" in Paris under the tutorship of both Roybet and Cabanel.
context_page_description: Émile Édouard Charles Antoine Zola was a French novelist, playwright, journalist, the best-known practitioner of the literary school of naturalism, and an important contributor to the development of theatrical naturalism. He was a major figure in the political liberalization of France and in the exoneration of the falsely accused and convicted army officer Alfred Dreyfus, which is encapsulated in the renowned newspaper headline J'Accuse…! Zola was nominated for the first and second Nobel Prize in Literature in 1901 and 1902.
context_section_description: In Zola there is the theorist and the writer, the poet, the scientist and the optimist – features that are basically joined together in his own confession of positivism; later in his life, when he saw his own position turning into an anachronism, he would still style himself with irony and sadness over the lost cause as "an old and rugged Positivist".
  The poet is the artist in words whose writing, as in the racecourse scene in Nana or in the descriptions of the laundry in L'Assommoir or in many passages of La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret, Le Ventre de Paris and La Curée, vies with the colourful impressionistic techniques of Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. The scientist is a believer in some measure of scientific determinism – not that this, despite his own words "devoid of free will" ("dépourvus de libre arbitre"), need always amount to a philosophical denial of free will. The creator of "la littérature putride", a term of abuse invented by an early critic of Thérèse Raquin (a novel which predates Les Rougon-Macquart series), emphasizes the squalid aspects of the human environment and upon the seamy side of human nature.
  The optimist is that other face of the scientific experimenter, the man with an unshakable belief in human progress. Zola bases his optimism on innéité and on the supposed capacity of the human race to make progress in a moral sense. Innéité is defined by Zola as that process in which "se confondent les caractères physiques et moraux des parents, sans que rien d'eux semble s'y retrouver"; it is the term used in biology to describe the process whereby the moral and temperamental dispositions of some individuals are unaffected by the hereditary transmission of genetic characteristics. Jean Macquart and Pascal Rougon are two instances of individuals liberated from the blemishes of their ancestors by the operation of the process of innéité.
caption: Luc Barbut-Davray, Portrait of Zola, Oil on Canvas, 1899
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