Pagina principaleGruppiConversazioniAltroStatistiche
Cerca nel Sito
Questo sito utilizza i cookies per fornire i nostri servizi, per migliorare le prestazioni, per analisi, e (per gli utenti che accedono senza fare login) per la pubblicità. Usando LibraryThing confermi di aver letto e capito le nostre condizioni di servizio e la politica sulla privacy. Il tuo uso del sito e dei servizi è soggetto a tali politiche e condizioni.

Risultati da Google Ricerca Libri

Fai clic su di un'immagine per andare a Google Ricerca Libri.

Sto caricando le informazioni...

La disfatta (1892)

di Émile Zola

Altri autori: Vedi la sezione altri autori.

Serie: Les Rougon-Macquart (19)

UtentiRecensioniPopolaritàMedia votiCitazioni
8201126,509 (3.98)43
Classic Literatur Fictio Historical Fictio HTML:

Dazzling romance, political intrigue, military conflictâ??this kind of top-rate historical fiction is a heady brew that French writer Emile Zola serves up better than anyone before or since. One of the novels in the author's celebrated Les Rougon-Macquart series, The Downfall follows the travails and triumphs of farmer and soldier Jean Macquart, who rises above adversity in a time of terrible discord to find a semblance of peace and happiness.… (altro)

Aggiunto di recente dapausam, CurrerBell, Lionman10, afmercado2, Dzaowan, liblow, lucsps, AlexEveBooks, ColeridgeB2, Brazgo67
Biblioteche di personaggi celebriJames Joyce
  1. 00
    The Franco-Prussian War 1870-1871 di Stephen Badsey (Artymedon)
    Artymedon: This Osprey book has a great map of the battlefield of Sedan, France where La Debacle's main action takes place. The reader understands then how accurate Zola's descriptions are and how his book's values are as much historical as those of a social novelist.… (altro)
  2. 00
    Récits d'un soldat di Amédée Achard (Artymedon)
    Artymedon: same period with Achard also treating about the siege of Paris as well as Sedan.
Sto caricando le informazioni...

Iscriviti per consentire a LibraryThing di scoprire se ti piacerà questo libro.

Attualmente non vi sono conversazioni su questo libro.

» Vedi le 43 citazioni

"Jesus Christ! What bloody good's bravery?"

22 years after starting his Rougon Macquart series, Zola sat down to write its climax. There is still one book to go, but La Débâcle is the big action set piece of the series, a frontline look at the bloody war and concomitant civil strife which demolished the Imperial Age of France once and for all.

Excluding flashbacks, the series opened with Napoleon III's coup of December 1851 with [b:The Fortune of the Rougons|14827593|The Fortune of the Rougons (Les Rougon-Macquart, #1)|Émile Zola|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1347457035l/14827593._SY75_.jpg|303087], and has taken us through life in the Second Empire from the political elite to the most worn-out of peasants. Three of the novels crept forward in time as far as July 1870: in the final pages of [b:La Bête humaine|6251724|La Bête humaine|Émile Zola|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388366273l/6251724._SY75_.jpg|101404] we see young men in the port cities boarding trains to join the army; at the conclusion of [b:Earth|27310205|Earth (Les Rougon-Macquart, #15)|Émile Zola|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1451244935l/27310205._SY75_.jpg|1810722], peasant Jean Macquart joins this long march as it snakes its way to Paris; the last chapter of [b:Nana|6491760|Nana (Les Rougon-Macquart, #9)|Émile Zola|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1481658479l/6491760._SY75_.jpg|89633] sees the titular heroine dying of smallpox while, outside in the streets, that march has become an army of soldiers, proudly shouting: "On to Berlin! On to Berlin!". La Débâcle at last makes good on that promise, opening in August 1870 as Jean Macquart's squadron nears the border, at rural Sedan. As the soldiers plod toward their destination, we come to discover their varied motives and beliefs, and Jean develops a rivalry with a fellow soldier, Maurice, which softens into an alliance and ultimately an intimate friendship.

Maurice is wealthy and pro-war, but he is also physically weak, something of a coward, a man who has never questioned the moral superiority of France, or the role of violence as an arbitrator. Jean is the kind of man who will always end up in wars even against his will; poverty and institutional inequality will make sure of it. He is tough and fair, but also seeks peace and a quiet plot of land to call his own. Yet both men are at the mercy of their country's over-confidence and under-preparedness. The first part of the novel is a bit of a slog, to be honest, which feels deliberate - Zola is in peak naturalism mode here, accurately conjuring the feeling of the endless marching, the gradual uncertainty. The level of detail is rich and intense (see below) but, as the longest novel in the series, one feels that it didn't have to be.

By 1892, Zola was the most famous living author in France, and he was also under great scrutiny. For the first time in his career, he was writing a novel purporting to present accurate events from only two decades ago, and he devoted himself to research on a higher plane. "I hope that people will recognise my impartiality. While sweeping nothing under the rug, I sought to 'explain' our disasters. This seemed the wisest and most dignified attitude, commercial success aside... I would be quite happy if, in France and in German, I got proper credit for my effort at truth-telling". Nevertheless, although the novel was highly acclaimed by many - and was the best-selling of his books during Zola's lifetime - he of course faced criticism on both sides, from those who argued he was being unpatriotic in arguing that France lost the war in part because of her own foolishness, and from those who argued he was extolling war by the novel's seeming conclusion that the horrors of 1870-71 had to happen, to cleanse the corrupted state and allow its rebirth.

I'm not able to answer that, but the details of Zola's research are included here on a sometimes exhausting scale. The French soldiers are given detailed maps of Germany, but when the battle takes place at Sedan - in France - they are disoriented and underprepared. Captured soldiers go weeks with almost no food, and then binge themselves when an entire caravan of supplies arrives; the resulting health impact from the overeating kills more of them than the starvation did. The constant use of dates and locations in Part I requires a great deal of footnotes, and the modern reader - who may be more interested in an overview of how France fell - might be disappointed to feel so locked in to a single platoon in a single part of a single battle in a single location. But Zola was not seeking to detail the entire war. He saw Sedan's failure as the pivotal moment, and he knew that his audience would be deeply familiar with their own recent history. A novel in the style of Tolstoy, purporting to examine a war synoptically, would be a very different undertaking.

Part II of the novel is a greater success, focusing on the Battle of Sedan from all possible angles. As in the greatest of the novels in the series, no character has a complete viewpoint of what is going on. Jean and Maurice, trapped behind enemy lines; Maurice's sister Henriette, wandering through broken, blood-filled villages; the Emperor himself, an ashen face glimpsed through windows and doors - a stark contrast from the earlier, more harsh portrayals of Napoleon III, suggesting that with hindsight Zola viewed even this man as a complex figure of circumstances. (Modern historians give him more credit than the fiercely anti-Imperial author did.) At the same time, one can't help but feel compelled by the stark inequality that runs throughout the book. "It's revolting", says one character, "sending a lot of brave lads off to their deaths for some rotten business they don't even know the first thing about". While the Emperor's caravan exhausts entire villages like a plague, when thousands of his followers descend and consume everything in sight, soldiers are left to squabble over single loaves of bread, while rivers become swamped with the dead bodies of horses and men. At one point, Jean says that in his experience, war always smells "scorched... like singed wool". These tiny moments of realism give great power. Alongside this are some of Zola's trademark heightened uses of symbolism, nowhere more so than the army captain who is shot to death while furled in the French flag - an image that calls to mind the death of the young heroine of The Fortune of the Rougons oh, so many books ago. And the sequence in which a German spy is brutally avenged by the French is sickening and intoxicating at the same time.

La Débâcle is quite an achievement (Henry James thought it on par with War and Peace), and I rate it very highly. At the same time, this falls into the same category as some of the other novels in the series - notably [b:Money|18552501|Money (Les Rougon-Macquart #18)|Émile Zola|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1385350960l/18552501._SY75_.jpg|417025] - which would have had a more immediate power over contemporary readers. The Franco-Prussian War was seen as the ultimate downfall of France. The crush to French morale that followed permanently upset the balance of power in Europe and the loss of the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine left a deep imprint in the country's psyche. Four decades later, when Europe was again a pressure-cooker, French fears of Germany and desire for revenge played a role in exacerbating WWI. The modern reader cannot properly recapture how this novel must have felt to its first discoverers, and as a result some of the length feels gratuitous. While Part III is gorgeous (see below), it again feels frustrating to spend so much time with these individual voices trapped within a wider web, when we naturally - after 18 previous novels - want to understand the web as a whole. (It's worth noting also the unusual intersection of fact and fiction here. One of the main characters of the series, Eugene Rougon, is based on a real figure named Eugene Rouger. But here, in a novel that needs to present verisimilitude to advance the author's aims, we have the real Rouger mentioned instead!)

Still, Part III of this book is surely one of the highlights of the entire series. While the survivors of Sedan are routed by the Germans, Jean and Maurice are separated to two very different journeys, which culminate in the horrors of the Paris commune, the four month siege of Paris by the Prussians, which was followed by a brief but bloody civil conflict as the centrist and conservative parties fought to take back the city from the radicals. It seems strange, actually, to only give the commune two chapters, since it feels like the real end-point of Zola's broad narrative. But the author packs so much into this sequence that - although extensive footnotes are needed due to the "24/7 news cycle" aspect of it all - the reader comes away reeling.

I noted in my reviews of the preceding novels that Zola has become more didactic, more preachy. The voice of the author which he had often sought to disguise now emerges from nooks and crannies to present itself as the voice of the spirit of the land. So I was pleasantly surprised that there is little of this here. Indeed, there's no need for it. The graphic sequences in the war hospital say more than an essay ever could. Although Zola preaches in the final two chapters, he expresses his disgust with both sides in the commune, and one feels that they have been treated fairly.

At the heart of the novel is the Jean/Maurice friendship, which feels deeply allegorical. The honest peasant and the decadent man of good birth, overcoming their differences to rely upon one another. The relationship's intimacy is unusual, for two heterosexual men, from an English perspective, although beautifully treated! Without spoiling the friendship's final fate, this feels like Zola's final commentary on change and rebirth.

Of course, there is one final novel in the series - [b:Doctor Pascal|52669114|Doctor Pascal|Émile Zola|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1585190863l/52669114._SY75_.jpg|1356866] - and I am bursting at the seams to read this in the new Oxford translation, due out next month. Here, Zola will attempt to bring together the strands of his expansive series, as he looked back on the 100th anniversary of the Revolution that had begun the tormented progress of France from monarchy to republic. On to Berlin! ( )
  therebelprince | Oct 24, 2023 |
Last year I read Germinal, which was about post-Second Empire coal miners struggling to survive the Industrial Revolution. This volume (#19 of 20) of the Rougon-Macquart universe is set a bit earlier, beginning in 1870 right before the fatal blow to Napoleon III's reign at the infamous Battle of Sedan and finishing at the climax of the Paris Commune. Most of the book is taken up by a sort of buddy movie starring two ordinary French soldiers suffering through the poor organization and even worse planning of the Emperor's ill-starred war with Prussia, following the nonsensical marches and countermarches as the leadership desperately tries to confront the devastating foreign invasion. Zola has a real gift for taking ragged peasant characters and placing them through all sorts of dramatic events without losing sight of their human qualities, and I really enjoyed the climactic ending with the two at the barricades of Paris. It's interesting to compare Zola to other French writers; I haven't read very many at all, but even though the book is part of Zola's grand cycle and filled with portentous philosophizing about all sorts of things, he almost never stoops to the level of using people as simple allegorical sock puppets the way that Victor Hugo does (though I also enjoyed Hugo). I've got two more of the series (#7 L'Assommoir and #14 L'Oeuvre) and maybe I will try to finish the whole icosology someday. ( )
  aaronarnold | May 11, 2021 |
The logical end of the Rougon-Macquart story, as the Second Empire is smashed to pieces in the humiliating mess of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1871 (in publication order, there's one more book to read, Le Docteur Pascal).

At the centre of the story is Jean Macquart, the tragic central figure from La Terre, whom we last saw going off to re-enlist. We meet him again, as a corporal in an infantry regiment, outside Mulhouse, waiting for the order to cross the Rhine and head for Berlin. Of course that doesn't come, instead it looks as though the Prussians have broken through, and the regiment moves around eastern France in an arduous series of marches and counter-marches, following the confusing shifts of strategy that come down from higher command, and never actually coming into contact with the enemy during the first six weeks of the war, until they end up in Sedan.

Part II takes us through the defeat of the French army in Sedan. Jean has made friends with Maurice, a young lawyer who is serving in his squad as a volunteer: through Maurice and his friends and relations we get to follow the action from the viewpoints of civilians in Sedan and members of other branches of the army.

In Part III, Zola moves on to the Prussian occupation, the siege of Paris, and, in a dénouement that will take no-one by surprise, ends with the fall of the Commune, and Paris burning. We don't actually get the Seine flooding over the stage (although there is a nocturnal boat-trip through the flaming city), but there is more than a hint of Götterdämmerung in the final scenes.

As usual, everything has been researched to a tolerance of better than half a blade of grass, and you can have hours of fun following it all on large-scale maps if you wish, not that there's any need for that, it's just as effective if you forget about the precise geography. We can safely take it for granted that if he says there is a beech tree, there really was one on that spot in 1870.

It's supposed to be a condemnation of the callous over-confidence and unpreparedness of those who took France into the war, the incompetence of those who lost it, and the naivety of those who rushed to fight in it. But, being Zola, it doesn't stop there: he wants us to know what it might feel like to be an infantry soldier, how much it matters if a minor error in planning sends the supply column to a different place from the troops and there's nothing to eat after a day's march, how military discipline ceases to exist in a lost war, how field hospitals are organised, how the casual destruction of passing armies destroys the lives of civilians, and a thousand other less obvious things he's found out about war during his research.

More documentary and less involved with its characters than many of Zola's other books, but there is an interesting human plot in the friendship between the peasant Jean and the intellectual Maurice. Perhaps inevitably, the female characters don't get a huge amount to do, other than bandaging their men or seducing Prussian officers into granting small favours.

A very impressive bug's-eye-view of war, but maybe not Zola's most interesting novel if you're not a military historian. ( )
  thorold | Jun 23, 2020 |
War is hell, and in this novel Zola vividly depicts that hell, from the battles themselves to the soldiers' struggles to find food and a dry place to sleep, from the horrifying conditions in a prison camp and the deadly march to it to the suffering of civilians caught in areas overrun by war, from the gruesome details of field hospital operations to the pain of wounds and the finality of death. The war is the rout of the French army by the Prussians in 1870, especially the shattering battle of Sedan (and the aftermath of the defeat in the 1871 Paris Commune). The seeds of the debacle were widespread. To cite just one example, referred to in passing by Zola, the French army had maps of Germany, but no maps of the areas of eastern France in which all the battles took place!

Sometimes my eyes glazed over with Zola's details of troop movements (although my Oxford World Classics edition had maps. which helped), but as with all Zola novels this is a novel about people as well as about history or social conditions. At the end of The Earth, Jean Macquart, devastated by the the disasters he has experienced, re-enlists in the army; in this book, he is a corporal and on the march to the war and the novel focuses on him, his unit, and the other people he encounters. This allows Zola to not only portray the army and its challenges, including both good and incompetent commanding officers, all the way up to Napoleon III himself, but also farmers and factory owners in the area of the battles and, eventually, how they adapt to the Prussian soldiers living in their midst. One of the soldiers in Jean's unit is Maurice, an educated but previously dissolute man; Maurice at first looks down on Jean because he is an uneducated peasant, but eventually they become fast friends, almost brothers. One of the farmers is Maurice's grandfather, who raised his twin sister, Henriette, and him near Sedan. Henriette is married to a man named Weiss, who knows the area well, and presciently warns some of the unit's leaders about the dangers of the army heading to Sedan (hills surround it). Various other characters associated with them, and with a local factory owner named Delaherche and his complicated family, also play important roles.

The novel is structured in three parts. The first corresponds to the week Jean's unit spent approaching the battlefields, then retreating, and then approaching them again, part of the debacle because the generals received competing orders from the Emperor, Napoleon III, who was traveling with the army, and the Empress back in Paris. The second is devoted to the horrifying details of the day-long battle of Sedan, and the third to the aftermath, first in the area of the battle, after Jean is wounded and holes up with Maurice's family (all soldiers are supposed to be prisoners of the Prussians), and later to the Commune and its bloody conclusion in Paris. There, Zola brilliantly depicts the suffering of the Parisians after being under siege by the Prussians for months, the violence on both sides, and the flames of the Tuileries and other buildings, set on fire by the Communards. Of course, being a Zola novel, there is melodrama at the end, before Jean sets off once more, looking towards the future.

The introduction to my edition helpfully explains all the research Zola did for this book, and notes how it completes the saga of the Second Empire that is the subject of the Rougon-Macquart cycle (there is a final novel that succeeds this one). The Third Republic was born from the ashes of this defeat, in which the French lost Alsace and Lorraine (as well as the military legacy of the first Napoleon). The defeat and the loss also set the stage for increased hostility between the French and the Germans that was a cause of the wars to come in the 20th century.

With this novel, I have completed my reading of all the novels in the Rougon-Macquart cycle that have been recently translated into English, begun with my reading of Germinal in 2012.
8 vota rebeccanyc | Jun 6, 2015 |
1870 Franco Prussian War - Paris Commune ( )
  dlsheaffer | Feb 8, 2015 |
nessuna recensione | aggiungi una recensione

» Aggiungi altri autori (22 potenziali)

Nome dell'autoreRuoloTipo di autoreOpera?Stato
Zola, Émileautore primariotutte le edizioniconfermato
Dorday, ElinorTraduttoreautore secondarioalcune edizioniconfermato
Lethbridge, RobertIntroduzioneautore secondarioalcune edizioniconfermato
Tancock, L. W.Translation and Introductionautore secondarioalcune edizioniconfermato
Devi effettuare l'accesso per contribuire alle Informazioni generali.
Per maggiori spiegazioni, vedi la pagina di aiuto delle informazioni generali.
Titolo canonico
Titolo originale
Titoli alternativi
Data della prima edizione
Personaggi
Dati dalle informazioni generali inglesi. Modifica per tradurlo nella tua lingua.
Luoghi significativi
Eventi significativi
Film correlati
Epigrafe
Dedica
Incipit
Dati dalle informazioni generali inglesi. Modifica per tradurlo nella tua lingua.
Camp had been set up two kilometres from Mulhouse, nearer the Rhine, in the middle of the fertile plain.
Citazioni
Ultime parole
Dati dalle informazioni generali inglesi. Modifica per tradurlo nella tua lingua.
(Click per vedere. Attenzione: può contenere anticipazioni.)
Nota di disambiguazione
Dati dalle informazioni generali inglesi. Modifica per tradurlo nella tua lingua.
La Débâcle (The Debacle) is also published as The Downfall. Please do not separate.
Redattore editoriale
Elogi
Lingua originale
DDC/MDS Canonico
LCC canonico

Risorse esterne che parlano di questo libro

Wikipedia in inglese (1)

Classic Literatur Fictio Historical Fictio HTML:

Dazzling romance, political intrigue, military conflictâ??this kind of top-rate historical fiction is a heady brew that French writer Emile Zola serves up better than anyone before or since. One of the novels in the author's celebrated Les Rougon-Macquart series, The Downfall follows the travails and triumphs of farmer and soldier Jean Macquart, who rises above adversity in a time of terrible discord to find a semblance of peace and happiness.

Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche

Descrizione del libro
Riassunto haiku

Discussioni correnti

Nessuno

Copertine popolari

Link rapidi

Voto

Media: (3.98)
0.5
1 1
1.5
2 6
2.5 1
3 12
3.5 2
4 35
4.5 3
5 26

Sei tu?

Diventa un autore di LibraryThing.

Penguin Australia

Una edizione di quest'opera è stata pubblicata da Penguin Australia.

» Pagina di informazioni sull'editore

 

A proposito di | Contatto | LibraryThing.com | Privacy/Condizioni d'uso | Guida/FAQ | Blog | Negozio | APIs | TinyCat | Biblioteche di personaggi celebri | Recensori in anteprima | Informazioni generali | 203,235,619 libri! | Barra superiore: Sempre visibile