L’Argent

Émile Zola 1890

By the end of the novel, the stage is set for the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871) and the fall of the Second Empire.

L’Argent (Money) is the eighteenth novel in the Rougon-Macquart series by Émile Zola. It was serialized in the periodical Gil Blas beginning in November 1890 before being published in novel form by Charpentier et Fasquelle in March 1891. It was translated into English (as Money) by Benj. R. Tucker in 1891 and by Ernest A. Vizetelly in 1894 (new edition 1904; reprinted 1991 and 2007).

The novel focuses on the financial world of the Second French Empire as embodied in the Paris Bourse and exemplified by the fictional character of Aristide Saccard. Zola’s intent was to show the terrible effects of speculation and fraudulent company promotion, the culpable negligence of company directors, and the impotency of contemporary financial laws.

Aristide Saccard (b. 1815 as Aristide Rougon) is the youngest son of Pierre and Félicité Rougon. He is first introduced in La fortune des Rougon. L’argent is a direct sequel to La curée (published in 1871), which details Saccard’s first rise to wealth using underhanded methods. Sensing his unscrupulous nature, his brother Eugène Rougon prompts Aristide to change his surname from Rougon to Saccard.

Aristide’s other brother Pascal is the main character of Le docteur Pascal. He also has two sisters: Sidonie, who appears in La curée, and Marthe, one of the protagonists of La conquête de Plassans.

Plot summary

The novel takes place in 1864-1869, beginning a few months after the death of Saccard’s second wife Renée (see La curée). Saccard is bankrupt and an outcast among the Bourse financiers. Searching for a way to reestablish himself, Saccard is struck by plans developed by his upstairs neighbor, the engineer Georges Hamelin, who dreams of restoring Christianity to the Middle East through great public works: rail lines linking important cities, improved roads and transportation, renovated eastern Mediterranean ports, and fleets of modern ships to move goods around the world.

Saccard decides to institute a financial establishment to fund these projects.

He is motivated primarily by the potential to make incredible amounts of money and reestablish himself on the Bourse. In addition, Saccard has an intense rivalry with his brother Eugène Rougon, a powerful Cabinet minister who refuses to help him after his bankruptcy and who is promoting a more liberal, less Catholic agenda for the Empire. Furthermore, Saccard, an intense anti-Semite, sees the enterprise as a strike against the Jewish bankers who dominate the Bourse. (In a footnote, Ernest A. Vizetelly, the first British translator of L’argent, draws a distinction between Zola’s depiction of this aspect of Saccard’s character and Zola’s personal pro-Jewish beliefs as manifested in the later Dreyfus affair.)

From the beginning, Saccard’s Banque Universelle (Universal Bank) stands on shaky ground. In order to manipulate the price of the stock, Saccard and his confreres on the syndicate he has set up to jumpstart the enterprise buy their own stock and hide the proceeds of this illegal practice in a dummy account fronted by a straw man.

While Hamelin travels to Constantinople to lay the groundwork for their enterprise, the Banque Universelle goes from strength to strength. Stock prices soar, going from 500 francs a share to more than 3,000 francs in three years. Furthermore, Saccard buys several newspapers which serve to maintain the illusion of legitimacy, promote the Banque, excite the public, and attack Rougon.

The novel follows the fortunes of about 20 characters, cutting across all social strata, showing the effects of stock market speculation on rich and poor. The financial events of the novel are played against Saccard’s personal life. Hamelin lives with his sister Caroline, who, against her better judgment, invests in the Banque Universelle and later becomes Saccard’s mistress. Caroline learns that Saccard fathered a son, Victor, during his first days in Paris. She rescues Victor from his life of abject poverty, placing him in a charitable institution. But Victor is completely unredeemable, given over to greed, laziness, and thievery. After he attacks one of the women at the institution, he disappears into the streets, never to be seen again.

Eventually, the Banque Universelle cannot sustain itself. Saccard’s principal rival on the Bourse, the Jewish financier Gundermann, learns about Saccard’s financial trickery and attacks, loosing stock upon the market, devaluing its price, and forcing Saccard to buy millions of shares to keep the price up. At the final collapse, the Banque holds one-fourth of its own shares worth 200 million francs. The fall of the Banque is felt across the entire financial world.

Indeed, all of France feels the force of its collapse. The effects on the characters of L’argent are disastrous, including complete ruin, suicide, and exile, though some of Saccard’s syndicate members escape and Gundermann experiences a windfall. Saccard and Hamelin are sentenced to five years in prison. Through the intervention of Rougon, who doesn’t want a brother in jail, their sentences are commuted and they are forced to leave France. Saccard goes to Belgium, and the novel ends with Caroline preparing to follow her brother to Rome.

Historical Background

Because the financial world is closely linked with politics, L’argent encompasses many historical events, including:

• The 1860 Druze massacre of Maronite Christians in Syria

• France’s invasion of Mexico (1861-1867)

• The construction of the Suez Canal, opened in 1869

• The Austro-Prussian War, including the Battle of Königgrätz at Sadowa in 1866

• The Third Italian War of Independence (1866)

• The Universal Exposition of 1867

• The publication of Das Kapital in 1867 and the advent of Marxism

By the end of the novel, the stage is set for the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871) and the fall of the Second Empire.

Relation to the Other Rougon-Macquart Novels

Zola’s plan for the Rougon-Macquart novels was to show how heredity and environment worked on members of one family over the course of the Second Empire. All of the descendants of Adelaïde Fouque (Tante Dide), Saccard’s grandmother, demonstrate what today would be called obsessive-compulsive behaviors to varying degrees. Saccard is obsessed with money and the building of wealth, to which everything in his life holds second place. In Le docteur Pascal, Zola describes the influence of heredity on Saccard as an “adjection” in which the natures of his avaricious parents are commingled.

Two other members of the Rougon-Macquart family also appear in L’argent: Saccard’s sons Maxime (b. 1840) and Victor (b. 1853). If his father’s obsession is with building wealth, Maxime’s obsession is with keeping it. A widower, Maxime (who played a central role in La curée) lives alone in opulence he does not share. In Le docteur Pascal, Maxime is described as prematurely aged, afraid of pleasure and indeed of all life, devoid of emotion, and cold, characteristics introduced in L’argent. Maxime is described as a “dissemination” of characteristics, having the moral prepotency of his father and the pampered egotism of his mother (Saccard’s first wife).

Victor, on the other hand, brought up in squalor, is the furthest extreme Zola illustrates of the Rougon family’s degeneracy. Like his great-grandmother Tante Dide, Victor suffers from neuralgic attacks. Unlike Jacques Lantier (his second cousin, see La bête humaine), he is unable to control his criminal impulses, and his disappearance into the streets of Paris is no surprise. Victor is described as a “fusion” of the lowest characteristics of his parents (his mother was a prostitute).

In Le docteur Pascal (set in 1872), Zola tells us that Saccard returns to Paris, institutes a newspaper, and is again making piles of money.

Rougon is the protagonist of Son Excellence Eugène Rougon, the events of which predate L’argent. Saccard’s daughter Clotilde (b. 1847) is the main female character in Le docteur Pascal.

L’Argent

Author Émile Zola

Country France

Language French

Series Les Rougon-Macquart

Publisher Charpentier & Fasquelle (book form)

Publication date 1890-1891 (serial) & 1891 (book form)

Media type Print (Serial, Hardback & Paperback)

Preceded by La Bête Humaine

Followed by La Débâcle

By the end of the novel, the stage is set for the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871) and the fall of the Second Empire.

L’argent (Money)

1891

Eugéne, Aristide Rougon

Aristide Rougon (Saccard), whom we met in La fortune des Rougon and whom we came to know intimately in La curée, finally comes up with the perfect money-making machine: he founds a banking corporation ostensibly intended to invest in developing French interests in the Near East. Actually, the real business of Saccard’s Universal Bank is manipulating its own stock price after the fashion of the failed Enron corporation in modern times. On the road to a ruin triggered in part by Saccard’s overt antisemitism towards powerful French Jewish financiers, Saccard inadvertently betrays and swindles even those he loves, all the while believing his own fantasies about ever-increasing prosperity and an endless rise in the stock market.

Although Zola leaned towards pathos, he was far from humorless: L’argent is a satire of the Crédit Mobilier scandal which rocked the last years of the Second Empire. There is disaster, but no real tragedy, and in the end, the scoundrel absconds under the protection of his cabinet minister brother to thrive and swindle another day.

This novel follows the exploits of Aristide Saccard, a financial wheeler-dealer in Second Empire Paris. His former wealth wiped away by investment schemes gone bad, Saccard looks for his next big windfall. Luckily, he meets a neighbor, Hamelin, an engineer with grand designs to develop railroads, mines, dams, and shipping companies in the Middle East. The engineer and the financial wizard join forces to make both their dreams come true. Saccard founds the Universal Bank to fund Hamelin’s projects, and it becomes all the rage in the Paris Bourse (stock market). While Hamelin’s intentions are noble, Saccard’s primary interest in the venture is personal financial gain and self-aggrandizement. In order to push up his company’s value, he manipulates figures illegally and lies to his investors.

Saccard is a personification of the greed and opportunism rampant in France at the time, and his unwise investors personify that period’s growing mania for financial speculation. It’s amazing how relevant the book is to this day. The Universal Bank could just as well be named Enron or Worldcom, and foreign investment in the Middle East is certainly a current concern. Another issue that Zola tackles in this book is anti-Semitism. Though Zola himself was not an anti-Semite, he makes Saccard a hater of Jews in order to depict the mind-set of many Parisians at that time. One of the functions of Saccard’s Universal Bank is to create a repository of Catholic money to rival the Jewish-owned banks, an actual goal of some Parisian businessman of the time.

Regardless of the historical social commentary, one can enjoy this novel purely for its intricately-drawn characters and its insights into human nature. I would caution that some of the financial strategy can be a little difficult for people (like me) who are not fully versed in the world of stocks and bonds.

This book is the 18th book in Zola’s twenty-novel Rougon-Macquart series. Zola first introduced us to the character Aristide Saccard back in the second volume of the series, La Curée. L’Argent (aka Money) is a much better book than La Curée (aka The Kill), and it is not necessary to read that prior volume in order to understand or enjoy this book.

“L’Argent/the Money” finishes up the story of Arstide Saccard; it takes over where the novel “La Curee/The Kill” leaves off. It shows the life in all its forms. The last two sentences of the novel give a philosophical description of the role of money and why so many vices are tied with it.

The novel shows how easy it was in those days to take a roller-coaster ride from poverty to richness and back to poverty. It narrates about early days of capitalism, when no antitrust regulations existed. One should also bear in mind that all the utopian talk of Sigizmund Busch about classless society and money becoming obsolete was seen (from the way it is conveyed in the novel) as daydreaming.

The novel walks through such important events of the XIXth century as: the Mexican expedition, building of the Suez Canal, the Austro-Italian War, the Prussian conquest of small duchies and the Paris World Exhibition of 1867.

Shortly after all these events France was struck by the infamous Dreyfus Affair and the novel does a good job describing the atmosphere that led to it, because there is hardly a chapter where the main character does not make inflammatory statements about the Jews.

All in all, it is a classic novel, not only about the money, but about the humanity, as well.

Set in the heroic golden age of nineteenth century capitalism, this belated sequel to the second book in the Rougon-Macquart cycle, “La Curée”, tells you in Zola’s inimitable style about how the stock market works and the psychology of market players. Nothing has really changed since it was written over a hundred years ago. Jewish readers may not like some of the remarks made by the book’s main character, Aristide, but remember Zola’s honourable role in the Dreyfus affair only a few years later.

Le débâcle (The Debacle)

1892

Jean Macquart

Jean Macquart (whom we last left in the aftermath of tragedy in La terre) has re-enlisted in the army for the Franco-Prussian War that ends in French defeat, the capture of Emperor Napoleon III at Sedan, and the occupation of Paris. Corporal Macquart mentors a young bourgeois private named Maurice. Maurice at first disdains the barely literate peasant corporal, but under the rigors of war bonds with the generous Macquart and ends up being drawn across class lines into the uprising of the Paris Commune.

Zola intended to conjure up again the emotions which had been felt by the French in their defeat by means of this novel written twenty years after that defeat. He also wished to pin the blame for the debacle on Napoleon III’s kleptocracy and the incompetent, venal generals who rose to power in the Second Empire. In other words, Zola created a sort of novelistic, 19th century “Fahrenheit 9/11″, one which earned him the kind of hostility and accusations of being a carrion bird that Michael Moore was garnering in the summer of 2004.

Zola was, however, committed to fairness even to his opponents, and exercised a journalistic rigor and self-discipline unknown to Moore. Zola never imputed to political leaders and historical figures deeds for the occurence of which he did not possess sound documentary evidence, and often treated his enemies with sympathy and presented profound psychological insight into their very human motivations. In particular, in The Debacle a minor didactic theme is the debunking of the centuries-old myth of the French people that every defeat of their army throughout French history can only have been the result of treason by the generals.

Comment: The novel L’Argent (Money) takes place in 1864-1869, beginning a few months after the death of Saccard’s second wife Renée (see La curée). Saccard is bankrupt and an outcast among the Bourse financiers. Searching for a way to reestablish himself, Saccard is struck by plans developed by his upstairs neighbor, the engineer Georges Hamelin, who dreams of restoring Christianity to the Middle East through great public works: rail lines linking important cities, improved roads and transportation, renovated eastern Mediterranean ports, and fleets of modern ships to move goods around the world.

La curée was filmed with Jane Fonda in the lead role.