Labor by Emile Zola

Zola’s socialist utopia

Emile Zola’s second-to-last novel was published in 1901 under the French title of Travail. English editions are titled as either Work or Labor. This is the second book in Zola’s Four Gospels series, preceded by Fruitfulness (1899) and followed by Truth (1903). (The fourth novel, Justice, was never completed.) Zola designed the Four Gospels series to address four social issues that were important to him. In each novel one of the Froment brothers—Mathieu, Marc, Luc, and Jean—tackles the issue at hand. In Labor, Luc Froment is confronted by problems of labor and capital, income inequality, and the poor living and working conditions of the laboring class.

Luc, an engineer, is summoned by an old friend to the town of Beauclair in the heart of an industrial region known for mining and smelting ore and manufacturing goods of iron and steel. Upon arriving in town, Luc strolls through the streets and also visits a neighboring steelworks. In both locations, he is appalled by the conditions of poverty, squalor, depravity, and ill health under which the factory workers live. He wishes he could do something to alleviate their suffering. Luc’s friend Jordan owns a blast furnace and foundry named La Crêcherie. The chief engineer of the works has recently died, and Jordan asks Luc for some advice on how to run his operations. A deal is struck between the two by which Luc agrees to manage La Crêcherie as long as Jordan lets him experiment with a new scheme of running the works under a cooperative model.

Zola envisions a socialist utopia based on the theories of French philosopher Charles Fourier, who conceived of the phalanstery, a type of self-contained communal living community. Luc turns La Crêcherie into a kind of independent socialist city-state where the workers enjoy profit-sharing, free housing in a charming residential village, high quality education for their children, and opportunities for social and physical recreation. Eventually, La Crêcherie’s communal influence expands to include the farms of the surrounding countryside and the merchants of Beauclair. Zola hints at the proliferation of similar communities throughout France and the world until socialism rules the globe, at which time mankind will be truly happy and fulfilled.

The first two books of the Four Gospels series are shockingly optimistic. In each case, the hero comes up with a grand scheme that is wildly successful because the whole purpose of the series is to illustrate Zola’s theories on social reform. The cynicism and vulgarity for which Zola was often criticized are not entirely absent, however. That’s what the supporting characters are for, in particular those who oppose the hero’s scheme—in this case, the merchants and industrialists who support the old way of doing business, the capitalistic system that crushes the souls of workers. The villains suffer while Luc and friends reap the benefits of their socialist paradise. This good-versus-evil didacticism results in a narrative that is not as realistic as Zola’s quintessentially naturalist novels. Labor is like the literary equivalent of a Diego Rivera mural. One scene shows capitalists wallowing in their wealth. Another depicts the workers rising up to take charge of their own destiny. Another glorifies the machines that liberate mankind from back-breaking toil. Each scene functions as a symbolic piece in a revolutionary political and socioeconomic statement.

Surprisingly, Zola’s socialist utopia even ventures into the realm of science fiction. His characters learn to utilize solar energy to produce all their electricity, and Zola even presciently prophesizes World War I and the Russian Revolution. Though it strains believability, Labor makes some valuable points and reveals much about its author’s political thought. It will appeal mostly to die-hard Zola fans or those with a pre-existing interest in socialist utopias. For everyone else, Zola already wrote the greatest novel on labor ever written, 1885’s Germinal.
If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.
https://www.amazon.com/review/R2QLHK9Z3OXZ5Q/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm