Truth by Emile Zola

Liberals vs. reactionaries in schools and courtrooms

Emile Zola’s final novel, Truth (Vérité in French), was completed shortly before his death in September 1902 and published posthumously the following year. Truth is the third novel in Zola’s Four Gospels series. (At the time of his death he had not begun writing the projected fourth novel, Justice.) Each novel in the series features one of the Froment brothers—Mathieu, Marc, Luc, and Jean—as its protagonist, each of whom is faced with one of four social issues that Zola felt must be resolved in order for France to achieve its potential and live up to the Revolution’s promise of “liberté, egalité, fraternité.” Zola used these novels not only to illustrate in great detail the evils and ills facing French society in his day but also to spell out his own utopian vision of an ideal France. Thus, all three of Zola’s final novels begin in his characteristically dark and pessimistically critical fashion but ultimately conclude with surprising messages of optimism.

As the novel opens, Marc Froment, a schoolmaster in the small town of Jonville, is visiting his wife’s family in the nearby town of Maillebois. At the time, each town in France had its Catholic school and its secular public school. Marc runs the secular school in Bonville and is on friendly terms with his counterpart in Maillebois, a Jewish schoolmaster named Simon. One morning Simon’s nephew is found murdered, and Simon is charged with the crime, even though evidence points to the likelihood that one of the religious brothers at the parochial school is the killer. The Church launches a cover-up to protect its reputation. Marc, who has devoted his whole life to teaching his students to pursue truth, becomes the most outspoken proclaimer of Simon’s innocence. The legal proceedings prove divisive within the region, pitting conservative and anti-Semitic citizens against the community’s more liberal Republican members. The majority of the populace refuses to see the truth of Simon’s innocence, including Marc’s wife and her family.

The Simon affair is an obvious metaphor for the Dreyfus affair, the real-life criminal case in which Zola had recently played the part of Marc Froment. Both cases involved anti-Semitism, but the Dreyfus affair was a military scandal while the Simon affair is a religious scandal. As he has done in other novels, Zola uses the fictional affair to attack the Church, but here he specifically focuses on the contrast between religious and secular education. In Zola’s view, the latter option is the only means to an enlightened populace and an egalitarian future. He condemns the Roman Catholic Church as the deliberate sower of ignorance and superstition, the enemy of knowledge and progress, and the betrayer of Republican ideals.

Zola’s last novel is also his longest. It is comprised of 16 chapters, each as long as a novella. Lengthiness in itself is not a fault, but this book does feel overly protracted and repetitive. Like the other Gospel novels, Fruitfulness and Labor, Truth spans the better part of a century and features scores of characters over four generations. The story takes place in four or five different towns, each of which has its confusing roster of schoolmasters, clergymen, and politicians. Zola could easily have pared the narrative down and still made his point effectively. From a literary standpoint, this isn’t his most compelling novel, but as a freethinker I admire the audacity of his strident arguments against religion and his condemnation of reactionary ignorance and deceit. Though Truth was written over a century ago in a foreign land, it is easy to see parallels between this story and the state of America under and since the Trump administration. It is a shame Zola never got to finish his Four Gospels, but Truth is a commendable capstone to a stellar career.
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