L’Assommoir and Zola’s Nuanced Vision of Nineteenth-Century Alcoholism

Abstract

This article examines depictions of problem drinking in Emile Zola’s 1877 L’Assommoir, situating the novel within contemporaneous writings about alcoholism. While criticism has long found in Zola’s novel the ruinous effects of hereditary degeneration, I propose that L’Assommoir also illuminates the flaws in nineteenth-century French medical thinking about alcoholism. One curious point about L’Assommoir is that this most famous work of French literature to deal with alcoholic drinking never uses the word alcoholism or alcoholic. Underneath that very elision, though, is a surprising amount of clarity and modern nuance about the realities of the disease. In the context of a contemporaneous French medical discourse that argued for the feasibility of moderation in drinking, that overwhelmingly counted wine as part of the solution, and that underscored the damning role of heredity, this novel is clear about the variance among constitutions, even among people in the same demographic and with similar family histories. It indicates that individual compulsion, not solely choice, and not solely heredity, drives the problem drinker. It also indicates that an alcoholic compulsion can be nourished through wine. In this manner, Zola was more aligned with the modern disease model of alcoholism than the prevailing French wisdom of his time.

Keywords:

• Alcoholism
• alcoholic
• Zola
• L’Assommoir
• heredity
• wine
• medicine

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 According to journalist Edmondo de Amicis, Zola “avait en tête de faire un roman sur l’alcoolisme” (Deffoux 29).

2 When Zola was accused of plagiarizing Denis Poulot’s Sublime for his portrait of Goujet, he responded: “Je m’étonne que les auteurs des dictionnaires d’argot que j’ai eus dans les mains ne m’aient pas encore accusé de les avoir pillés ! Je m’étonne surtout que le docteur V. Magnan ne m’ai pas fait un procès pour avoir emprunté tant de passages à son beau livre De l’alcoolisme. Mon Dieu, oui ! j’ai pris dans ce livre tout le delirium tremens de Coupeau ; j’ai copié des phrases que le docteur a entendues dans la bouche de certains alcoolisés ; j’ai suivi ses observations de savant pas à pas, et certes, si vous voulez bien comparer L’Assommoir à son ouvrage, vous trouverez la matière d’un nouveau réquisitoire” (Les Rougon-Macquart 1563).

3 “Ein Bauer aber, oder auch ein junger Mensch mit hitzigem Temperament kann schon in diesem Stadium heftig gereizt und zu gewaltthätigen Handlungen hingerissen warden. Es ist besonders der Fall bei rohen Menschen von bedeutender Körperstärke , deren sie sich bewusst sind, dass sie, sobald sie ein Glas Wein getrunken warden, brutal warden, und, wenn man sie reizt oder nur ihnen widerspricht, anstatt aller weiterer Gründe ihren starken Arm grebrauchen, und sich ihr vermeintliches Recht selbert schaffen.”

4 In 1848, the year before Swedish physician Magnus Huss introduced the term “alcoholism” to a European audience, Labourt had written: “Tandis que l'œuvre de la temperance se propageait ainsi dans les pays les plus éloignés du centre de la civilisation, la France, cette terre classique de la philanthropie moderne, restait complètement étrangère à cette vaste impulsion dans le voies du veritable progrès” (78).

5 As Zola wrote in the Dossier préparatoire: “Graduer l’ivresse de Coupeau” (20r).

6 In the context of these articulations of need, the detail that Coupeau “éprouva le besoin de faire cette déclaration” seems to be purposeful wording. With the need to drink comes the corresponding need to deny or minimize that need.

7 A full discussion of alcoholism’s relationship to otherness is outside the scope of the present article. The intent here is to parse the contradiction between blame (for something the patient can control) and diagnosis (for something the patient cannot control).

8 See Anthony Cummins, who details the adaption of Zola’s novel into English temperance-focused plays.

9 Reading the hospital scene, Hewitt observes, “Like the various characters of L’Assommoir, real mental patients in the late 1800s were increasingly viewed as incurable victims of their own family trees” (150).

10 See for instance Y. Rollins and C. Hill.

11 As one reader observed: “Le livre de M. Zola n’est pas vrai . . . il vous monte au cerveau, quand on a fermé, pour ne pas le rouvrir, L’Assommoir, une sensation de fatigue, de dégoût, d’écœurement” (Ranc, cited in Reinach, 35-36).

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Notes on contributors

Susanna Lee

Susanna Lee is professor of French and Francophone Studies at Georgetown University. She is the author of Detectives in the Shadows, Hard-boiled Crime Fiction and the Decline of Moral Authority, and A World Abandoned by God.