Work and Pleasure: Zola’s Travail

Abstract

As a working-class artist committed to depicting the labourer, Luce represented for his contemporaries a particular model of anarchist engagement to which the political radicalism of Neo-Impressionist art could be attached. But the Utopian anarchism that came to characterise the works of many Neo-Impressionist painters signalled a turn away from the immediacy of urban anarchist politics. The militant propagandist tactics of the late 1880s and early 1890s brought to a head questions about social injustice, forcing writers and artists to think with new urgency about the legitimacy of violence in the pursuit of radical political ideals. In a speech given at the eighth annual banquet of the Association Générale des Étudiants on 18 May 1893, that pivotal year in the history of anarchism in France which would end in Auguste Vaillant’s bomb attack on the Chamber of Deputies, Zola described the nineteenth century as the unfolding of a perpetual struggle for truth and justice. This struggle had, he lamented, left many revolutionary ideals unfulfilled, not least the long-awaited empowerment of the peuple. Evoking the spectre of exhaustion that haunted the national consciousness as the century drew to a close, Zola declared: ‘nous assistons à l’inévitable fatigue des longs voyages: on s’assoit au bord de la route, on désespère d’arriver jamais, en voyant l’interminable plaine, un autre siècle se dérouler encore’ [we are witnessing the exhaustion that comes with all long journeys: we are sat by the roadside, giving up all hope of getting there, as we see the endless open country that is yet another century unfold before us].¹

Le temps est maintenant d’être idéaliste, et, de toutes les manières, dans toutes les directions, de réagir contre ce que nous avons tous, pour ainsi parler, de naturalisme dans le sang.

[Now is the time for us to be idealists, and to react, in every way possible, against the naturalism we all have in our blood, so to speak.]

(Ferdinand Brunetière, La Renaissance de l’Idéalisme (Part III))

Labour cannot become play, as Fourier would like.

(Marx, Grundrisse (Notebook VII))