The Potboiler Revolution: Émile Zola’s 1848

Uprisings of 1848 form the crescendo to Émile Zola’s Les Mystères de Marseille (1867), in what is the novelist’s only direct representation of the French Second Republic’s founding episodes. This article reckons with the incursion of revolutionary history into Zola’s sensational serial novel, where it becomes a matter of melodramatic intrigue, even conspiracy. Revolutionary scenes are taken to crystallise the emerging political imagination of a writer whose future naturalist fiction has tended to encapsulate a style of passive detachment characteristic of post-1848 literature. With reference to Georg Lukács and Fredric Jameson, the article returns to such verdicts on Zola’s political thinking, and asks how this early potboiler might reveal a complex meditation on the writer’s contentious relationship to history.