Emile Zola has always been attached to his Provençal roots: Aix-en-Provence where he spent his youth, l'Estaque near Marseille and Marseille which he celebrates in his work The Mysteries of Marseille.
Why Zola started writing Mysteries of Marseille ?
Léopold Arnaud, owner of the Marseille newspaper The Messenger of Provence, entrusted to Emile Zola the writing of a work intended to be the counterpart of the Mysteries of Paris by Eugène Sue, who had held Paris in suspense in 1842. Having financial problems to finish his new novel Thérèse Raquin, he accepts the order. He was then paid two cents, a considerable sum at the time.
How Zola constructs the novel Mysteries of Marseille ?
This popular novel, with its many unexpected twists and turns typical of the genre, already reveals Zola's style and taste for colorful life, as well as his indignation against injustice, and his art of representing the diversity of social strata. Léopold Arnaud provides him with legal documents from recent criminal trials that took place in the south.
Zola seized it to write a gripping dramatic work, displaying the shames and virtues of a large city given over to the outbursts of modern industry. He devoted his mornings to writing Thérèse Raquin and his afternoons to that of Mysteries of Marseille.
The history of Mysteries of Marseille
This novel tells the love story of Philippe Cayol, a destitute republican, and the young Blanche de Cazalis, niece of Mr. de Cazalis, an all-powerful millionaire deputy in Marseille. Marius, Philippe's brother, protects the two lovers and the child that Blanche had before entering the convent from the anger of M. de Cazalis.
Marseille is in the spotlight; the clash of social classes against a backdrop of financial embezzlement at the time of the 1848 revolution, notably the bloody workers' riot, recalls the backdrop of Germinal. This “contemporary historical novel”, in which the character of Lorette prefigures that of Nana, was subsequently adapted for the theater.
« The Mysteries of Marseille is a contemporary historical novel. I took from real life all the facts they contain; I chose the necessary documents here and there, I brought together in a single story twenty stories of different form and nature, I gave to a character the traits of several individuals that I was allowed to know and study. This is how I was able to write a work where everything is true, where everything was observed in nature. »
