La Bête Humaine
Par Emile Zola
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À propos de ce livre électronique
La Bête humaine est un roman d'Émile Zola publié en 1890, le dix-septième volume de la série Les Rougon-Macquart. L'histoire évoque le monde du chemin de fer et se déroule tout au long de la ligne Paris-Le Havre. On a coutume de dire qu'elle comporte deux héros : d'une part le mécanicien Jacques Lantier et de l'autre sa locomotive, la Lison, que Lantier aime plus qu'une femme. Outre son aspect documentaire, La Bête humaine est un roman noir, sorte de thriller du xixe siècle ; c'est aussi un roman sur l'hérédité, Jacques souffrant d'une folie homicide que Zola rattache à l'alcoolisme des Macquart.
Emile Zola
Émile Zola (1840-1902) was a French novelist, journalist, and playwright. Born in Paris to a French mother and Italian father, Zola was raised in Aix-en-Provence. At 18, Zola moved back to Paris, where he befriended Paul Cézanne and began his writing career. During this early period, Zola worked as a clerk for a publisher while writing literary and art reviews as well as political journalism for local newspapers. Following the success of his novel Thérèse Raquin (1867), Zola began a series of twenty novels known as Les Rougon-Macquart, a sprawling collection following the fates of a single family living under the Second Empire of Napoleon III. Zola’s work earned him a reputation as a leading figure in literary naturalism, a style noted for its rejection of Romanticism in favor of detachment, rationalism, and social commentary. Following the infamous Dreyfus affair of 1894, in which a French-Jewish artillery officer was falsely convicted of spying for the German Embassy, Zola wrote a scathing open letter to French President Félix Faure accusing the government and military of antisemitism and obstruction of justice. Having sacrificed his reputation as a writer and intellectual, Zola helped reverse public opinion on the affair, placing pressure on the government that led to Dreyfus’ full exoneration in 1906. Nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1901 and 1902, Zola is considered one of the most influential and talented writers in French history.
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Avis sur La Bête Humaine
241 notations5 avis
- Évaluation : 4 sur 5 étoiles4/5A really interesting and disturbing book. Typical Zola; deals with the insidiousness that lurks inside us all. I really enjoy reading things in translation, but the prose was still acceptable.
- Évaluation : 4 sur 5 étoiles4/5What a dark and depressing tale about the most evil things mankind can get itself involved in. This is truly a story that depicts the most evil and hidden aspects of peoples mind. Or were they all beasts after all?This is the first Zola I ever read, but it has certainly sparked my interest. (Although I think it'll be a while before I will venture into another one of his novels. I need something that is a little more on the brighter side of life after this! :D )
- Évaluation : 4 sur 5 étoiles4/5Zola's work is dark and the title is apt. Train enthusiasts might enjoy the historical aspects of the glory days of steam, and the notes provide useful information about the historical context of the politics and pending downfall of Napoleon III. While I have seen the movie version of Germinal, starring Gérard Depardieu, this is the only book of Zola's series I have read. While the series of twenty novels centres around the lines of the Rougon-Macquart families, providing a coherent framework for characters, this novel by itself seems to have many characters, where the protagonist passes the baton to other characters as "the beast within" transmigrates from one evil character to the next. One can only imagine how violent this novel appeared in its day - not in the graphic horror movie sense but in a dark (as opposed to Gothic) telling of human nature and the fine line between good and evil that presents itself as choices as we tread along our life trajectories. In Murder on the Orient Express, the reader experiences the twists and turns of an arguably justifiable sense of justice, whereas The Beast Within shows justice to be a human construct that frets against the bureaucracy. In many respects, the story provides an interesting counterfactual theme to Christie's masterpiece, but also Kafka's The Trial. The major differences are that Christie points to the failings of the bureaucracy to bring the guilty to justice, while Kafka points to the bureaucracy's ability to bring the innocent to non-justice. Zola, on the other hand, does the opposite of both. The evil are desiring a form of justice, but the bureaucracy won't let them, and the innocent are not condemned. Instead, the last years of France's Second Empire unfold in a tale of the worst of human nature, culminating in a runaway train that speeds to its inevitable demise amid a trail of banal evil where ultimately, everyone gets what they deserve.
- Évaluation : 4 sur 5 étoiles4/5Zola louche un peu vers la copie de son ami Maupassant avec cette histoire de folie furieuse, mais c'est tout de même sa propre langue, robuste et impitoyable, qui prédomine. Plusieurs scènes très marquantes.
- Évaluation : 4 sur 5 étoiles4/5La Bete Humaine, or The Human Beast, is one of Zola’s more violent novels, illustrating his increasing belief later in his career that ‘love and death, possessing and killing, are the dark foundations of the human soul.’ There are many who have bloodlust in this book. As Leonard Tancock writes in the Introduction to this edition, Zola lets the reader watch “several quite different types of murder: the man who kills in a blind rage of sexual jealousy, the cold, slow, poisoner after his victim’s money, the psychopath whose decent, reasonable side struggles in vain against his hereditary predisposition, and various sub-species such as the woman maddened by passion or jealousy or the man with a grievance turned into a brute by alcohol.” It’s often over the top, e.g. “At last, at last! He had satisfied himself, he had killed! Yes, he had done it. Boundless joy and an awful exultation bore him aloft in the complete contentment of his eternal desire.” And: “…the only thought in his mind being to get dressed quickly, take the knife and go and kill some other woman in the street.” However, the slow poisoning in a house near a train crossing is memorable, as are the hazy opening scene in the train station which evokes the Impressionists who Zola was a friend of, and the closing scene, with a runaway train that will blindly destroy, a symbol for mankind. On a somewhat random side note, the ending and overall feel of the novel reminded me of the movie “Runaway Train” with Jon Voigt.Quotes:On the railroad, likened to the human beast:“The crowd again, the endless crowd amid the roar of trains, whistling of engines, buzzing of telegraphs and ringing of bells. It was like a huge body, a gigantic creature lying across the land, with its head in Paris and joints all along the line, limbs spreading out into branch lines, feet and hands at Le Havre and other terminal towns. On and on it went, soulless and triumphant, on to the future with a mathematical straightness and deliberate ignorance of the rest of human life on either side, unseen but always tenaciously alive – eternal passion and eternal crime.”Also this one, on the progress the railroad represented:“It seemed funny being buried in this wilderness, without a soul to confide in, when day and night, all the time, so many men and women were rushing past in the thunder of trains shaking the house, and then tearing away at full speed. It was a fact that all the world went by, not only French people but foreigners too, people from the most distant lands, since nowadays nobody could stay at home and all the nations, it was said, would soon be only one. That was progress, all brothers together, all going along to some Better Land!”On suffering, and the bleakness of life:“It was just suffering without end, and no possibility of forgetting or being forgiven. They wept together, conscious of the blind forces of life weighing them down, life which consists of struggle and death.”On sex:“…there was a little toolshed in which a heap of empty sacks would have made a soft bed. But one Saturday when a sudden downpour of rain forced them to take shelter there she obstinately remained standing, only giving him her lips in endless kisses. Her modesty did not extend as far as these kisses, for she greedily gave him all her mouth, as if merely in friendship. And when, roused to fever-pitch by this passion, he tried to take her, she defended herself tearfully, every time giving the same reasons. Why did he want to make her unhappy? It seemed so nice just to love each other without all that dirty business of sex! Defiled at sixteen by the lusts of that old man whose bleeding spectre haunted her, violated later by the brutal appetites of her husband, she had kept a childlike purity, a virginity with all the charming modesty of passion unaware of itself. What so appealed to her in Jacques was his gentleness, his obedience in not letting his hands wander all over her as soon as she simply took them in her own hands, weak though they were. She was in love for the first time, and she did not give herself for the very reason that it would have spoiled her love to belong to this man straight away, as she had to the two others. Unconsciously she wanted to prolong indefinitely this delicious sensation, become a young girl again like she was before she was defiled, and have a sweetheart like you have at fifteen, and kiss him shamelessly behind doors.”