2014/12/01 by Robert Lethbridge · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · #French Literature and Criticism #Renaissance Literature and Culture #French Literature and Poetry
paper · doi:10.1093/frebul/ktu026
openalex publication_date 2014/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31
De l'affaire Manet à l'affaire Dreyfus: the subtitle of Henri Mitterand's early study of Zola's journalism speaks of controversy marking the span of his career.1 Lodged within it is the ‘affaire Cézanne’ which has generated almost as much debate as ‘J'accuse …!’, extended across the work of generations of art-historians and literary scholars. Indeed, the relationship between Zola and Cézanne occupies such a prominent place in our cultural histories that it is not merely readers of FSB (let alone dix-neuviémistes) who will be familiar with the reported drama occasioned by the publication of L'Œuvre in 1886. This was the moment, so the legend had it for over a century, that Cézanne put an end to a thirty-four-year friendship, never again having any contact with the novelist. The sensation created by a newly-discovered letter from him, dated 28 November 1887 and thanking Zola for sending him a copy of La Terre, can hardly be over-estimated.2 For it will require a re-writing of nearly all the books, articles and exhibition catalogues (not to mention enticing publishers' blurbs for editions and translations of L'Œuvre and biographical entries on the internet) which have relied on the categorical declarations of John Rewald to the effect that Cézanne's letter of 4 April 1886 was the last he ever wrote to Zola, so hurt was he by his identification with the fictional painter, Claude Lantier.3 Nor, it should be stressed, is this simply quibbling about a date. This supposedly fraught end of the relationship between Zola and Cézanne has had massive consequences: according to the latter's best and most recent biographer, ‘the legend of L’Œuvre stoked the legend of Cézanne',4 his own reaction to the novel apparently confirming, in this textual mirror, a self-portrait marked by personal neuroses and anticipated artistic failure; it has been read back across what is deemed a roman-à-clef; it has contaminated analyses of Zola's art-criticism; and it has offered his detractors multiple angles from which to attack this ‘betrayal’.