Workers at Play in Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart

Abstract

On 18 October 1868, Zola composed an article, as part of his weekly ‘Causerie’ in the newspaper La Tribune, on the subject of popular leisure. The young journalist’s enthused account of a recent Sunday excursion to the île de Saint-Ouen provides the poetic backdrop to a politically charged defence of working-class recreation:

Je suis resté jusqu’au soir au milieu du peuple endimanché. Peu de paletots, beaucoup de blouses: un monde ouvrier gai et franc, des jeunes filles en bonnet de linge, montrant leurs doigts nus criblés de piqûres d’aiguille, des hommes vêtus de toile, dont les mains rudes gardaient l’empreinte d’un outil. La joie de ce monde était saine; je n’ai pas entendu une seule querelle, je n’ai pas aperçu un seul ivrogne. [...] C’était une gaieté de bons enfants, des éclats de rires sincères, des plaisirs sans honte. On eût dit une seule famille, la grande famille plébéienne, venant goûter sous le ciel libre le repos gagné par une longue semaine de labeur.¹

[I stayed until evening amidst the people in their Sunday best. Not many overcoats, lots of workshirts. A cheerful and open crowd of workers: young girls in cloth hats, their bare needle-pricked fingers on show; men, dressed in cotton, whose rough hands still bore the imprint of a tool. The joy of this crowd was healthy; I did not hear a single quarrel, nor did I spot a single drunk. [...] Theirs was the cheerfulness of good-natured children, sincere bursts of laughter, and pleasures with no shame attached. They looked like one big family, the great, common family, savouring under the open sky the rest earned by a long week of labour.]

Quand les pauvres gens s’amusent, la pauvreté disparaît de la terre.

[When poor people are having fun poverty vanishes from the earth.]

Zola, ‘Causerie’, 18 October 1868

En ces jours-là, il me semble que le peuple oublie tout, la douleur et le travail; il devient pareil aux enfants.

[On days like these, people seem to forget every-thing, their troubles and their toil; they become like children.]

Baudelaire, ‘Le vieux saltimbanque’, Le Spleen de Paris (1869)