The Rout
the Rout is a Romance of Emile Zola published in 1892, the nineteenth volume of the series Rougon-Macquart , whose it constitutes the historical conclusion: the first novel ( the Fortune of Rougon ) evoked the coup d'etat of the December 2nd 1851, which set up the Second Empire; this one has as a framework the rout of the French Army in front of the Prussian with Sedan, and thus the fall of the empire, replaced the September 4th 1870 by the Third Republic.
Summary
The hero of the novel is Jean Macquart, already main character of the Earth , which took again service in the army after its disillusions in the country world. Incorporated in the 106e of line, he is corporal, and its men respect it for his good sense, its devotion and its healthy design of the authority. It attends impotent with the collapse of the empire and the rout of its armies, that Zola allots to the incompetence of the staff, the lack of preparation of the troops and the harmful part played by the empress Eugenie de Montijo near Napoleon III.
The novel is initially a denunciation relentless of the war and its horrors. It is also the history of a friendship which will finish in drama between Jean Macquart and one as of his soldiers, the intellectual Maurice Levasseur. The first wants France where the order and wisdom reign; the second wishes to put an end to the injustices, and dreams of revolution. These ideological divergences do not prevent them liking and from being respected, each one saving the life of the other. Once the finished war, both take part in the Commune, but in different camps. At the time of the bloody Week, of Versailles Macquart mortally wounds blow of bayonet a communard; he realizes thereafter that it is Levasseur. Jean Macquart, who was about to marry Henriette, sister of Levasseur, will leave Paris and the army. One then finds it in Doctor Pascal , alive in Provence and married to a country-woman of the name of Melanie Vial.
A little as in Germinal , the novel ends in a note of hope. Whereas Paris burns and that Jean has just lost at the same time his best friend and the young woman whom he loved, it with the feeling of a dawn which rises, after the fall of the rotted branch which the empire constituted:
“It was the unquestionable renovation of eternal nature, of the eternal humanity, the promised revival with which hopes and works, the tree which throws a new powerful stem, when one cut the rotted branch, whose poisoned sap yellowed the sheets… and Jean, humblest and most painful, from went away, going in the future, with great and hard work of a whole France to be remade. ”
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