Appréciation thermodynamique des Rougon-Macquart d'Émile Zola

In 1975 the eminent French philosopher and historian of science, Michel Serres, published Feux et signaux de brume: Zola, in which he postulates that the well-known Rougon-Macquart series by Émile Zola was an "epic of entropy." His seminal book stirred up interest in the Zola criticism community, with several literary scholars seeking to interpret the work of the founder of the naturalism movement in terms of thermodynamics. This thesis was partially informed by our reading of Serres' book, enlightened by our own expertise as an engineer specializing in the field of thermodynamics. We hypothesize that the difference between Zola's somber naturalism and the more optimistic literary realism movement from which it emerged in the latter half of the 19th century reflects the timely appearance and vulgarization of thermodynamic principles in the French popular press.

We begin by presenting an overview of this then-new branch of science, whose foundations were established by Nicolas Sadi Carnot in 1824 and whose maturation was assured, principally by Rudolf Clausius, between 1850 and 1865. We then present the thermodynamic principles which we postulate arguably could have played a determinant role in the emergence of Zola's naturalism in 1870, as outlined in his Roman experimental (1880). Foremost among these is the celebrated Second Law and its distressing consequence to many, the inevitable entropy death of the universe. Having established the fundamental concepts of thermodynamics, we undertake an analysis of Serres' book aimed at exposing and critically commenting on the theoretical basis of his thermodynamic reading of Zola. We then follow the same approach in our analysis of several critical articles from the archival literature that owe their genesis to Serres' work. Finally, we undertake a close reading of three novels from the Rougon-Macquart series that we have either not considered elsewhere in the thesis or whose thermodynamic implications we have not yet exhausted: Nana, La Bête humaine, and L'Assommoir. According to the hypothesis of this thesis, Zola consistently followed the same disastrous paradigm, informed by thermodynamic principles, when he imagined the disastrous life trajectories of his principal characters. We have applied a version of this paradigm in interpreting our own close reading of a representative sample of works from the Rougon-Macquart series. Michel Serres sought to point out the obvious parallels that exist between the catastrophic nature of the series and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. We wish to go a bit further in promoting the idea that the transformation of literary realism into Zola's brand of naturalism may have been prompted by the vulgarization of thermodynamics in the contemporary popular press. Lastly, the content of this master's thesis provides a new perspective to and vocabulary for naturalist criticism.