‘Une Page d’amour: un panorama politique’

Emile Zola's Une Page d’amour (1878) is not normally regarded as a novel with a political subtext. In fact, like L’Œuvre, which followed Germinal and Le Rêve after La Terre, Une Page d’amour, written straight after L’Assommoir and before Nana, is usually seen as an interlude providing Zola with an opportunity to put aside, temporarily, the great historical and political themes of Les Rougon-Macquart and to concentrate on a more intimate psychological drama. And yet, as this article demonstrates, this novel contains a number of coded political references that modern readers may overlook but which, for contemporary Parisian readers, would have evoked memories of the nation's recent traumatic experience of the war with Prussia, the fall of the Second Empire, and the Paris Commune.