Florent / Flourens (àpropos du Ventre de Paris)

Written in 1872 and published in 1873, Le Ventre de Paris, the third novel in Emile Zola's Rougon-Macquart cycle, contains several allusions to the Paris Commune of 1871. However, if critics have already highlighted the most obvious of these, from a memorialist point of view, there are, as this article argues, several others which need exploring, for example: Florent’s journey into the city by way of Courbevoie and Neuilly (two important Commune lieux de mémoires); the many images of fire embedded throughout the novel; and, most strikingly, the similarities between Zola’s protagonist and the assassinated Communard leader Gustave Flourens, whose name alone echoes that of Zola’s revolutionary. All of these examples allude to the city’s recent past but they serve also to structure the novel in such a way as to reinforce its essential underlying conservative ideology