After reading Émile Zola’s experiment with fairy-tale romance in The Dream (Le Rêve)), it was a relief to turn to get back to what he does best: gritty social commentary. The Conquest of Plassans delivers this in abundance with a story line of greed, political opportunism and the thirst for power among the inhabitants of a sleepy provincial town.
The novel opens with a seemingly unremarkable event. A shabbily-dressed priest named Abbé Faujas rents a room from the Mourets, a comfortable, unremarkable bourgeois family.
Faujas seems at first to be the ideal lodger — so quiet that the Mourets hardly know when he’s at home. He barely eats and barely speaks. Faujas is a man of mystery. Try as he might, François Mouret can’t get him to divulge anything about his background or his reactions to the people of Plassans.
Faujas is ostensibly in Plassans to assist the local diocese, but his true intentions are signalled early on:
Faujas stretched out his arms in an ironic challenge, as though he wanted to pull Plassans to his broad chest and suffocate it. He muttered: ‘So much for those fools smiling this evening as they say me crossing their streets!’”
The abbé often mocks the people of Plassans — not just because he’s corrupt, but because he senses just how easy his conquest will be. His threadbare clothes, taciturn demeanour and social ineptitude give him the perfect disguise — who could possibly question his motives as anything but honourable?
By the time it’s clear that Faujas is no mild-mannered priest but a cunning manipulator, he’s well on his way to controlling the town. He’s achieved it so stealthily, the Mourets and most of Plassans is unaware of how easily they’ve been led down the garden path.
Just like other novels in Zola’s Rougon-Macquet series, the theme is corruption. L’Argent (Money) dealt with financial greed, La Curée (The Kill)l with property speculation and His Excellency Eugène Rougon. with political patronage.
In The Conquest of Plassans, Zola turns his attention once more to the political sphere with a plot involving the connivance of the church in manipulating the outcome of an election.
Faujas, it transpires, has come to Plassans on a political errand for Paris, tasked with swaying the town’s electors to switch allegiance to a candidate loyal to the Bonaparte cause.
He achieves his aim by quietly infiltrating every aspect of life — church,, newspapers, friendships, social gatherings. Votes are bought with promises of jobs, awards and titles. Everything and everyone becomes caught in his net of intrigue, even the unassuming little people like the Mourets. They lose their home and their sanity through steady, deliberate and systematic pressure from Faujas and his parasitic sister and brother-in- law when they join his as lodgers.
He appeared to be in a daze as he stood there leaning against the mantelpiece, a far-off look in his eyes. He was the master now and no longer needed to act contrary to his instincts; he could stretch out his hand, take hold of the town, and make it tremble. His gaunt dark figure filled the drawing room. Gradually the armchairs had been pulled closer together, forming a circle around him. The men expected him to express his satisfaction. The women implored him with their looks, like subservient slaves.
This is an uncompromising view of the decay Zola sees in his society. Although all the action takes place in one town, Plassans clearly stands in for what has happened to France itself, a stable society hollowed out through manipulation and flattery and the bllnkered complacency of its citizens.
By the time the novel arrives at its dramatic conclusion it’s hard not to interpret this as Zola’s verdict on the whole political project — something beautiful-looking built on rot and doomed to collapse spectacularly.
The Conquest of Plassans is a slow burn tale with little of the melodrama of some of Zola’s later novels (I’m thinking of Germinal and The Human Beast).
It also contains a fair degree of details about various political parties that I found confusing to begin with but eventually came to realise I didn’t need to understand. All I really needed to appreciate was that Faujus’s masters wanted the man currently in office in Plassans ousted and their a pro-Bonarparte candidate installed in his place.
This is a novel that rewards patience however. It becomes darker and more troubling as the plot gathers momentum, touching on religious fervour and mental instability. It’s a strong attack on the hypocisy and deceit of those in the clerical world but is it perhaps also Zola’s wake up call to his readers? Is he saying that they, like the good citizens of Plassans, are too comfortable in their ways, too self-satisfied to realise just how vulnerable they are to those with an agenda and a thirst for power?