These alternatives informed her social, political, and cultural life in the last third of the century, framing a bitter debate over the country's heart and soul. "Science" and "supernatural intervention" were indeed the competing prescriptions for France's recovery after the Franco-Prussian debacle of 1870-7 1, which toppled Napoleon III from his Imperial throne. Everywhere, the Church casts a long shadow. Rural folk who aspire to a higher level of awareness are weighed down by the archaic baggage they carry with them bourgeois women surrender to a priest's erotica-mystical predation. The theme pervades his great fictional cycle, Les Rougon-Macquart, in which modernity is dogged by the pious and the primitive. "Study and dramatize the endless duel between science and the longing for supernatural intervention," he instructed himself. Frederick Brown, The Battle for the Soul of France Culture Wars in the Age of DreyfusĪFTER OBSERVING THE pilgrims thronging Lourdes in 1891, Emile Zola noted that the time and setting were right for a novel about the intractability of mankind's dependence upon the miraculous.
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