In the streets of Aix en Provence with Emile Zola, the childhood friend Cezanne
This summer, Aix-en-Provence celebrates Paul Cézanne. It is an opportunity to read or re-read his childhood friend Émile Zola, who set the first volume of Les Rougon-Macquart in Aix-en-Provence in 1886.
Paul Cézanne, a native of Aix-en-Provence, met Émile Zola at the Collège Bourbon, which later became the Collège Mignet in the Mazarin neighborhood. The Zola family had followed François Zola, a native of Venice and a public works engineer in charge of supplying the city of Aix-en-Provence with drinking water from Mount Sainte Victoire. Émile arrived in Aix-en-Provence at the age of 3 and left in 1858. At the age of 18, he joined his mother in Paris.
His friendship with Paul Cézanne continued until 1886, when Zola published L’Oeuvre in which Cézanne can be recognized as the failed painter Claude Lantier.
Zola, a naturalist writer, paints a detailed picture of Second Empire society in his novel Les Rougon-Macquart.
Composed of 20 volumes, La fortune des Rougon tome 1, published in 1871, analyzes the encounter between Adélaïde Fouque, the heroin of the Rougon family, and the ill-famed Macquart. The rivalry between the Rougon and Macquart families runs throughout the book.
The Rougon family took advantage of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte's “coup d'état” on December 2, 1851 to climb the social ladder so dear to the 19th-century bourgeoisie. Plassant (Aix en Provence) had a population of 10,000. The population was divided into 3 groups: “the nobility in the large, silent hotels they owned in the surrounding area”, “the bourgeoisie, retired tradesmen, lawyers and notaries populating the new town”, and the people “working and rejected in the old quarter”.
“The whole town goes to Cours Sauvaire (today Cours Mirabeau) on Sundays after the vespers. The nobility is on the south side of the avenue, the people on the north side, next to the cafés and tobacco shops.”
Much of the novel takes place in the “rue de la Banne” - “rue Thiers” today - and on the aire Saint-Mitre, a wasteland outside the ramparts in the faubourg on the Porte de Rome - Porte Saint Jean (route de Nice) , but also on the banks of the Viorne (Arc Valley). Zola reincarnates his Aix-en-Provence acquaintances in his characters, as well as the places of his childhood memories. for example, For Silvère, Zola drew his inspiration from his friend, Aix sculptor Philippe Solari. Silvère and Miette's budding romance runs through the novel with modesty, innocence and tenderness, breaking with the Rougon family's greed for money and power. “Love had the expected innocence of brotherly tenderness”. This volume, which inaugurates the great novelistic fresco, enriches the strolls through Aix-en-Provence with the historical and social depth of a writer who observed the society of his time with great precision.