Justice, Zola’s Global Utopian Gospel

Following the paean to colonial expansion Zola had developed at the end of Fécondité, it comes as a surprise perhaps that Justice, Zola’s unwritten conclusion to the Quatre Évangiles, should promise so consistently to focus on anti-imperialism. Judging by the beginnings of the Dossier préparatoire for this novel, which Zola was already assembling simultaneous to penning Fécondité, and on the basis of the author’s evident shift in thinking about society-building, this study highlights Zola’s sensitivity to the changing mentalities of the period, his ability at times to predict the future of humanistic striving, his polyvalence, finally, as he envisioned the exemplary role France would play in shaping a pan-European economy. (CM-R)