Book description
Conservative and working-class, Jean Macquart is an experienced,
middle-aged soldier in the French army, who has endured deep personal
loss. When he first meets the wealthy and mercurial Maurice Levasseur,
who never seems to have suffered, his hatred is immediate. But after
they are thrown together during the disastrous Franco-Prussian war of
1870-71, the pair are compelled to understand one other. Forging a
profound friendship, they must struggle together to endure a
disorganised and brutal war, the savage destruction of France's Second
Empire and the fall of Napoleon III. One of the greatest of all war
novels, The Debacle is the nineteenth novel in Zola's great
Rougon-Macquart cycle. A forceful and deeply moving tale of close
friendship, it is also a fascinating chronicle of the events that were
to lead, in the words of Zola himself, to 'the murder of a nation'.
Emile Zola (1840-1902) was a French novelist and critic, the founder of
the Naturalist movement in literature. Among Zola's most important works
is his famous
Rougon-Macquart
cycle (1871-1893), which included such novels as L'Assomoir (
1877), about the suffering of the Parisian working-class, Nana
(1880), dealing with prostitution, and Germinal
(1885).
