The Flood (7 page)

1
. In 1783 Russia annexed the Crimea, a Ukrainian peninsula, from Turkey. When religious tension caused these two nations to fight the Crimean War (1853–6), France – fearing Russian expanionism, like its ally Britain – intervened on the side of the Turks. ‘The Italian campaign’ (1859) bolstered Sardinia in its war against Austria, rulers of the northern regions Lombardy and Venetia since 1815. ‘The catastrophe of 1870’ refers to the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1), which Emperor Napoleon III declared and lost.

2
. In September 1855 Franco-British troops seized the Ukrainian port city, a key Russian naval base, after an eleven-month siege.

3
. In 1830 Victor Hugo (1802–85) scored a controversial hit with the play
Hernani
, a courtly romance set in sixteenth-century Spain, which challenged the prevailing artistic fashion for seeking inspiration in Classical antiquity.
Hernani
helped to inaugurate a phase of literary Romanticism, of which Alfred de Musset (1810–57) was a central (if ambivalent) figure. Zola admired Hugo and Musset as a young man, but criticised them repeatedly in later life. ‘Lettre à la Jeunesse’ (‘Letter to the Youth’, 1880), for instance, argued that Hugo’s poetic idealism was ‘dangerous’, ‘leading young people into… lies’ and ‘vice’. Zola promoted his own earthy Naturalism as the remedy: it ‘may be frightening’, he conceded, ‘but not corrupting’.

4
. Saint-Cyr is a military academy in Brittany, founded in 1803.

5
. The Franco-Sardinian alliance defeated the Austrians at this northern Italian town on 4th June 1859.

6
. A newspaper, founded in 1789, regarded – at the point in time that Zola describes – as an official organ of Napoleon III.

7
. On 24th June 1859, Franco-Sardinian forces fought Austrian troops for more than nine hours at this northern Italian town; both sides suffered heavy losses.

8
. Napoleon III’s declaration of war on Prussia came amid mounting domestic
demands for democratic reform.

9
. The Congress of Vienna (1814–5) redrew European borders in the wake of the ultimately disastrous Napoleonic Wars (1803–15) between France and its rival continental powers; an alliance of English and Prussian forces inflicted on Napoleon Bonaparte his final defeat at the Battle of Waterloo (18th June 1815).

10
. The
Corps Législatif
is the chamber of elected representatives, where the prominent anti-Imperialist Adolphe Thiers (1797–1877) denounced plans to attack Prussia.

11
. Prussian troops seized the Alsatian village of Froeschwiller on 6th August 1870.

12
. The Prussians’ nineteen-week siege of Paris began on 19th September 1870.

13
. On 14th August 1870, the retreating French forces delayed their westward withdrawal to fight a bloody battle at Borny in Lorraine, east of Metz.

14
. The decisive battle of the Franco-Prussian War was fought on 1st September 1870 at Sedan, a north-eastern town near the border with Belgium; Napoleon III surrendered with 17,000 men killed or wounded, and more captured. A Republic was declared on 4th September, while fighting continued for a further five months.

15
. In Paris, a popular revolt at the circumstances of the defeat led to a two-month period of rule under ‘the Commune’, brutally repressed during the ‘Bloody Week’ of 21st–28th May 1871.