In the Library
The Debacle
Émile Zola, 1892
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 16 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by Ernest Alfred Vizetelly (1893)
- Chapters
- Chapters 24
- Length
- Length 222k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
But why are they still firing when I have had the white flag hoisted?
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Germinal
Émile Zola
Germinal does to a coalfield what this does to an army: ordinary people ground to nothing by a system Zola refuses to look away from.
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Boule de Suif
Guy de Maupassant
The same war of 1870, seen from inside one stalled coach, where the enemy turns out to be less frightening than the respectable passengers sharing the seat.
£1.99
All Quiet on the Western Front
Erich Maria Remarque
Remarque does the same thing one war later: young men finding out that the country which sent them has no idea at all what it asked.
£1.99
About the book
Two soldiers outside Mulhausen cannot get green wood to catch, and the smoke that climbs where a fire should be is the whole campaign in miniature: nothing the French army has been issued will work. The magazines at Belfort are empty. Nobody knows where the third division is. Émile Zola walked the ground at Sedan and read the survivors' depositions, and out of them he built the most exact account any novel has given of how an army dies, not in a charge but in a fortnight of countermarching, hunger and contradictory telegrams, until the men stand on a hillside and watch their own guns smashed one by one without ever being allowed to fire. The Emperor rides past with rouge on his cheeks to hide that he is dying. Underneath all of it are Jean the peasant corporal and Maurice the volunteer who despises him on sight, taught to love each other by exhaustion, and the war is nowhere near finished with them when Paris begins to burn.