The disappearance of the obscenely ambitious, gloriously grandiose attempt to encapsulate all of society in a series of novels is one of literature’s great tragedies. In France, this peculiarly nineteenth century project was carried out successively by Balzac, Flaubert and Zola. Between them, these men spanned almost the entirety of France’s tempestuous nineteenth century. Whereas Flaubert concentrated on the nuanced intricacies of individual psyches and Balzac the complex choreography of social relations, Zola was above all interested in the nature of what we would call “modernity”-- the throbbing dynamic of his age as it emerged in everything from department stories to prostitution to coal mines. This obsession sometimes gives his novels a somewhat sensational feel, but always makes them fun and memorable reads.

L'Argent 's contribution to the study of modernity lies in its examination of the force of money and speculation. The main narrative focuses on the rise and fall of Aristide Saccard and the Banque Universelle, a story roughly based on the challenge of the Péreire Brothers' Crédit Mobilier to the Rothschild-dominated haute banque in the 1860s (the Rothschild character, the Jewish banker Gundermann, is not central but particularly well-drawn with his forbidden grapes and his constant milk-drinking). More broadly, however, the story weaves together multiple smaller stories about money: the proud but penniless aristocrats who secretly wash their own clothes in order to maintain a public façade of nobility, the devout princess ruining herself through works of charity in penitence for her deceased husband's ill-gotten gains, the sinister debt collector who tracks down old bills and unveils dirty secrets and his beloved sickly brother who preaches the downfall of capitalist society, a kind of Madame Defarge of the stock market who buys up the remnants of bankrupt companies, the aspiring novelist, his disinherited wife and their beloved four pieces of furniture that they refuse to yield the bailiffs. All of these characters’ fates become tied up in the breathtaking rise and fall of Saccard's megalomaniacal project.

As in La Bête Humaine , the book which immediately precedes it in the Rougon-Macquart series, there is a sense of some grand, inevitable, unstoppable force sweeping along the characters in its path. Yet whereas the unforgettable last pages of La Bête Humaine present us with the ferocious engine crowded with doomed soldiers speeding over the French countryside without a driver, the drunken rollercoaster ride of speculative activity that has ruined so many ends with attempts at rebuilding some of the visions that had inspired the Banque Universelle. Speculation is perhaps the wild and dark side of this unbridled faith in the future, potentially realizing nightmares as well as dreams, but at heart Zola seems to embrace the visions of a better future that wealth (prudently managed) could provide.

Zola is often (and rightly) faulted for his occasionally clumsy handling of his characters' psychological lives. L'Argent largely plays to Zola's strengths in this regard. Concentrating on the giddy superficiality of money, the lack of psychological depth and stability seems completely in line with a Simmelian reading of the topsy-turvey but empty emotional world of speculation creates. The treatment of the female characters is quite compelling, with almost all coming off far more sympathetically and heroically than their male counterparts. Modern readers might be shocked to see the extent of female participation in the stock markets: Zola’s story takes place from 1864 to 1867, years immediately preceding the active suppression of women’s role in financial life (a theme well covered by Victoria Thompson’s book The Virtuous Marketplace). Of all the female character, Madame Caroline in particular comes across as a remarkably modern woman, and the novel’s true heroine.

Zola's story of Second Empire speculation, spot-on accurate in its own day, sparkles with a lurid and disturbing contemporaneity in our own age of speculation. It is written in a clear, lucid and compelling French even when discussing the fine points of stock market transactions. Like Saccard, Zola’s vision may have verged on the grandiose, but, like Saccard, his passion and vision somehow make up for his weaknesses. A masterful feat.