French Global: A New Approach to Literary History

The French nineteenth-century business novel reveals how capitalism, as an economic force field that would be theoretically catalyzed by Karl Marx’s 1867 Das Kapital, consolidated its significance as a subject for modern literature, contributing to the internationalization of literary geographic vistas, social settings, cultural commonplaces, and generic forms. Anti–private property, Proudhon-inspired works such as George Sand’s Le compagnon du Tour de France (1840) and Charles Baudelaire’s socialist poem “La rançon” (1857), which concentrated lyric energy in spectacles of distributive injustice, targeted the exploitation of labor and human capital as a source of political evil. The great realist and naturalist fictions of economic speculation and career opportunism by Honoré de Balzac (Le pére Goriot, 1835; Histoire de la grandeur et de la décadence de César Birotteau, 1837; La Maison Nucingen, 1837; Illusions perdues, 1836–43), Gustave Flaubert (L’education sentimentale, 1869), Emile Zola (La curée, 1872; Au bonheur des dames, 1883; L’argent, 1891; Pot-bouille, 1894), and Guy de Maupassant (Belami, 1885) made capitalism a narrative telos, as characters heeded François Guizot’s famous injunction to the citizens of the July Monarchy: “Enrichessez-vous!” (Get rich!) In the later part of the century, hate-mongering broadsides against Jewish-owned banks by right-wing nationalists—Maurice Barrès (promoter of anti-Semitism as an effective campaign strategy in Nancy), Paul Déroulède (founder in 1882 of the Ligue des Patriotes), Edouard Drumont (author of La France juive, 1886, and editor of La libre parole), and Léon Bloy (author of a tract on Jews and real estate titled Propos d’un entrepreneur de démolitions, 1884)—enlisted anti-capitalism to buttress anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. Finally, without stretching things too far, it is arguable that the century’s premier narrative, Madame Bovary (1857), lent itself to being read as “Kapital, the novel,” inasmuch as Emma Bovary and her husband Charles are brought down by unpayable debt, thereby consigning their orphaned daughter to proletarianization in a factory mill.

Late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century transformations of capitalism orient, perforce, the reading of French nineteenth-century financial fiction. Though modern market takeoff and speculation scandals were already in full pitch during the prerevolutionary period, the Restoration raised the level of economic action to a higher order of magnitude, with transformations in banking practices and aggressive market conquests in trade, transport, and commodities accounting for much of the acceleration. The business novel in France, especially in the period coinciding with Balzac’s literary career, recorded tectonic shifts in the identity of capitalism comparable to what is being witnessed in the post-2000 era. Where the nineteenth-century economy transitioned from mercantilism to finance capitalism, at present, at least in the estimation of French economist Jean-Hervé Lorenzi (advisor to the Rothschild Investment Company and president of the Circle of Economists), the universality of the Anglo-Saxon model of capitalism has expired with the advent of four new modes: venture capitalism that circumvents banks; European power-sharing among banks, businesses, the state, and unions; new forms of familial corporatism (Arnault, Pinault); and new kinds of state capitalism in which the state controls 70 percent of industry (typically found in China, Russia, and the Middle East).¹

Accordingly, in an era when the phrase “irrational exuberance” seems as dated as the strong dollar and the technology bubble; in which the chair of the New York Stock Exchange was forced to resign over a dubious bonus package; in which lax government oversight and poor securitization have produced “a subprime financial system” that has made the U.S. economy vulnerable to the nations that own its debt; in which transnational corporations are consistently revealed to have shored up their assets’ ratings with the help of fragile pyramid schemes, nonexistent earnings, and devalued stock options (seemingly with the blessing of friends in government); and when controversy around western expansionism in the Middle East coalesces around the construction of gas pipelines, border fences, and transportation systems, works such as Balzac’s César Birotteau (The Rise and Fall of César Birotteau) and La Maison Nucingen (The Firm of Nucingen) or Zola’s L’argent (Money) appear newly topical.² They warrant reexamination as accounts of capitalist world systems that implode even as they are being dynamically constituted.³ Noting, for example, how hedge funds have superseded banks in directing the investment economy in 2007 and that the word credit (derived from credere) “only works if people believe in it,” novelist and social commentator Tom Wolfe attributes the loss of “capitalism as we know it” to the loss of credit’s credibility.⁴ This diagnosis has obvious resonance with César Birotteau, for credulity toward credit is precisely what precipitates the protagonist’s free fall into bankruptcy. Here, as in virtually all business novels in the nineteenth century, we see devalued credit performing double semiotic duty as the currency of corruption and disbelief. The obsession with credit also accounts, perhaps, for why Balzac in César Birotteau impedes narrative flow with a disquisition on the credit economy under the reign of the Bourbons in prose that seemed lifted whole cloth from an economic tract. The concern to demonstrate the theological consequences of worthless paper currency was paramount. César Birotteau ends, fittingly enough, with a reference to its eponymous hero (rescued from insolvency by the King for his honorable refusal to wear his official decoration in the wake of financial disgrace), as “un martyr de la probité commerciale à décorer de la palme éternelle [a martyr to commercial integrity worthy of an eternal palm].”⁵

With credere an anchoring metaphor, French nineteenth-century financial fiction generated a veritable econometrics of character-Bildung. The sizing of personality type to outfit social stratification was fine-tuned as a calculus of spiritual force. A hero’s subjective worth was indexed to the success or failure of entrepreneurial ventures. Love affairs served as barometers of financial ascension. Gambling—no mere trope—signified brute efforts by parvenus to game the system. A society’s moral bankruptcy was made visible in the tauromachy of crashing markets. Descriptions of material wealth and luxury commodities gave momentum to realism. The popularity of the business biography in the mass press helped make the financial novel historical, with thinly veiled characters and incidents serving as templates. The attempted suicide in 1832 of Jean Rodolphe Kesner, France’s Caissier Général du Trésor (accused and later convicted of embezzlement), was grist for Balzac’s Melmoth réconcilié (1835). And in La Maison Nucingen, Nucingen’s character is a composite of James de Rothschild (whom Balzac frequented socially in the 1830s and 1840s) and Ber-Léon Fould, who, assisted by his patron Cerf Berr (an Alsatian arms purveyor and activist for Jewish emancipation in the revolutionary period), putatively rose from obscure origins as an Alsatian shoeshine boy to become a legendarily wealthy banker.⁶

As a genre, the business novel was constitutive of a greater nineteenth-century literary world system featuring technological modernity’s self-definition as a society of calculation.⁷ Capitalist decadence—specifically, the vulnerability of political order to financial scandals (as in the Panama Canal scam of 1892, which prompted Stéphane Mallarmé’s prose fragment Or [Gold] of 1895)—would also underwrite the catastrophism of French fin-de-siècle culture, aesthetically franchised in the full-blown international movement known as decadence. And the arsenal of symbolic capital—belief in national destiny, the conquest of foreign markets, triumphal military campaigns, and colonial exploits—was deployed to shore up France’s standing as an emergent imperial power.

In this ample arena of “literature and capitalism,” beginning with France’s relatively late arrival to industrial modernity, the business novel stands out as a major subgenre. In the period spanning the July Monarchy and the Dreyfus affair (roughly 1830 to 1898), financial fiction affords a unique window onto world systems takeoff, featuring the role of speculation in establishing intercontinental transportation networks in Europe, the Americas, and the Middle East. In this sense, then, the genre fully delivers on the remit of “French global”: it documents the national economy’s boom and bust while charting the diversification of venture capitalism in extrahexagonal territories, and traces the exportation of a financial genre associated with the stylistic general equivalents of realism and naturalism. As Mary Poovey has shown with respect to Britain, shifts in the structuring of debt, currency, credit, and exchange helped produce a plethora of finance-centered fiction worldwide (there is an entire Web site dedicated to the genre).⁸ One of Mary Poovey’s operative assumptions, succinctly articulated in an essay on investment culture in Victorian England, is that capitalism’s course was coterminous with writing about capitalism, for “the development of a modern market economy has always depended in part on the circulation of financial information.”⁹

Though clearly a cosmopolitan genre of and about the globalization of capitalism in industrial societies, the business novel in nineteenth-century France frequently made reference to a local culture of agiotage, a term used more often in French than in English to refer to the exchange business, stockjobbing, the extraction of profit from price fluctuations (as opposed to buying for use or income). It was more loosely applied to all manner of attempts to game the system: from behind-the-scenes manipulations of stock prices, premiums, interest rates, and exchange rates to the short-selling of currencies, bonds, collectibles, real estate, and derivatives. The negative associations around agiotage in the prerevolutionary and immediate postrevolutionary periods were legion. As George V. Taylor has analyzed them, “Speculators were called agioteurs. What they did was called agiotage. These words were epithets applied to the persons and activities of those of whom one disapproved. Business communities, particularly those outside Paris, condemned agiotage because it drove up the interest rate, increased the dangers of a credit crisis, and violated the medieval condemnation of unearned profits that still figured in the business ethics of the time.”¹⁰

Ancien régime speculation scandals helped tip France toward revolution and set up the agioteur to become the perfect avatar of a new political order of opportunism: “The most famous speculation of the eighties was an attempt in 1787 to corner the market for shares of the New Indies Company. Although a collective conspiracy, it was identified in public opinion with the name of one of the participants, the Abbé Marc-René d’Espagnac, a worldly cleric of noble family, who was to die with the Dantonists in 1794. The Espagnac affair created a crisis, prompted Mirabeau and Clavière to publish the Dénonciation de l’agiotage, and contributed to the disgrace of the controller general, Calonne, who was an unintentional accomplice.”¹¹

During the Terror, as demonstrated in Père Goriot, agiotage became the savvy workingman’s ticket to a fortune. “Citizen” Goriot, though dim and recessive in manner, reveals an unsuspected talent for business, transforming himself from humble vermicelli maker to significant player in the market for grain futures: “To see him transacting his business, explaining the laws governing export or import of grain, analyzing the thinking behind them, grasping their defects, anyone would have judged him able to be a Minister of State.”¹² In César Birotteau a cruder, more ruthless practice of agiotage appears in Claparon’s speculation motto “Fleece the public!” euphemistically passed off as “a modern theory of loans.”¹³

“A speculation?” asked the perfumer; “what sort of business is it?”

“It is commerce in the abstract,” replied Claparon, “an affair which will only come to light ten years later at the bidding of the great Nucingen, the Napoleon of finance, a scheme by which a man embraces sum-totals, and skims the cream of profits yet to be made; a gigantic conception, a method of marking expectations like timber for annual felling ; it is a new cabal, in short. . . . Art and science are paid to give their opinion, the affair is paraded about, the public rushes into it, and receives paper for its money, and our takings are in our hands. . . . Think it over. I have summed up the modern theory of loans for you.”¹⁴

Irene Perciali’s study of the “personification of capitalism” in Balzac’s portrait of Nucingen, the king of agioteurs and the most emblematic figure of the loup-cervier (lynx) type in La comédie humaine, clarifies the way in which the magically powerful, highly individualized personality of the banker was wedded to an impersonal system of economic rationalism.¹⁷ This alignment of human genius and the abstract logic of capital proved crucial to Balzac’s modernization of Shylock (identifiable in his stable of characters with the old-style banker-usurer Gobseck). The consummately political, fully networked Nucingen becomes the linchpin of Balzac’s unvarnished portrait of the Restoration as a society of calculation.¹⁸

If agiotage is taken to refer not only to unscrupulous stockjobbing, but also to an “interested” calculus of life and love that prefigures contemporary political theories of utilitarianism and rational choice, then its generic scope widens considerably to include all major aspects of the nineteenth century novel, with those of Balzac at the center. Whether describing the pursuit of marriage partners and mistresses (“Love is essentially an egoistical affection, and egoism implies profound calculation”) or the art of the deal, Balzac consistently relied on a language of fiduciary interest vernacularized by his characters.¹⁹ César Birotteau’s Claparon, a character steeped in statistical consciousness, perfects an idiom “stuffed” (farci) with commonplaces, axioms, and calculations.²⁰ Balzac filled César Birotteau (as he did virtually all of his novels), with page after page of cost-benefit analysis, noting the perfumer’s entrepreneurial wager on the profits of a hair-regeneration formula, his projections of the social and financial returns on an expensive ball, the exact figures owed to creditors. It is astonishing how often the financial math is shown. Madame Birotteau, at the very outset, divulges the value of the couple’s net worth and possible prospects: “We have a hundred thousand francs good money invested outside the business, the stock and the factory, have we? . . . The funds are at seventy-two, buy rentes; you would have ten thousand livres a year coming in without drawing anything out of the business.” After César goes bankrupt, precise figures are attached to the liquidation: “The liquid assets reached a total of one hundred and ninety-five thousand francs, to which the trustees added seventy thousand francs from the liquidation of ‘that unlucky fellow Roguin.’ The liabilities amounted to about four hundred and forty thousand francs, so that there would be a dividend of more than fifty percent.”²¹ As if not content merely to allude to calculation, Balzac performed acts of accounting, testing the reader’s psychic endurance, and gesturing toward incalculability through informational overkill. A favored device was to amass vast quanta of technical data relating to credit, junk bonds, liquidation, and bankruptcy. The lengthy, didactic section of César Birotteau devoted to describing the French system of the concordat (a provision that put the bankrupt merchant’s assets at the disposal of trustees, and that enabled him to resume business as usual) provides a case in point. Though justifiable perhaps by Balzac’s intent to show that César, denied the concordat, suffered an atypically harsh fate for his time, the excess of financial detail leads one to suspect that this material is prized for its own sake, valued as the stuff of a new literary genre of agiotage consonant with parodic capitalist realism.

Agiotage has been typecast as uniquely French. Writes Walter Savage Landor, “Vanity and agiotage are to a Parisian the oxygen and hydrogen of life.” Certainly Balzac’s stamp on financial fiction assigns agiotage a secure national literary foothold. But placed in a comparative, transhistorical literary context, this quintessentially “French” way of doing and writing about business proves to be as global as capitalism itself. Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now (1875), Benjamin Disraeli’s Endymion (1880), Alfredo de Taunay’s O encilhamento (1893), José Asunción Silva’s De Sobremesa (1896), Frank Norris’s The Pit (1903), Louis Auchincloss’s The Embezzler (1966), and William Gaddis’s JR (1975), each from a distinct national and historical perspective, takes up agiotage, widening the circumference of a literary world system conditioned by what the philosopher Bernard Stiegler has called (with reference to the late twentieth century), the “disaffection, discreditation, and decadence” of industrial democracies.²²

Balzac’s original working title for La Maison Nucingen was La Haute Banque, a term in circulation at the time that designated roughly twenty affiliated banking firms directed by Jewish (and some Protestant) financiers. A node of mythic associations, la Haute Banque was built on the conspiratorial, ancien régime construct of “an international clique of bankers, ‘boring from within’ the ruling circles to control state credit policies and subordinate governments to its interests.”²³ The myth was of course stoked by the fact that monarchies did routinely raise cash for wars through appeal to private banks and wealthy noblemen, wooing their foreign and domestic sources of capital with political perks and honors. The suspicion that government depended on a transnational consortium of lenders whose identities stayed under wraps led to fear of “societies of control” or shadow governments.²⁴ Often depicted as a cabal, la Haute Banque bore a marked resemblance to Balzac’s fictive group of “thirteen,” a confraternity sworn to secrecy and mutual aid both within and outside the law. In the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, “The Bank” was even more firmly soldered to the Rothschild name. As Niall Ferguson ascertains, both it and the Rothschilds came in for anti-Semitic targeting in its many republican guises.²⁵

La Haute Banque played a determinative role in the transition from the old mercantilist economy to the new economy of finance capital between 1815 and 1845. French banking at the beginning of the nineteenth century was governed by archaic practices. Between 1826 and 1828 the old firms went into crisis over a dearth of liquidity. Bronze and gold were the preferred units of asset transfer, and until 1845 printed currency was limited. The anxiety over liquidity, aggravated by the relative scarcity of capital, made credit lines difficult to obtain. The threat of insolvency and vulnerability to bankruptcy constrained investors. It was these conditions that favored the rise of la Haute Banque, many of whose members, trained in business and finance at elite schools, were eager to apply new management principles to credit and loan practices. The Péreire brothers were famously successful: modernizing lending practices, floating elevated lines of credit, investing in real estate, and fueling speculation on the first railroad networks in and around Paris between 1832 and 1837.

The idea of a financial empire run by an omnipotent family is constitutive of a literary world system insofar as it reinforces the historical connections, exploited in novels, between political and economic imperialism. When Birotteau visits the banker François Keller (the man of “the Napoleonic glance” whose “voice . . . spoke to all Europe”), the Napoleonic military campaigns are evoked as a preamble to the revelation of Keller’s investment initiative in canal lines that hold out the promise of millions. In La Maison Nucingen, the baron’s empire is intercontinental, encompassing the Mexican securities market. A dialogue among speculators about the risk of a market crash and the need to keep faith with Nucingen’s paper money affords an optic onto an emergent, risky, vastly scaled economic world system:

This fear-inducing perspective on global capitalism builds on the memory of first-wave economic imperialism in the eighteenth century, which included John Law’s failed stock market venture in the Mississippi Delta in 1720 and the related burst of the South Sea bubble. On one hand, we glimpse Europe’s fortified power over the periphery, the extension of its markets to the Americas, and the promise of quick and dirty profits.²⁷ On the other hand, we glean how the world’s economic fate—running the gamut of windfall to crash—has been concentrated in the hands of a tiny circle of investors. It was Zola, even more than Balzac, who would make of this picture a study in economic xenophobia.

Zola was working on L’argent, his novel about the Paris bourse (stock market), at roughly the same time that he was composing La débâcle, his epic chronicle of the French defeat of 1870 published in 1892. He recorded in his notebook how war would be represented as a “volcanic explosion” following on the helium trail of France’s burst economic bubble.²⁸ In deciding that “‘money’ would pass before ‘the debacle,’” Zola revealed how closely economic and military downfall were associated in his mind.²⁹ Where La debâcle would introduce a “writing of disaster” (the expression is Blanchot’s, but it echoes the subtitle of Zola’s notebooks on the disastrous Battle of Sedan), L’argent tracks what Zola in his Carnets characterized as an inevitable crumbling (la logique de l’écroulement).³⁰ Disaster and breakdown, twin anchors of Zola’s diagnosis of decadent defeatism, became the tangible signs of history’s instinctive death drive.

Though historically it was non-Jewish French bankers who warranted the lion’s share of responsibility for the largest market failures, Zola, interestingly enough, drew on the whole paranoid association of Jews and money that would become the stock-in-trade of anti-Dreyfus propagandists, including Octave Mirbeau (in his early right-wing tracts against the Rothschilds) and Edouard Drumont (whose La France juive, later a cult book for the anti-Dreyfusards, fanned the racist hatreds of the affair). Zola relied on literature about the stock market that circulated anti-Semitic shibboleths, from Eugène Mirecourt’s 1858 La bourse, ses abus et ses mystères (The Stock Market, Its Abuses and Mysteries), which provided a sociology of characters on the stock market floor and attacked “the financial Jewry,” to Ernest Feydeau’s Mémoires d’un coulissier (Memoirs of a Day Trader), a folkloric depiction of the Palais Brongniart, and Eugène Bontoux’s firsthand account of le krach (the crash) in L’union générale, published in 1888, six years after his arrest. Writing with ten years’ hindsight, Zola nonetheless conformed to the expectations of a public accustomed to reading novels that had appeared shortly after the crash by feuilletonistes such as Louis de Chercusac, Pierre Zaccone, Charles Mérouvel, Alexandre Hamm, and G. d’Orcet (author of the transparently titled La comtesse Shylock), all of which in some measure endorsed the anti-Semitic thesis. And yet, when he published La débâcle only a year after L’argent, Zola himself was cast as a symbolic Jew. He attracted the ire of militarists and nationalists who deemed his antiwar novel to be tantamount to treason. La débâcle propelled a massive shift in Zola’s political stature, making him ripe to become the author of J’accuse in 1898. The anti-Dreyfus press, howling mad, caricatured him as a “Jew lover.” Léon Daudet, for example, gave him a Yiddish accent in French when transposing his speech. In the span of a mere seven years, from L’argent to J’accuse, Zola went from being a promulgator of Jewish conspiracy theory to becoming a champion of Dreyfus and premier symbol of republican tolerance and secular justice.³¹

L’argent is significant not only because it reveals the forgotten Zola—the one who gave currency to the conventionally held opinion that an ancient cabal of moneyed Jews controlled the financial fortunes of the world—but also because it charts how this belief gave rise to a distinct form of economic xenophobia that has been less examined than political xenophobia. Economic imperialism and economic xenophobia constitute obverse sides of a common world system. As France positioned itself against European competitors to become a prime mover, initiating ambitious political and capital projects in far-flung corners of the globe from Mexico to Suez, imperial triumphalism and anti-Jewish paranoia grew in step. The conviction that “we should control the world,” and the fear that “they control us,” emerged as part and parcel of the same logic, with little apparent awareness of ideological discrepancy or ethical double standards. Many prominent members of the non-Jewish financial community aligned their phobia of an unholy alliance of Jewish financiers with their desire for a new Holy Roman Empire that would take concrete shape as a French-financed rail system running through Austria-Hungary, the Balkans, and Turkey as a rampart against the Middle East. Whether the vision was that of a Jewish conspiracy or that of a new European crusade, global capital came to be figured as a world system, moving spectrally, as Marx would have it, across vast geographical expanses, and uniting wildly disparate cultural agents through invisible hubs of exchange. It is not surprising that one of Zola’s preparatory cahiers for L’argent was titled “le Dieu caché” (the hidden God).³² The parallel between God and capital, moving in mysterious ways, was lost on Zola no less than it was on Marx. This fiduciary deity, producing something out of nothing, also bears a distinct resemblance to the demon of rational choice, driving the felicific machine of gain with indifference to the distributive injustice of wins and losses.

In its time, L’argent ranked among Zola’s most popular works in the Rougon-Macquart series. The work’s focus on the unraveling of pyramid schemes was of passionate interest to a public nourished on news stories about corrupt investors. In using le krach of 1882 as the centerpiece of his novel (chronologically displacing it to the 1860s), Zola was necessarily drawn to Eugène Bontoux, the financier who headed the General Union. Born in 1820 and formed as a polytechnicien, Bontoux directed a rail system in 1860 that belonged to James de Rothschild. Catholic and monarchist, he dreamed of a greater Europe established with the help of French capital. In 1878 he founded the General Union with a capital base of 25 million francs culled from new money, put up by a class of small investors drawn from the ranks of legitimists, royalists, and Catholics. All were eager to participate, like the gullible creditors in Gide’s Les caves du Vatican, in an initiative that would shore up the beleaguered fortunes of the papacy. Bontoux enticed believers with a special charity dedicated to offering the Vatican a major real estate deal (un trésor de Saint-Pierre). Hundreds of local priests, religious institutions, and royalists came forth with contributions, and by 1881, a hundred million francs had been raised. Bontoux then launched an Austrian bank intended to weaken the Rothschild monopoly on transportation finance. Due to corruption and bad management however, the whole enterprise began to crumble, only worsening when Bontoux mislead investors with false figures on assets, subscriptions, and promissory values. In the ill-disciplined rush to liquidate on the part of the Union’s directors, shares estimated at 3,060 plunged to 1,200, and then down to 20. Bontoux was arrested for issuing fictive dividends and for embezzlement. In an effort to save face, he maintained that the Union had been “assassinated” by a coalition of investors in the pay of the Jews, especially Rothschild. As Catholic writers and aristocrats spread the story of being deliberately swindled by Jewish financiers, conspiracy theory took hold. Even when a new center-left government intervened, charging Léon Say, the minister of Finance, with finding ways to cushion the impact of losses, the Jewish conspiracy theory retained mythic status and popularity, with Say himself vilified as a Rothschild retainer.

To understand the deep-seated globalism of this conspiracy mentality, one must recall that Jews, no matter how assimilated, were consistently classed as foreign in mid-nineteenth-century France, and that the “foreign” world itself—known mostly through military campaigns—was associated with specific French anxieties: the fear of punitive deportation, tropical diseases, cultural isolation, and the potential for embarrassing setbacks to French imperialism.³³ British one-upmanship in the Suez Canal venture and the botched mission to help Emperor Maximilian of Austria secure an imperial foothold in Mexico reinforced French parochialism. For the protagonist of L’argent, the perils of globalization outweigh its potential returns, at least initially. As Zola paints it, there are two contrastive models of worldliness—the French kind, which is based on Gallic urbanity, and the Jewish kind, based on a “racial aptitude” for world finance. Gundermann, the novel’s Rothschild figure, is described as “banquier roi, le maître de la Bourse et du monde [the banker-king, the master of the Bourse and of the world].”³⁴ If the Bourse itself, with its cavernous interior and intricate byways, is cast as a global microcosm, then Jewish capitalists, in Zola’s diagram of power, sit at the mast.

To gain comparative perspective on the place of L’argent in a larger literary world system of financial novels, it may be read not only alongside César Birotteau or La Maison Nucingen, but also in conjunction with a work such as Anthony Trollope’s 1874–75 novel The Way We Live Now. Here we see economic xenophobia emerge ever more clearly as a global force field in the European novel. The plot of The Way We Live Now interweaves two dominant modes of nineteenth-century speculation: the marriage market and railroad finance. The unscrupulous Felix Carbury, an impoverished baronet and inveterate gambler, stakes his fortune on forming a union with the daughter of a wealthy venture capitalist, Augustus Melmotte. Melmotte’s wealth, national origins, and social position are uncertain. Described as a heavy-set man with a look of power about him, but of untrustworthiness as well, he is married to a Bohemian Jewish woman, who, though fair-complexioned, has a Jewish nose and “the Jewish contraction of the eyes.”³⁵ He has also chosen as his chief financial advisors a “Hebrew gentleman” named Cohenlupe and a “fat Jew” called Brehgert. By virtue of his conjugal and business associates, and amid rumors of his unbounded affluence, Melmotte becomes a flashpoint of suspicion. The plan to float a new railroad system, though initiated by an American source and routed through a British member of Melmotte’s entourage, defaults to him, as if by genetic right, thereby reinforcing the conspiratorial line of thought that associates foreign-born subjects with the new economy of big money and high risk:

Public opinion offers an ambivalent verdict on this burgeoning world system in the Americas under Britain’s advisory arm. The press praises “the idea of civilizing Mexico by joining it to California” while commenting on the “irony” that the project did not “originate” in England itself. What Zola would state openly in the terms of economic xenophobia, Trollope only alluded to as a worrisome condition of economic un-Englishness. An American entrepreneur in partnership with a foreign-born financier are represented as unsure guarantors of England’s interests; there is something about them—hard to pinpoint—that perverts the Protestant ethic. The euphemism employed by Trollope for Melmotte’s Jewish-like business savvy is, interestingly enough, his universalism: “there was something said of the universality of Mr Melmotte’s commercial genius, but whether said in a spirit prophetic of ultimate failure and disgrace, or of heavenborn success and unequalled commercial splendour, no one could tell.”³⁷ Though the quintessence of Trollope’s style is concentrated in the skillful distribution of innuendo, a hermeneutic wormhole opens up around appraisals of Melmotte’s enterprise. Is he or is he not a front man for furtive deals? It is as if the novel tests its own expository limits in tackling the xenophobic subtext of the Jewish question.

From the salons of the chattering classes to the boardroom, Melmotte reigns as the genie of Capital and the premier representative of the economic world system (“The world knew . . . that Mr Melmotte was to entertain the Emperor of China, that Mr Melmotte carried the South Central Pacific and Mexican Railway in his pocket—and the world worshiped Mr. Melmotte”), until his demise, when, crushed by an avalanche of “unsecured paper” and justly accused of forgery, he takes his life. But his suicide fails to generate tragic gravitas; the novel swerves unexpectedly into romantic comedy, with thwarted marriages coming to fruition and money all around for bit players. The epic stakes of high-risk in the global economy give way to a trite cliché—the “wheel of fortune”—used as a title by Lady Carbury in her potboiler based on the Melmotte affair. Pulp fiction thus supplants the Bildungsroman as the genre of choice by the end of Trollope’s novel. By contrast, Zola never abandons melodrama in his chronicle of financial apocalypse. Both writers use the railroad to map a new economy of scale, but Trollope traces the drama of capital accumulation with sober realism whereas Zola charts a frenzied addiction to buying shares. Saccard’s vision of a communication network stretching the length of Asia Minor is full of fetish magic, with the railroad cast as the material expression of the “life of money,” as the manifest destiny of a new civilization. “And it was the gigantic thought of conquering the East, the scheme which the Crusaders had attempted, and which Napoleon had been unable to accomplish, that inflamed Saccard; though in his case, it was to be a rational conquest, effected by the double agency of science and money.”³⁸ As in Trollope, a melioristic platform is used to buttress an imperial economic plan, but Zola’s rhetoric is extreme, laying on the Crusades, the defeat of the remnants of the Ottoman Empire, and the resurrection of the Napoleonic legacy to inflate the grandiosity of the Banque Universelle’s mission. And where Trollope records anti-Semitism as an affectation of the upper classes—“If he’s fixed about anything,” says Lady Longstaffe to her daughter by way of explaining her husband’s opposition to her engagement to a Jewish banker, “it’s about the Jews. An accursed race . . . expelled from Paradise”³⁹—Zola invokes ancient anti-Semitic mantras with unmediated violence:

The railroad speculation novels of Trollope and Zola are not just documents of how the nineteenth-century economy took off in a global sphere, nor are they just morality tales about the downfall of societies of greed. In tying anti-Semitism to imperialism as codependent orders in a single world system, both texts raise the question of whether anti-Semitic conspiracy theory had an enabling effect on the world system construct. Bizarre as it may seem, it was as if the paranoid vision that imagined Jewish banking interests controlling world finance inspired French capitalists to think globally. If Zola could be said to have made a singular contribution to the genre of financial fiction in L’argent, it lay in his diagnosis of the double indemnity of economic xenophobia; at once an incentive to French economic imperialism, and an ideological aberration leading inexorably to le krach.

The history of the French business novel and its counterparts in England and the Americas traces a condition of neoliberal capitalist development that inevitably moves toward what Quentin Meillassoux, writing about Alain Badiou’s Being and Event, has described as “a liberation from the limits of calculatory reason.”⁴¹ One might conceptualize this liberation, following Jean-Luc Nancy, as a partage de l’incalculable, a radically democratic “distribution of the incalculable” which is based for Nancy on principles of the “common” (le commun), the nonexchangeable (l’inéchangeable), and the without-value (la sans-valeur) typically found in “art, love, friendship or thought.”⁴² Agiotage, in this formulation, culminates paradoxically in partage, that is to say, in a history of alternative political economy that subsumes Marx and Engel’s deprivatization of property, Marcel Mauss’s gift economy, Georges Bataille’s notion of nonproductive expenditure (dépense), and John Rawls’s theory of distributive justice.

7. It was Franco Moretti (following in the steps of Fredric Jameson), who, in 1996, introduced the world-system approach to the literary field in the English-translated subtitle of his book on modern epic. Grafted from Immanuel Wallerstein’s structural view of capitalism as an economic mode exceeding any one political entity or national territory, and informed, in its taste for big swaths of space-time by the concept of longue durée put in play by Ferdinand Braudel and the Annales historians, world-systems theory, at least in Moretti’s ascription, drew attention to narrative sites of uneven development. Goethe’s Faust (a divided Germany); Melville’s Moby-Dick (an America of “bloodthirsty hunting and industrial production”); Joyce’s Ulysses (its Ireland “a colony which nevertheless speaks the same language as the occupier”); and García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (the wild zones of Latin America), were mobilized by Moretti to extend the classical dimensions of epic to “the supranational discontinuities of represented space” in modern literature. See Moretti, Modern Epic: The World-System from Goethe to Garcia Márquez (1996).

31. Zola’s British publisher, Alfred Vizetelly, attempted to blunt anticipated criticism of Zola’s anti-Semitism by arguing that his descriptions of it should not be confused with his own views. In the preface to his English translation of L’argent, Vizetelly wrote, “There is a strong Jewish element in this story, and here and there some very unpleasant things are said of the chosen people. It should be remembered, however, that these are the remarks of M. Zola’s characters and not of M. Zola himself. He had to portray certain Jew-haters, and has simply put into their mouths the words which they are constantly using. This statement is not unnecessary, for M. Zola counts many friends and admirers among writers and readers of the Jewish persuasion, and some of them might conceive the language in which their race is spoken of to be expressive of the author’s personal opinions. But such is not the case. M. Zola is remarkably free from racial and religious prejudices. And, after all, I do not think that any Hebrew reader can take exception to the portrait of Gundermann, the great Jew financier, the King of the Money Market, who in a calm methodical way brings about the ruin of Saccard and Hamelin” (Money, vi).