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Plenitude, Potential and Provence: Zola, Art Criticism and <i>Le Sémaphore de Marseille</i>

This article was first accepted for and presented as a paper at the international conference on ‘Zola, Cézanne and Aix’, organized jointly by the Université de Provence-Aix-en-Provence and International UK Emile Zola Society, held at the Université de Provence, Aix-en-Provence (Maison des Sciences et Cultures) in October 2007. It was supported by a British Academy Overseas Conference Award by competition. A revised, substantially developed version of the paper was submitted and selected by peer-review for the internationally excellent scholarly journal, Australian Journal of French Studies with a track record of articles by leading international scholars in their fields on cutting-edge research on literary, Zola, art and art criticism studies in the long nineteenth-century area. The article examines a significant, yet neglected episode in Zola’s 1870s writings on Impressionist and naturalist art in the context of his mainstream ‘press’ exile from Paris, and as elaborating through art criticism (as ‘a space for combat’), a suggestive new politics of naturalist Republicanism. In this way, the article both contributes to more developed understanding of Zola’s key contributions to a theory of modern art linked to naturalist politics and its press contexts. It also opens significant insights into ways in which the period’s press and publication transformations lie at the heart of how such ideas were communicated, read, politicized and understood.