How Have Experimental Sciences Transformed the French Novel in the 19th Century?
- Art d'Histoire
- May 28
- 3 min read
The European nineteenth century was characterised by a major epistemological revolution: the triumph of natural sciences, biology, and medicine over ancient metaphysical certainties.
In this intellectual climate where rationalism prevailed, novelistic literature adapted. The writer abandoned idealism to don the scientist's lab coat, seeking to dissect human behaviour with the accuracy of a clinician.
What were the roles of Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola in this mutation?
Social Taxonomy: Honoré de Balzac
Honoré de Balzac laid the foundations of a zoology applied to humanity. Drawing inspiration from the classifications made by naturalists, he undertook to catalog individuals according to strict social categories, transposing animal taxonomy to French society. The writer conceived of himself as a "doctor of social sciences"; the literary gaze became clinical and detailed an environment with the same rigor as a biologist examining a habitat and the species that inhabits it.
The Mark of Transformism: Gustave Flaubert
Raised within the very walls of a Rouen hospital center directed by a surgeon father, the novelist grew up in an environment where rationality prevailed over metaphysics.
As a teenager, Flaubert was passionate about Lamarck's transformism, which would leave its mark on his early work Quidquid Volueris, featuring a half-man, half-ape hybrid.
The author of Madame Bovary publicly supported scholars against religious authorities during academic controversies regarding the zoological origin of man. Indeed, in the Littré dictionary, the entry for "Man" indicates "mammal of the order of primates"; there was enough there to alarm Monseigneur Dupanloup and Christian academicians. Where is God’s work in all this? In passing, it should be noted that Flaubert studied and recorded medical reports on arsenic poisoning almost word for word to describe the death spasms of the poisoned Emma.
Later, his confrontation with Darwin confirmed his strictly materialistic and deterministic vision of humanity and even fed his political thought: captivated by the law of natural selection, Flaubert perceived humanitarian ideologies as a brake on social vitality, and democratic suffrage as a biological nonsense.
The Novelist-Experimenter: Émile Zola
The novelist's doctrine was forged during the time when, employed in publishing, he wrote notices for scientific and philosophical works.
He moved within a circle of physicists and zoologists, assimilating a vision of a world governed solely by the laws of matter.
At the beginning of his journalistic career, Zola was also an art critic. He early on came to the defence of Édouard Manet, while everyone was still mocking him. And when the writing of the art column for L'Évènement was taken from him for having too greatly trampled on the big names of academic painting and defended the painter of Olympia, he described himself as a doctor, scalpel in hand, practicing the autopsy of works in order to reveal their intimate anatomy.
Zola appropriated the concept of determinism—a principle according to which every individual is the inevitable product of their biological heredity and social environment. He transposed the protocol of experimental medicine and its sacrosanct hypothetico-deductive method to the construction of the novel. Zola developed a starting hypothesis that he tested in his fictional laboratory, which constitutes his narrative, and studied how a passion evolves when subjected to specific environmental constraints: he invented the "experimental novel."
Just as the laws of anatomy progressively imposed themselves on classical ideals in the Fine Arts, the novel bowed to the requirement of reality as envisioned by positivist sciences: palpable, rational, predetermined, and measurable.
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