Émile Zola's Volatile Utopia

Networked Utopia : the Architecture and Urbanism of the Bata Shoe Company Satellite Cities = Utopia en red : arquitectura y urbanismo en las ciudades satélite de la Bata Shoe Company, 1930 al presente

“…Nonetheless, at the turn of the century and fruit of his strong, and punished, commitment to justice-J'Acuse (1898)-for the aforementioned Dreyfus case, Zola would abandon realism and reengage with utopian thought, and work for the "liberation of men", through the glorification of labor "and by this oblige those who profane, enslave and soil it with ugliness and poverty, to finally respect it" (as quoted in Vidler 1971, 250). "Travail [1900; translated to Czech language in 1901] 2.04.004 is the work I wanted to create with Fourier, the oganisation of labor, father and regulator of the world… with him I create the City, a city of the future, a kind of Phalanstery" (as quoted in Vidler 1971, 250) wrote Zola, and in fact, Fourier was the prime and explicit source of inspiration for the fictional mind behind the city, Luc Froment (Ibid., 251;Reid 1992;Ghoche 2013). The motto "no revolution, evolution through Fourier" (Ibid.,32) provided with an alternative solution to the problematics raised by marxist and anarchist: progressive reform, based in non-violence, collective association, and a scalable system (Vidler 1971, 251).…”

“…More specifically, in the way he conceived the design of the new industrial city of Travail, and its social structure, Zola's utopia embraced both industry and technology, and embedded his own social and class assumptions, so that his idealist agenda, deployed as a "fictionalized instruction manual" (Ghoche 2013, 32), seemed within reach. To begin with, he reintroduced the alternative utopian theme of the nineteenth century in France, that of Saint-Simon and his technocratic order, in line with the then prevailing faith in science as the means to liberate the workers of the toil of the past (Vidler 1971;Ghoche 2013); in Travail, "manual labor was rendered obsolete" and man had made of nature "his servant and paradise" (Ibid.,33): But what an amelioration had been effected by cleanliness, and by the air and sunshine which brightened the great halls, making work more cheerful and less heavy on the back and muscles! What a marvelous difference there was between these workshops and the holes full of darkness and of suffering in which gangs of workmen in the old factory hard by wore out their existence.…”