Macquart branch
Jean Macquart
Carpenter, soldier, farm labourer
The youngest of the Macquart children and the one who comes closest to escaping the family's hereditary damage — not through exceptional gifts but through a fundamental decency and stubbornness that no amount of history can entirely extinguish. He appears in two of the cycle's most harrowing novels, separated by a decade. In La Terre he is a former soldier turned farm labourer in the Beauce, where he falls in love with Françoise Fouan, a fierce young girl from a peasant family. He marries her to protect her from her brutal brother-in-law Buteau; she is killed by Buteau and Lise; Jean, understanding what has happened, leaves the Beauce rather than stay in a world he cannot change. In La Débâcle he is an infantryman in the catastrophic Franco-Prussian War of 1870, fighting alongside Maurice Levasseur. The friendship between them — the inarticulate peasant and the educated idealist — is one of Zola's most affecting relationships. When Jean bayonets Maurice during the suppression of the Commune, without recognising him in the chaos of street fighting, and holds him as he dies, it is the cycle's most complete expression of history as tragedy: the two friends destroyed by the same political disaster, in different uniforms, on the same street. Jean is the ordinary Frenchman — slow-spoken, patient, essentially good — whom Zola follows through the worst of the century and leaves still standing, diminished but alive, at the other end.
Le plus jeune des Macquart, homme simple et têtement honnête qui apparaît dans deux romans. Dans La Terre, ouvrier agricole en Beauce, il aime Françoise Fouan, l'épouse pour la protéger, la voit tuer par Buteau et Lise, et quitte la région sans pouvoir rien prouver. Dans La Débâcle, soldat dans la guerre franco-prussienne, il noue une amitié profonde avec Maurice Levasseur — et le tue sans le reconnaître lors des combats de la Commune. Le Français ordinaire, battu par l'histoire et toujours debout.
Solidly built, slow-spoken, with the patient strength of a man formed by physical labour and the honest eyes of someone without guile — and, by the end of La Débâcle, the face of a man who has seen too much.
Solidly built, slow-spoken, with the patient strength of a man formed by physical labour and the honest eyes of someone without guile — and, by the end of La Débâcle, the face of a man who has seen too much.
Family & Relationships
- Child Antoine Macquart
- Sibling Lisa Quenu
- Sibling Gervaise Macquart