Naturalism For the CSET

man, scientific knowledge of him, in his individual and social relations”.

“Some observed fact makes the idea start up of trying an experiment, of writing a novel, in order to attain to a complete knowledge of the truth” .

“I consider that the question of heredity has a great influence in the intellectual and passionate manifestations of man. I also attach considerable importance to the surroundings”. “Man is not alone; he lives in society, in a social condition; and consequently, for us novelists, this social condition unceasingly modifies the phenomena. Indeed our great study is just there, in the reciprocal effect of society on the individual and the individual on society”.

“This is what constitutes the experimental novel: to possess a knowledge of the mechanism of the phenomena inherent in man, to show the machinery of his intellectual and sensory manifestations, under the influences of heredity and environment, such as physiology shall give them to us, and then finally to exhibit man living in social conditions produced by himself, which he modifies daily, and in the heart of which he himself experiences a continual transformation”.

“We shall construct a practical sociology, and our work will be a help to political and economical sciences. . . . To be the master of good and evil, to regulate life, to regulate society, to solve in time all the problems of socialism, above all, to give justice a solid foundation by solving through experiment the questions of criminality–is not this being the most useful and the most moral workers in the human workshop?”

“Naturalism is . . . the intellectual movement of the century”. It “is not a school . . . [;] it consists simply in the application of the experimental method to the study of nature and of man”.

The Dreyfus Affair

In 1894, French Captain Alfred Dreyfus was tried for high treason and sentenced to life imprisonment in total isolation on Devil’s Island, off the coast of the peal colony of French Guiana. It took many years for the truth to be known: Dreyfus was totally innocent of the crime and false evidences had been used to convict him.

The Dreyfus Affair, from its infamous first verdict to the Jewish officer’s unequivocal exoneration in 1906, split French public opinion in two opposing camps. Beyond the legal