'My novels have always been written with a higher aim than merely to amuse. I have so high an opinion of the novel as a means of expression--I consider it parallel with lyrical poetry, as the highest form of literary expression, just as in the last century the drama was the highest form of expression--that it is on this account that I have chosen it as the form in which to present to the world what I wish to say on the social, scientific, and psychological problems that occupy the minds of thinking men. But for this I might have said what I wanted to say to the world in another form. But the novel has to-day risen from the place which it held in the last century at the table of the banquet of letters. It was then the idle pastime of the hour, and sat low down between the fable and the idyll. To-day it contains, or may be made to contain, everything; and it is because that is my creed that I am a novelist. I have, to my thinking, certain contributions to make to the thought of the world on certain subjects, and I have chosen the novel as the best way of communicating these contributions to the world. Thus "La Débâcle," in the form of a very precise and accurate relation of a series of historical facts--in other words, in the form of a realistic historical novel--is a document on the psychology of France in 1870. This will explain the enormous number of characters which figure in the book. Each character represents one _état d'âme psychologique_ of the France of the day. If my work be well done, the reader will be able to understand what was in men's minds and what was the bent of men's minds--what they thought, and how they thought, at that period.'
As might have been expected with a work dealing with such a question as the last Franco-German War, 'La Débâcle' has given rise to considerable controversy in France. Some ultra-bellicose Frenchmen, and among them M. de Vogue of the Academy, have taunted the author with a lack of patriotism, their notion being apparently that they ought never to be told the truth concerning themselves. Other persons have impeached M. Zola's accuracy with regard to various matters of detail, and a few have gone so far as to accuse him of having written that which he must have known to be untrue. It may be as well to notice some of the charges here.