The Belly of Paris

Emile Zola’s 1873 novel, The Belly of Paris, presents the story of Florent Quenu, a hapless political insurgent living in Paris during Louis Napoleon III’s reign as Emperor of France. Although Napoleon was duly elected President of France in 1848, three years later he seized power in a coup d’etat, declared himself Emperor, and named his government the Second Empire. Florent, an ineffectual radical, is stirred to oppose the injustices of the Empire, but he is no match for the fattened bellies of bourgeois Paris.

Florent joined the 1851 street riots protesting Napoleon’s power-grab but was swept up in the government crack-down and deported to a penal colony in French Guyana on trumped-up charges of murder. Seven years later, Florent escapes and makes his way back to Paris.

Zola’s novel opens at night, as a caravan of wagons carrying produce from outlying farms approaches Paris. When the widowed farmer Mme Francois spies a dark mound stretched along the road, she stops her wagon to investigate. It’s a man – Florent, in fact – who has collapsed from exhaustion and hunger. She throws Florent on her wagon-load of vegetables and resumes her excursion to Paris’ central food market.



When they arrive in Paris, Florent, depleted and malnourished from his arduous years in political exile, nevertheless marvels at the changes Paris has undergone during his absence. Under Napoleon’s urban renewal program, the city’s narrow streets have been expanded into grand boulevards and the medieval food market has been transformed into “Les Halles,” a complex of twelve glass and steel pavilions. Mme Francois tells Florent, “If you haven’t been in Paris in a long time, you probably don’t know the new markets,” and she points out the various pavilions for fruit and flowers, fish and poultry, butter and cheese, and vegetables. She quickly sells her produce, but before leaving, introduces Florent to a young painter, Claude Lantier.

Bewildered by the reconstruction of the city and unable to orient himself, Florent agrees to Claude’s suggestion of “a little tour through the market.” In a half-starved, dream-state, Florent follows Claude, dodging an incoming wave of wagons and carts piled high with seafood and “eggs and baskets of cheeses and butter.” While Claude relishes the “great mountain of food” that rises every morning in Les Halles, Florent, gnawed by hunger, realizes the skinny artist feasts more on the painterly beauty of the foods than on their taste. Indeed, Claude confesses, “the thing that exasperates me […] is that those good-for-nothing bourgeois actually eat all this.”

Then Claude sees Marjolin, a young boy he wishes to paint, and tells Florent the story of Marjolin and his lover, Cadine. Both were orphans living on the street when they were rescued, separately, by marketplace women. The two children grew up together in Les Halles, spending their days running wild and carefree through the complex. When they reached a certain age, the market women no longer allowed them to sleep together, but they still slip off to secret places to be with one another. Cadine now sells flowers, and Marjolin works in a poultry shop.



Claude suddenly vanishes, chasing Marjolin. After stumbling past many more mountains of food (painstakingly described in lavish detail), Florent, famished and nearly fainting, encounters an old friend, Gavard, who sells poultry. Florent has a half-brother, Quenu, whom he raised after their mother died. Gavard directs Florent to Quenu’s new delicatessen, across the street from the marketplace.

When Florent beholds Quenu’s shop, the narrative digresses into more sumptuous descriptions of foodstuffs (as it does again and again). In the window display “was a world of good things, mouthwatering things, rich things.” Florent ogles “big, fat hams; thick cuts of veal and pork whose juices had jellied clear as crystal candy [… and] casseroles in which […] sliced meats slept under blankets of fat.”

Florent’s stout brother, Quenu, along with his plump, beautiful wife, Lisa, invite him to stay with them. Their pudgy daughter, Pauline, coaxes Florent to tell stories from his time at the penal colony. Thus ensues a strikingly dissonant scene in which Florent recalls starvation conditions and witnessing crabs consuming the corpse of a fellow prisoner, while Quenu, busy making blood sausages, interjects with calls for more fat as he stirs a steaming cauldron.



Florent, the revolutionary, sees the extravagant consumerism unleashed at Les Halles as a pabulum that seduces the bourgeoisie into blithely accepting the oppression of the “Emperor’s” regime. Lisa sums up this bourgeois mindset when she remarks, “I support a government that’s good for business. If they commit acts of evil, I don’t want to know.” Lisa also considers Florent’s thinness an affront to the values of the marketplace, so she tries to fatten him up.

Despite Florent’s opposition to the gluttony Les Halles promotes, he takes a job as inspector of the fish markets. In this position, he meets many more “huge women” shopkeepers who throw their weight around, attempting to intimidate and trick him. One such woman, Louise Méhudin, or the Beautiful Normande, has been rivals with Lisa so long the reason has been forgotten.

Florent soon realizes the “seduction of fat” has rendered him “soft and easy,” so he joins his friend Gavard, also a radical, at a basement meeting of dissidents plotting to overthrow the Empire. Mlle Saget, the neighborhood’s foremost gossip, sees Florent with Gavard and reports their suspicious activities to Lisa. When Lisa seeks out Gavard in the poultry cellars to question him, Marjolin corners her and impulsively makes sexual advances. Lisa strikes him and runs off. He suffers brain damage from the altercation but seems more blissful for it.



Mlle Saget cajoles little Pauline into revealing that Florent was deported for political crimes, and afterward, she gleefully spreads the gossip among the market women at Les Halles. Meanwhile, Florent and Claude make a day trip to Mme Francois’s farm. Claude expounds on “The Battle Between the Fat and the Thin” in which, throughout history, the one has been “devouring the other to grow fat and jolly.”

Lisa searches Florent’s room and finds rebel arm-bands and banners. After some deliberation, she goes to the police to denounce Florent, only to find a line of market women who got there first. Florent and Gavard are arrested to the “malicious delight” of the well-fed bourgeoisie, and Claude seethes, “Respectable people…What bastards!”

Zola was a leader in the nineteenth-century literary movement called naturalism, which aspired to represent people and society objectively. Scrupulous, almost scientific attention to detail distinguishes naturalist novels, as is evident in The Belly of Paris, the third book in Zola’s twenty-volume series, Les Rougon-Macquart.