Zola’s La Débâcle, first planned in 1868, was the penultimate chapter in Les Rougon-Macquart. Warfare was something Zola had always meant to give full play in Les Rougon-Macquart, and his 1868 scheme had provided for "a novel that will have the military world as its framework…; an episode in [Napoleon III’s] Italian campaign." But after the calamitous Franco-Prussian War, this installment acquired special significance. What had originally been envisaged as one tale among others came to be seen as the denounceme ....