ABSTRACT
Boime proposes that at the heart of the modern is a guilty secret the need of the dominant, mainly bourgeois, classes in Paris to expunge from historical memory the haunting nightmare of the Commune and its socialist ideology. The stress, in the term the fog of war', on the uncertainty in situational awareness experienced by participants in military operations points toward the nimble' Stendhalian view of war which Zola greatly admired and yet felt the need to resist in his own pre-modernist muscular' prose. Zola's attempt to master the battlefield in his novelistic planning for his tale of war shares that Clausewitzian desire to dispel fog and see the clear contours of war by privileging an overview of detail. But to talk of the Impressionist qualities of Zola's descriptive style always risks turning that aesthetic of indeterminacy into an uncritical vagueness which does a disservice both to painting and to fiction.
