LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Emile Zola: Les Rougon-Macquart
built 622 days ago
There has always been a suspicion that those who admire or enjoy the novels of Emile Zola do so for the wrong reasons. When he died, a century ago, on September 28, 1902, the pseudo-scientific bases of his fiction were already discredited. His cycle of novels, Les Rougon-Macquart, set out to analyse French society under Napoleon III and the Second Em-pire (1852-1870) through the intersecting destinies of two families, tracing the supposed influence of hereditary traits. Zola's Naturalism was founded on the belief that it was possible to apply scientific methods to such sociological analysis - a belief that even the writer himself had modified by the time he completed the 20 novels that make up the cycle.
Source:
Zola was born in Paris, but spent his childhood and youth (from 1843 to 1858) in Aix-en-Provence, where he formed a close friendship with Cézanne. His father, a civil engineer of Italian stock, died in 1847, leaving his family in difficult financial circumstances. Zola moved to Paris with his mother in 1858 to complete his education, but failed the baccalauréat and was forced to seek, with little success, some suitable form of employment. He wrote Romantic poetry and stories whilst frequenting artistic milieux in these years of financial straits, which were only eased when he obtained a modest position with the publisher Hachette. He published a collection of tales, Contes à Ninon, in 1864 and his first novel, the autobiographical La Confession de Claude, the following year, then two serial novels for public consumption: Le Vœu d'une morte (1866) and Les Mystères de Marseille (1867). But his early works received little critical attention.
Source:
After his first major novel, Thérèse Raquin (1867), Zola started the long series called Les Rougon Macquart, the natural and social history of a family under the Second Empire. "I want to portray, at the outset of a century of liberty and truth, a family that cannot restrain itself in its rush to possess al the good things that progress is making available and is derailed by its own momentum, the fatal convulsions that accompany the birth of a new world." The family had two branches - the Rougons were small shopkeepers and petty bourgeois, and the Marquarts were poachers and smugglers and they had problems with alcohol. Some members of the family would rise during the story to the highest levels of the society, some would fall as victims of social evils and heredity. Zola presented the idea to his publisher in 1868.
Source:
Zola’s first important novel, Thérèse Raquin (1867), is a vivid psychological study of murder and passion. Later, inspired by scientific experiments in heredity and environment, and influenced by the determinist philosophy of Hippolyte Adolphe Taine, Zola determined to produce a new type of novel that would probe deeply into every area of human existence, document every social ill, no matter how politically sensitive, and show the interaction of the individual and society. He called his new school of fiction “naturalism“, and he wrote a series of 20 novels under the generic title Les Rougon-Macquart (1871-1893; trans. 1885-1907) to illustrate his theories in terms of the saga of one family. Through painstaking research he produced an arresting and complete picture of French life, particularly of Paris, in the late 19th century. He was... criticized for obscenity and for exaggerating the frequent criminality and pathological behaviour of the lower classes.
Source:
One of Zola's first works published was his autobiographical La Confession de Claude (1865), which attracted many critics and brought negative attention to him including the police. Guilt and shame haunt Thérèse Raquin (1867), another of Zola's works to inspire many film and television adaptations. Madeleine Férat was published a year later. Zola further explores the scientific model in Le Roman Experimental (The Experimental Novel) (1880). He next wrote his Les Trois Villes series consisting of Lourdes (1894), Rome (1896), and Paris (1898).
Source:
In 1885 Zola published one of his finest works, GERMINAL. It was the first major work on a strike, based on his research notes on labor conditions in the coal mines. The book was attacked by right-wing political groups as a call to revolution. NANA (1880), another famous work of the author, took the reader to the world of sexual exploitation. Zola's tetralogy, LES QUATRE EVANGILES, which started with FÉCONDITÉ (1899), was left unfinished.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Les Rougon-Macquart