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Emile Zola: Les Rougon-Macquart
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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. The family have two branches - the Rougons are small shopkeepers and petty bourgeois, the Marquarts are poachers and smugglers and have problems with alcohol. During the story some members of the family would rise to the highest levels of society, and some would fall as victims of social evils and heredity. Zola presented the idea to his publisher in 1868.
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Zola accomplished his great task, beginning in 1871 with La fortune des Rougon (The Fortune of the Rougons, 1886) and ending in 1893 with Le docteur Pascal (Doctor Pascal, 1957). After publishing the seventh of these novels he read Introduction à l’étude de la médecine expérimentale (1865; An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, 1927) by French physiologist Claude Bernard and tried to adapt this scientific method of observation and experimentation in the remainder of his work. In 1880 Zola published the essay “Le roman expérimental” (“The Experimental Novel,” 1893), in which he developed these ideas and articulated his concept of naturalism and the naturalistic novel. He further explored these ideas in “Les romanciers naturalistes” (The Naturalist Novelists, 1881).
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Zola worked as a clerk and journalist, and wrote short stories, beginning with Contes à Ninon (1864). After his first major novel, Thérèse Raquin (1867), he began a twenty volume series called Les Rougon-Macquart which traced the lives of three branches of the Rougon-Macquart family and in which he expounded his theories of naturalism. The series included Nana (1880), Germinal (1885), La Terre (1887), and La Bête humaine (1890). JW was familiar with his work although not closely involved with Zola himself.
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Zola's private life was not free of strains. He married in 1870, but this union was childless. Then, in 1888, he set up a second home with a young seamstress, who bore him two children. This unexpected blossoming of domestic happiness probably accounts for the sunnier tone of the books he wrote after the completion of Les Rougon-Macquart. They included a trilogy - Lourdes, Rome, and Paris (1894-1898) - dealing with the conflict between science and religion, and a tetralogy of utopian novels, Les Quatre Évangiles, of which only the first three were completed.
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It was on this date, April 2, 1840, that the French novelist Émile Zola was born in Paris. but only after he reached age 31. It was in 1871 that his Rougon-Macquart cycle (1871-1893), which reached 20 volumes, caught on with the public. His later novels strongly attacked the Catholicism in which he was reared, and in his novel La Terre he gives the nickname Jésus-Christ to a reprehensible character.
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More than half of Zola's novels were part of this set of 20 collectively known as Les Rougon-Macquart. Unlike Balzac who in the midst of his literary career re synthetized his work into
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Les Rougon-Macquart