best biography of emile zola

• The Best Books By Emile...

The Best Books By Emile Zola You Should Read

Emile Zola, one of the most famous French writers of all time, was a very important contributor to the Naturalist movement. He also led an active political life, which is reflected in some of his works. His novels are infused with realism, as he wanted to create accurate portrayals of what life was like at the time. Below we have compiled a list of the best books by Zola you should read.

Germinal (1885)

Germinal is the 13th novel in Zola’s collection of Les Rougon-Macquart , a set of books that he grouped together, creating blood ties between some of the characters in order to try to give a complete panorama of life under Napoleon II. Germinal is the harsh, realistic account of coalminers’ lives in the north of France and their hopes for a better life. Zola spent a great amount of time researching miners’ lives in order to intertwine fiction and reality in this novel and create the semblance of a true story. The name was taken from one of the months of the French Republican Calendar.

La Bête Humaine (1890)

This is a thriller novel in which Zola explores the themes of sexuality and psychosis. The main character, who is the brother of Germinal ’s protagonist, has a hereditary madness. Jack the Ripper was an important source of inspiration for Zola for this character, whose psychosis consists in him only being sexually aroused when he kills women, and he thus goes on a terrifying rampage while travelling on a train between Paris and Le Havre. La Bête Humaine (which means the human beast) also forms part of the Rougon-Macquart series.

L’Oeuvre (1886)

Often translated into English as The Masterpiece , L’Oeuvre is the 14th novel of the Rougon-Macquart collection. It is a fictionalization of Zola and Cezanne’s friendship and it aims to represent the world of artists in 19th century Paris, exploring the rise of movements such as Naturalism, Realism and Impressionism in the art world. This book has often been considered the reason behind Zola and Cezanne’s falling out, since Zola portrays a young, talented artist who is nevertheless unable to live up to his own potential.

L’Assommoir (1877)

The last novel on our list of the best books by Zola you should read is L’Assommoir , the 7th novel in the Rougon-Macquart series. This book explores the problems of alcoholism and poverty in 19th century Paris, especially in the working-class areas of the city. Zola showcases these problems through the character of Gervaise Macquart, a woman with two sons who is abandoned by her lover and is forced to fend for herself and protect her family against her newfound lover’s alcoholism.

Thérèse Raquin (1867)

Thérèse Raquin was one of the first novels by Zola (he wrote it when he was only 27) and it received a lot of negative criticism. The writer worked hard to make it realistic and depict the hardships of daily life in Paris, but that did not please the critics. The novel is the story of Thérèse, a 21-year-old woman who is unhappily married to her cousin. Sex, imprisonment and animalistic tendencies are just a few of the main themes of this novel, often considered Zola’s first major work, despite the reviews he received when he first published it.

Au Bonheur des Dames (1883)

Translated into English as The Ladies’ Delight or The Ladies’ Paradise , this novel is the 11th in the Rougon-Macquart series. ‘Au Bonheur des Dames’ is the name of the department store (a quite recent phenomenon in Zola’s world) that is the main stage of the novel. It focuses around the stories of Denise Baudu, a young woman who has come to Paris and works at the department store, and Octave Mouret, the owner of the store. Zola describes the substandard conditions that Denise lives and works in, and the novel is based around the conflicts that arise as each character tries to rise up in the retail world and escape the grim lives they lead.

Become a Culture Tripper!

Sign up to our newsletter to save up to $1,200 on our unique trips..

See privacy policy .

Unmissable Attractions in the Loire Valley

30 Unmissable Attractions in Lille

The Top 10 Things To Do in Toulon, France

Unmissable Attractions in St Tropez

An Essential Guide to the Beautiful Porquerolles Island, France

The Top 17 Romantic Destinations to Visit in France

The Most Beautiful Beaches in Nice, France

20 Unmissable Attractions in Provence

8 Top Flea Markets and Thrift Stores in Marseille

The 8 Best Beaches to Visit in France

The 7 Most Beautiful Beaches in and Around Montpellier

The 11 Best Coastal Towns and Cities to Visit in France

Culture Trip Summer Sale

Save up to $1,200 on our unique small-group trips! Limited spots.

• Post ID: 374618
• Sponsored? No
• View Payload

Émile Zola was a French novelist, playwright, journalist, and the best-known practitioner of the literary school of naturalism. He was a major figure in the political liberalization of France and in the exoneration of the falsely accused and convicted army officer Alfred Dreyfus.

This list of books are ONLY the books that have been ranked on the lists that are aggregated on this site. This is not a comprehensive list of all books by this author.

1. Germinal

The novel is a bleak and realistic portrayal of coal miners' lives in 19th century France. The protagonist, a young man who starts work in a mine, becomes embroiled in the hardship and exploitation faced by the workers, leading to his involvement in a strike. The story explores themes of poverty, social injustice, and the struggle for workers' rights, while also providing a detailed depiction of mining life, from the dangerous work conditions to the close-knit communities.

2. Thérèse Raquin

A realistic novel.

"Thérèse Raquin" is a novel about a young woman who is unhappily married to her cousin, a sickly and selfish man. She embarks on a passionate and destructive affair with one of her husband's friends, leading to a series of tragic events. The novel explores themes of lust, guilt, and the psychological consequences of such immoral actions, set against the bleak backdrop of the Parisian underworld.

3. Drunkard

This novel follows the tragic life of an alcoholic laundress in Paris and her abusive husband. The narrative explores the devastating effects of alcoholism and poverty on both the individual and their family. Despite the protagonist's ongoing struggle to maintain her dignity and protect her two children, her life spirals out of control due to her addiction, leading to a heartbreaking conclusion. The book is a vivid and stark portrayal of the harsh realities of life for the working class in 19th-century Paris.

4. La Bête humaine

"La Bête humaine" is a psychological thriller set against the backdrop of the French railway system during the 19th century. The plot revolves around a railway worker who, despite being a seemingly ordinary man, harbors a dark, uncontrollable urge to kill. The narrative is a grim exploration of human nature, delving into themes of inherited violence, animalistic instincts, and the impact of industrialization on society. The novel is also filled with a variety of subplots involving jealousy, betrayal, and murder, all intricately tied to the characters' lives.

"Nana" is a novel that follows the life of a young woman in 19th century France who rises from the streets to become a high-profile courtesan. Her physical charm and manipulative nature allow her to maintain control over her high-status lovers, leading them to financial ruin and even death. The novel is a critique of the moral decay of the French society, highlighting the destructive power of lust and greed.

6. Au Bonheur Des Dames

The novel centers on the transformation of the Parisian retail world in the late 19th century, following the story of a young woman from the provinces who comes to Paris and finds work at a grand department store. The store, with its innovative marketing and sales tactics, represents the rise of capitalism and the modern consumer culture, dramatically altering the fabric of society. As the protagonist navigates the challenges of her new life, she witnesses the impact of the retail revolution on small businesses and the lives of the store's employees, all while exploring themes of ambition, love, and the relentless pursuit of progress.

7. L'argent

"L'argent" is a novel that delves into the complexities of the financial world in 19th-century Paris, focusing on the life of an ambitious man who becomes entangled in the speculative frenzy of the stock market. The narrative explores themes of greed, corruption, and the moral decay that often accompanies the pursuit of wealth. As the protagonist navigates through financial schemes and manipulations, the book provides a critical look at the banking system and the societal impacts of economic crises, ultimately portraying the dangerous consequences of unchecked financial speculation.

8. La Débâcle

The novel is a harrowing depiction of the Franco-Prussian War, particularly focusing on the catastrophic defeat of the French at the Battle of Sedan in 1870. It follows the experiences of a group of soldiers and civilians, illustrating the chaos and horror of war, as well as the societal and political turmoil that ensues. The narrative delves into the lives of its characters, exploring themes of fate, human suffering, and the disintegration of order, all set against the backdrop of a nation in the throes of defeat and revolution. Through vivid and unflinching realism, the book presents a critical examination of leadership, the futility of war, and the resilience of the human spirit amidst devastation.

9. The Earth

The book is a naturalistic novel that delves into the harsh realities of peasant life in 19th-century France. It portrays the struggles of the rural community through the lens of the Fouan family, who are grappling with inheritance disputes and the encroachment of modernity on traditional farming practices. The narrative exposes the brutality, greed, and sexual licentiousness that lurk beneath the veneer of pastoral simplicity, painting a grim picture of human nature and the social upheavals of the time. The novel's unflinching depiction of life's darker aspects is a testament to the author's commitment to exploring the human condition in its most raw and unvarnished form.

Purchase this book

Edit profile.

Émile Zola (April 2, 1840 – September 29, 1902) was an influential French novelist , the most important example of the literary school of naturalism , and a major figure in the political liberalization of France. Zola risked his career and even his life to expose French anti-Semitism in the matter of the Dreyfus Affair with the publication of his open letter "J'accuse." His defense of Dreyfus led to a conviction for libel, yet he continued to speak out against this miscarriage of justice.

• 1.1 Literary career
• 1.2 Dreyfus Affair
• 1.3 Final days
• 5 Major Works
• 7 References
• 8 External links

Whereas realism seeks only to describe subjects as they really are, naturalism also attempts to determine "scientifically" the underlying forces (i.e. the environment or heredity) influencing these subjects' actions. In this concern one can see the influence of evolution theory of Charles Darwin and the discussion about nature versus nurture. Zola's naturalistic works often include uncouth or sordid subject matter. They had a frankness about sexuality along with a pervasive pessimism, and they dealt with the lives of ordinary people. Zola's many novels exposed the dark harshness of life, including poverty , racism , prejudice , disease , and prostitution , by which he focused on social problems with the hope of catalyzing social reform.

Born in Paris , the son of an Italian engineer, Émile Zola spent his childhood in Aix-en-Provence and was educated at the Collège Bourbon (now called Collège Mignet). At age 18 he returned to Paris where he studied at the Lycée Saint-Louis. After working at several low-level clerical jobs, he began to write a literary column for a newspaper. Controversial from the beginning, he did not hide his disdain for Napoleon III, who used the Second Republic as a vehicle to become Emperor.

Literary career

More than half of Zola's novels were part of a set of 20 collectively known as Les Rougon-Macquart. Set in France's Second Empire, the series traces the "hereditary" influence of violence, alcoholism , and prostitution in two branches of a single family: The respectable (that is, legitimate) Rougons and the disreputable (illegitimate) Macquarts, over a period of five generations.

As he described his plans for the series, "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 all 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."

Zola's literary project in no small part resembled that of Honore de Balzac , whose Comedie Humaine signaled the emergence of a new literary movement, Realism . Zola was a leading proponent of the school of naturalism. Naturalism was an outgrowth of Realism , an attempt to take realism to new heights, or depths. Naturalism employed the same literary techniques as realism, but the rundown boarding house of Madame de Vaquer, which Balzac portrays in exhaustive detail in the first 30+ pages of Pere Goriot is positively palatial compared to the locations described in Zola and the other naturalists' texts. Naturalism is more "realistic" than realism in its efforts to portray the underside of society.

Zola and the painter Paul Cézanne were friends from childhood and in youth, but broke in later life over Zola's fictionalized depiction of Cézanne and the bohemian life of painters in his novel L'Œuvre ( The Masterpiece, 1886).

Dreyfus Affair

He risked his career and even his life on January 13, 1898, when his " J'accuse " was published on the front page of the Paris daily, L'Aurore. The paper was run by Ernest Vaughan and Georges Clemenceau, who decided that the controversial story would be in the form of an open letter to the President, Félix Faure. "J'accuse" accused the French government of anti-Semitism and of wrongfully placing Alfred Dreyfus in jail. Zola was brought to trial for libel on February 7, 1898, and was convicted on February 23. Zola declared that the conviction and transportation to Devil's Island of the Jewish army captain Alfred Dreyfus came after a false accusation of espionage and was a miscarriage of justice. The case, known as the Dreyfus affair , had divided France deeply between the reactionary army and church and the more liberal commercial society. The ramifications continued for years, so much so that on the 100th anniversary of Émile Zola's article, France's Roman Catholic daily paper, La Croix, apologized for its anti-Semitic editorials during the Dreyfus Affair.

Zola was a leading light of France and his letter formed a major turning-point in the Dreyfus affair. In the course of events, Zola was convicted of libel, sentenced, and removed from the Legion of Honor . Rather than go to jail, he fled to England . Soon he was allowed to return in time to see the government fall. Dreyfus was offered a pardon (rather than exonerated) by the government, and, facing a re-trial in which he was sure to be convicted again, had no choice but to accept the pardon if he wished to go free. By accepting it, he was, in effect, saying that he was guilty, although he clearly was not. Zola said, "The truth is on the march, and nothing shall stop it." In 1906, Dreyfus was completely exonerated by the Supreme Court.

Zola died in Paris on September 29, 1902, of carbon monoxide poisoning caused by a stopped chimney. He was 62 years old. His enemies were blamed, but nothing was proven, although decades later, a Parisian roofer claimed on his deathbed to have closed the chimney for political reasons. [1] He was initially buried in the Cimetière de Montmartre in Paris , but on June 4, 1908, almost six years after his death, his remains were moved to the Panthéon in Paris.

The biographical film The Life of Emile Zola won the Academy Award for "Best Picture" in 1937. The film focuses mainly on Zola's involvement in the Dreyfus Affair.

In January 1998, President Jacques Chirac held a memorial to honor the centenary of " J'Accuse ."

Les Rougon-Macquart is the collective title given to Zola's greatest literary achievement, a monumental 20-novel cycle about the exploits of various members of an extended family during the French Second Empire, from the coup d'état of December 1851, which established Napoleon III as Emperor through to the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War of 1871 which brought the Empire down.

Almost all of the main protagonists for each novel are introduced in the first book, La Fortune des Rougon. The last novel in the cycle, Le Docteur Pascal, contains a lengthy chapter tying up virtually all the loose ends from the other novels. In between, there is no "best sequence" in which to read the novels in the cycle, as they are not in chronological order and indeed are impossible to arrange into such an order. Although some of the novels in the cycle are direct sequels to one another, many of them follow on directly from the last chapters of La Fortune des Rougon, and there is a great deal of chronological overlap between the books; there are numerous recurring characters and several of them make "guest" appearances in novels centered on other members of the family.

All 20 of the novels have been translated into English under various titles (details of which are listed under each novel's individual entry), but some of the translations are out of print or badly outdated and censored. Excellent modern English translations are widely available for nine of the most popular novels in the cycle.

Germinal (1885) is the thirteenth novel in Zola's 20-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart. Usually considered Zola's undisputed masterpiece and one of the greatest novels ever written in the French language, the novel—an uncompromisingly harsh and realistic story of a coalminers' strike in northern France in the 1860s—has been published and translated in over one hundred countries as well as inspiring five film adaptations and two television productions.

The novel's central character is Etienne Lantier, previously seen in Zola's other masterpiece, L'Assommoir (1877), a young migrant worker who arrives at the forbidding coal mining town of Montsou in the bleak far north of France to earn a living as a miner. Sacked from his previous job on the railways for assaulting a superior—Etienne was originally to have been the central character in Zola's "murder on the trains" thriller La Bête humaine (1890), before the overwhelmingly positive reaction to Germinal persuaded him otherwise—he befriends the veteran miner Maheu, who finds him somewhere to stay and gets him a job pushing the carts down the pit.

Etienne is portrayed as a hard-working idealist but also a naïve youth; Zola's genetic theories come into play as Etienne is presumed to have inherited his Macquart ancestors' traits of hotheaded impulsiveness and an addictive personality capable of exploding into rage under the influence of drink or strong passions. Zola manages to keep his theorizing in the background and Etienne's motivations are much more natural as a result. He embraces socialist principles, reading large amounts of extremist left-wing literature and fraternizing with Souvarine, a Russian anarchist and political emigré who has also come to Montsou to seek a living in the pits. Etienne's simplistic understanding of socialist politics and their rousing effect on him are very reminiscent of the rebel Silvère in the first novel in the cycle, La Fortune des Rougon (1871).

Etienne also falls for Maheu's daughter, Catherine, also employed pushing carts in the mines, and he is drawn into the relationship between her and her brutish lover Chaval, a prototype for the character of Buteau in Zola's later novel La Terre (1887). The complex tangle of the miners' lives is played out against a backdrop of severe poverty and oppression, as their working and living conditions continue to worsen throughout the novel; pushed to breaking point, the miners decide to strike and Etienne, now a respected member of the community and recognized as a political idealist, becomes the leader of the movement. While the anarchist Souvarine preaches violent action, the miners and their families hold back, their poverty becoming ever more disastrous, until they are sparked into a ferocious riot, the violence of which is described in explicit terms by Zola, as well as providing some of the novelist's best and most evocative crowd scenes. The rioters are eventually confronted by police and the army, who repress the revolt in a violent and unforgettable episode. Disillusioned, the miners go back to work, blaming Etienne for the failure of the strike; then, in a fit of anarchist fervor, Souvarine sabotages the entrance shaft of one of the Montsou pits, trapping Etienne, Catherine, and Chaval at the bottom. The ensuing drama and the long wait for rescue are among some of Zola's best scenes, and the novel draws to a dramatic close.

The title, Germinal, is drawn from the springtime seventh month of the French Revolutionary Calendar, and is meant to evoke imagery of germination, new growth, and fertility. Accordingly, Zola ends the novel on a note of hope, and one which has provided inspiration to socialist and reformist causes of all kinds throughout the years since its first publication:

Beneath the blazing of the sun, in that morning of new growth, the countryside rang with song, as its belly swelled with a black and avenging army of men, germinating slowly in its furrows, growing upwards in readiness for harvests to come, until one day soon their ripening would burst open the earth itself.

By the time of his death, the novel had come to be recognized as his undisputed masterpiece. At his funeral crowds of workers gathered, cheering the cortège with shouts of "Germinal! Germinal!" Since then the book has come to symbolize working class causes and to this day retains a special place in French mining-town folklore.

Zola was always very proud of Germinal, and was always keen to defend its accuracy against accusations of hyperbole and exaggeration (from the conservatives) or of slander against the working classes (from the socialists). His research had been typically thorough, especially the parts involving lengthy observational visits to northern French mining towns in 1884, such as witnessing the after-effects of a crippling miners' strike first-hand at Anzin or actually going down a working coal pit at Denain. The mine scenes are especially vivid and haunting as a result.

A sensation upon original publication, it is now by far the best-selling of Zola's novels, both in France and internationally.

"Let us never forget the courage of a great writer who, taking every risk, putting his tranquility, his fame, even his life in peril, dared to pick up his pen and place his talent in the service of truth."— Jacques Chirac

"Zola descends into the sewer to bathe in it, I to cleanse it."— Henrik Ibsen

"Civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest."— Émile Zola

Major Works

• La Confession de Claude (1865)
• Thérèse Raquin (1867)
• Madeleine Férat (1868)
• Le Roman Experimental (1880)
• La Fortune des Rougon (1871)
• La Curée (1871–72)
• Le Ventre de Paris (1873)
• La Conquête de Plassans (1874)
• La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret (1875)
• Son Excellence Eugène Rougon (1876)
• L'Assommoir (1877)
• Une Page d'amour (1878)
• Nana (1880)
• Pot-Bouille (1882)
• Au Bonheur des Dames (1883)
• La Joie de vivre (1884)
• Germinal (1885)
• L'Œuvre (1886)
• La Terre (1887)
• Le Rêve (1888)
• La Bête humaine (1890)
• L'Argent (1891)
• La Débâcle (1892)
• Le Docteur Pascal (1893)
• Lourdes (1894)
• Rome (1896)
• Paris (1898)
• Fécondité (1899)
• Travail (1901)
• Vérité (1903, published posthumously)
• Justice (unfinished)
• ↑ Frederick Brown. Zola, A Life. (Humanity Press/Prometheus Bk; New Ed edition, 1997). ISBN 0333662121

References ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Brown, Frederick. Zola, A Life . Humanity Press/Prometheus Bk, 1997. ISBN 0333662121
• Hemmings, F.W.J. The Life and Times of Emile Zola . Bloomsbury Reader, 2013. ISBN 978-1448205202
• Schom, Alan. Emile Zola: A Biography . Henry Holt & Co, 1988. ISBN 978-0805007107

External links

All links retrieved February 13, 2024.

• Works by Émile Zola . Project Gutenberg.
• Émile Zola works : text, concordances and frequency list.
• The Rougon-Macquart Novels of Emile Zola (for English-speaking Readers) provides an American enthusiast's introduction, insights and synopses.

New World Encyclopedia writers and editors rewrote and completed the Wikipedia article in accordance with New World Encyclopedia standards . This article abides by terms of the Creative Commons CC-by-sa 3.0 License (CC-by-sa), which may be used and disseminated with proper attribution. Credit is due under the terms of this license that can reference both the New World Encyclopedia contributors and the selfless volunteer contributors of the Wikimedia Foundation. To cite this article click here for a list of acceptable citing formats.The history of earlier contributions by wikipedians is accessible to researchers here:

• Emile_Zola   history
• Germinal   history
• Les_Rougon-Macquart   history
• Naturalism   history

The history of this article since it was imported to New World Encyclopedia :

• History of "Emile Zola"

Note: Some restrictions may apply to use of individual images which are separately licensed.

• Writers and poets
• Pages using ISBN magic links

Pardon Our Interruption

As you were browsing something about your browser made us think you were a bot. There are a few reasons this might happen:

• You've disabled JavaScript in your web browser.
• You're a power user moving through this website with super-human speed.
• You've disabled cookies in your web browser.
• A third-party browser plugin, such as Ghostery or NoScript, is preventing JavaScript from running. Additional information is available in this support article .

To regain access, please make sure that cookies and JavaScript are enabled before reloading the page.

• History & Society
• Science & Tech
• Biographies
• Animals & Nature
• Geography & Travel
• Arts & Culture
• Games & Quizzes
• On This Day
• One Good Fact
• New Articles
• Lifestyles & Social Issues
• Philosophy & Religion
• Politics, Law & Government
• World History
• Health & Medicine
• Browse Biographies
• Birds, Reptiles & Other Vertebrates
• Bugs, Mollusks & Other Invertebrates
• Environment
• Fossils & Geologic Time
• Entertainment & Pop Culture
• Sports & Recreation
• Visual Arts
• Demystified
• Image Galleries
• Infographics
• Top Questions
• Britannica Kids
• Saving Earth
• Space Next 50
• Student Center
• Introduction

Les Rougon-Macquart

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

• JewishEncyclopedia.com - Emile Zola
• The Guardian - Émile Zola – on the run in Upper Norwood
• Émile Zola - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)
• Table Of Contents

Although he produced some 60 volumes of fiction, theory, and criticism , in addition to numerous pieces of journalism, during his 40-year career, Zola is best known for his 20-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart , which is “the natural and social history of a family under the Second Empire .” As the subtitle suggests, the naturalist goal of demonstrating the deterministic influence of heredity is fulfilled by tracing the lives of various members of the three branches of the Rougon-Macquart family. At the same time, the weight of historical moment is shown by limiting the action of the novels to one historical period, that of the Second Empire (1852–70), which was the reign of Napoleon III , the nephew and pale imitation of Napoleon Bonaparte . Finally, Zola examines the impact of environment by varying the social, economic, and professional milieu in which each novel takes place.

La Curée (1872; The Kill ), for example, explores the land speculation and financial dealings that accompanied the renovation of Paris during the Second Empire. Le Ventre de Paris (1873; The Belly of Paris ) examines the structure of the Halles, the vast central market-place of Paris, and its influence on the lives of its workers. The 10 steel pavilions that make up the market are compared alternately to a machine, a palace, and an entire city, thereby situating the market within a broader social framework. Son Excellence Eugène Rougon (1876; His Excellency Eugène Rougon ) traces the machinations and maneuverings of cabinet officials in Napoleon III’s government.

L’Assommoir (1877; “The Club”; Eng. trans. The Drunkard ), which is among the most successful and enduringly popular of Zola’s novels, shows the effects of alcoholism in a working-class neighbourhood by focusing on the rise and decline of a laundress, Gervaise Macquart. Zola’s use of slang, not only by the characters but by the narrator, and his vivid paintings of crowds in motion lend authenticity and power to his portrait of the working class. Nana (1880) follows the life of Gervaise’s daughter as her economic circumstances and hereditary penchants lead her to a career as an actress, then a courtesan, professions underscored by a theatrical metaphor that extends throughout the novel, revealing the ceremonial falseness of the Second Empire. Au Bonheur des Dames (1883; Ladies’ Delight ) depicts the mechanisms of a new economic entity, the department store , and its impact on smaller merchants. The sweeping descriptions of crowds and dry-goods displays justify Zola’s characterization of the novel as “a poem of modern activity.”

Germinal (1885), which is generally acknowledged to be Zola’s masterpiece, depicts life in a mining community by highlighting relations between the bourgeoisie and the working class. At the same time, the novel weighs the events of a miners’ strike and its aftermath in terms of those contemporary political movements (Marxism, anarchism, trade unionism) that purport to deal with the problems of the proletariat. Zola’s comparison of the coal mine to a devouring monster and his use of animal and botanical imagery to characterize the workers create a novel of epic scope that replicates, in modern terms, ancient myths of damnation and resurrection. A quite different work, L’Oeuvre (1886), explores the milieu of the art world and the interrelationship of the arts by means of the friendship between an Impressionist painter, Claude Lantier, and a naturalist novelist, Pierre Sandoz. Zola’s verbal style mirrors the visual techniques of Impressionism in word-pictures of Paris transformed by varying effects of colour, light, and atmosphere.

In La Terre (1887; Earth ) Zola breaks with the tradition of rustic, pastoral depictions of peasant life to show what he considered to be the sordid lust for land among the French peasantry. In La Bête humaine (1890; The Human Beast ) he analyzes the hereditary urge to kill that haunts the Lantier branch of the family, set against the background of the French railway system, with its powerful machinery and rapid movement. La Débâcle (1892; The Debacle ) traces both the defeat of the French army by the Germans at the Battle of Sedan in 1870 and the anarchist uprising of the Paris Commune . Zola superimposes the viewpoints of numerous characters to capture the vividness of individual vision while at the same time obtaining an overall strategic sense of the war. Finally, in Le Docteur Pascal (1893) he uses the main character, the doctor Pascal Rougon, armed with a genealogical tree of the Rougon-Macquart family published with the novel, to expound the theories of heredity underlying the entire series.

The Rougon-Macquart series thus constitutes a fictional family saga while providing a valuable sociological document of the events, institutions, and ideas that marked the rise of modern industrialism and the cultural changes it entailed. However, what popularity the novels maintain today is largely due to Zola’s unique artistry, a poetry of machine and motion, vitalized by the individual viewpoint, yet structured by vast networks of imagery that capture the intense activity and alienation of modern industrial society .

Zola’s novels had an immense impact on Western literature of the 20th century, from the existentialist novel and the New Novel in France to the works of the muckrakers in the United States . In their striking combination of visuality and movement, Zola’s novels can even be said to foreshadow the motion picture, for which they have proved admirably suited for adaptation; the pioneering version of La Bête humaine by Jean Renoir in 1938 and a big-budget rendition of Germinal by Claude Berri in 1993 are two examples. Above all, Zola’s writings endure on account of his forthright portrayal of social injustice, his staunch defence of the downtrodden, and his unwavering belief in the betterment of the human condition through individual and collective action.

9 Best Books Of Emile Zola

By: Author Christine Rogador

Posted on October 30, 2023

Are you planning on reading the best books of Emile Zola but don’t know where to begin? Well, we’ve got you covered!

Emile Zola, a French novelist , journalist, and playwright, had a profound impact on literature by championing naturalism – a movement dedicated to portraying life’s raw reality, including its social, economic, and psychological influences on human behavior.

Zola’s extensive body of work includes over 60 books, but his standout accomplishment is the 20-novel series known as Les Rougon-Macquart . This literary masterpiece immerses readers in the tumultuous history of a family during the Second French Empire.

Within these pages, Zola skillfully explores gripping themes such as class conflicts, human desires, morality, the role of genetics, and societal transformations.

Although each novel in the series can be read as a standalone story, they feature recurring characters and interconnected events, providing readers with a rich and immersive experience.

Emile Zola’s novels serve as windows to the past, providing a vivid and authentic glimpse into the world of his time. Here’s a list of some the best books of Emile Zola that you should read and enjoy.

Things you'll find in this article

1. Thérèse Raquin (1868)

2. germinal (1885), 3. l’assommoir (1877), 4. nana (1880), 5. au bonheur des dames (1883), 6. l’oeuvre (1886), 7. la terre (1887), 8. le rêve (1888), 9. la bête humaine (1890).

Thérèse Raquin is one of Émile Zola’s early and quite startling novels.

The story revolves around the life of Thérèse, who finds herself stuck in a loveless marriage with her cousin Camille, who’s not in the best of health. As fate would have it, she falls head over heels for Laurent, a friend of Camille’s. Together, they hatch a plan to get rid of Camille and start a new life together.

However, their dark deed leaves them haunted by guilt and paranoia, driving their love into a pit of hatred and violence. Thérèse Raquin is a gripping psychological thriller that delves deep into themes like adultery, murder, remorse, and madness.

Germinal is often considered Émile Zola’s masterpiece and a highly influential novel. It takes us to northern France in the 1860s, where coal miners struggle against harsh conditions, exploitation, and violence.

The story follows the rise of a socialist movement led by the idealistic Etienne Lantier, who belongs to the Rougon-Macquart family. Through its powerful and realistic narrative, Germinal sheds light on the social injustices and human suffering caused by capitalism.

This book is the 13th installment in Zola’s remarkable series, Les Rougon-Macquart .

This book is the 7th installment in the Les Rougon-Macquart series, and it’s one of Zola’s most heart-wrenching and true-to-life stories. The novel’s title, L’Assommoir, roughly translates to English as “The Stunner,” which is an allusion to the consequences of excessive alcohol consumption.

L’Assommoir delves into the life of Gervaise Macquart, a hardworking laundress trying to make ends meet in the gritty streets of Paris. Along her journey, she ties the knot with Coupeau, a roofer who turns to alcoholism following a tragic accident. To make matters worse, her abusive ex-husband, Lantier, resurfaces to haunt her. Gervaise’s life is a heartbreaking tale of poverty, hardship, violence, and addiction.

L’Assommoir is a poignant social drama that sheds light on the devastating impact of alcoholism and urban poverty on the lives of the working class.

Nana is the 9th book in the Les Rougon-Macquart series, and it’s one of Zola’s most talked-about works.

This book tells the story of Nana Coupeau, a stunning and alluring courtesan who knows how to use her charm and allure to control and sometimes ruin men from all walks of life.

Nana symbolizes the decadence and corruption of the Second Empire, and she’s also a victim of her own family’s issues. The book truly dives into critiquing the moral decline and hypocrisy of French society at the time.

Au Bonheur des Dames , or The Ladies’ Paradise in English, marks the 11th installment in the Les Rougon-Macquart series, showcasing Zola’s more optimistic and vibrant storytelling.

The book tells the tale of Octave Mouret, an innovative entrepreneur who pioneers a massive department store, ushering in a new era of consumerism and capitalism. In the narrative, we also follow the journey of Denise Baudu, a young saleswoman who works at Mouret’s establishment and courageously rebuffs his romantic pursuits.

Au Bonheur des Dames serves as a captivating and lively depiction of how urbanization, industrialization, and commerce transformed the landscape of Paris.

The title, when translated directly as The Work (like a piece of art), is usually presented in English as The Masterpiece – or sometimes, His Masterpiece .

This is the 14th novel in the Les Rougon-Macquart series, and one of Zola’s most personal and autobiographical works.

The book L’Oeuvre or The Masterpiece tells the story of Claude Lantier, a talented but unsuccessful painter who is obsessed with creating a masterpiece that will revolutionize the art world. He is also involved in a turbulent relationship with Christine, a young woman who becomes his model and lover.

The novel is a critique of the artistic movements of the time, such as Impressionism and Naturalism, and reflects Zola’s friendship and rivalry with Paul Cézanne.

La Terre , also known as The Earth in English, is the 15th novel in the Les Rougon-Macquart series by Zola. It is a quite intense and thought-provoking piece of literature.

La Terre dives into the lives of the hardworking folks in a rural Beauce village, where owning and working the land is everything – it’s where wealth and influence come from.

The story revolves around the Buteau family, caught up in a heated feud with their neighbors over a piece of land. It portrays the complexities of rural life, highlighting the struggles, greed, and resistance to change among the local folks.

La Terre is an eye-opening epic that lays bare the tough realities of life in the French countryside.

Le Rêve is the 16th novel in the Les Rougon-Macquart series, and one of Zola’s most romantic and poetic works. The title means “The Dream” in English.

It tells the story of Angélique, an orphan girl who is adopted by a couple of embroiderers in a cathedral town. She falls in love with Félicien, the son of a wealthy nobleman who opposes their marriage.

Angélique lives in a world of fantasy and imagination, inspired by the legends and symbols of the stained glass windows and tapestries in the cathedral. The book beautifully portrays the stark difference between Angélique’s idealism and innocence, and the harsh realism and corruption prevalent in the society she encounters.

This book marks the 17th installment in the fascinating Les Rougon-Macquart series, showcasing Emile Zola at his most thrilling and suspenseful.

La Bête Humaine (English: The Beast Within ) introduces its readers to Jacques Lantier, a locomotive engineer dealing with a hereditary madness that occasionally drives him towards violent impulses. His world becomes entangled with Séverine, the wife of his colleague Roubaud, who, with Jacques’s assistance, has committed a heinous crime.

As the story unfolds, Jacques and Séverine find themselves caught in a passionate affair, but their love is constantly threatened by Jacques’ inner turmoil and Roubaud’s simmering jealousy.

In this book, Zola dives deep into the human psyche, creating a compelling exploration of crime and passion, all set against the backdrop of the modern railway industry.

Hi, I’m Christine – a full-time traveler and career woman. Although I’m from the Philippines, my location independent career took me to over 40 countries and lived in 4 continents in the last 10 years, including France. A self-proclaimed Francophile, I love everything France.

Sharing is caring!

Biography of Emile Zola

Famous for chronicling life in nineteenth-century France, and infamous for his political activism and frank depictions of sexuality, Émile Zola was one of the most ambitious and influential writers of his generation. Today, he is widely known for the Rougon-Macquart Cycle, a series of novels that attempts to apply scientific and analytic principles to everyday life. Such ideas - particularly the empirical, cause-and-effect observation of society - are at the heart of the style of literature that Zola pioneered, known during both his time and ours as “naturalism.”

Zola’s early years were marked by misfortune. Zola’s father, an Italian engineer named Francesco Zola, died of pneumonia in 1847, and Zola’s mother Emilie would spend the next several years locked in litigation. The young Émile spent his childhood in the countryside of Aix-en-Provence. Here, he enrolled in the Collège Bourbon, a school he found unpleasant, but which introduced him to one valuable companion - his schoolmate and future colleague in the arts, painter Paul Cézanne.

The Zola family left Aix for Paris in 1858. After settling into the metropolis, Zola continued his schooling at the Lycée Saint-Louis. But he proved to be a poor student, twice failing his baccalauréat exams, and decided to try his hand at poetry instead of academics. In the meantime, he also worked as a clerk in the Canal Saint-Martin Customs House.

Zola’s early career was a time of self-discovery and precocious career moves. By 1865, he had arrived at some of the anti-dogmatic liberal principles that would sustain him through his artistic maturity: “I love the Renaissance and our own age, these skirmishes among artists, these men all of whom pronounce words hitherto unheard.” The young Zola wasn’t by any means lacking in commercial sense; he began working as a journalist (continuing in this profession, in some form, until the end of his days) and eventually became head of marketing at the publishing firm Hachette.

Yet literary fame was just on the horizon for Zola. After publishing the story collection Contes à Ninon (1864) and the novel The Confession of Claude (1865), he achieved a breakthrough with Therese Raquin (1867), a novel of adultery, intrigue, and murder. The novel was attacked as “putrid literature,” a gruesome tale little better than pornography. But for Zola, Therese Raquin was a determined and necessary investigation of psychology and personality. It also set the template, in a few respects, for the great novel project that soon consumed Zola’s abundant energies.

By 1868-1869, Zola had crafted a plan for a series of novels which would follow two families - the upper-class Rougons and the less exalted Macquarts - through the prosperity and tumult of the Second Empire period in French history. Questions of how heredity and environment shape the fates of individuals were to be Zola’s focus. The first Rougon-Macquart novel, The Fortune of the Rougons , appeared in book form in 1871. It was followed by novels such as The Kill (1872) and His Excellence Eugène Rougon (1876) which revolved around Paris’ upper classes.

Arguably, Zola’s novels of the lower classes brought him more resounding fame. A few of the most remarkable of these were The Drinking Den (1876), which discusses the ravages of alcohol among Paris’ lower-class tradespeople; Nana (1879), which charts the adventures of a notorious prostitute; and Germinal (1884), which describes a harrowing miners’ rebellion in the French provinces. Zola performed extensive research for these projects, and worked carefully to reproduce the dialects and idioms used by his uneducated subjects.

Despite Zola’s own politics, the Rougon-Macquart novels did not follow anything like a rigid ideology; rather, Zola revealed the vices and virtues of all walks of life, and almost all ends of the political spectrum. But after wrapping up the series with the pessimistic war novel The Debacle (1892) and the hopeful social statement Doctor Pascal (1893), Zola began a new series with more critical overtones. His trilogy Lourdes (1894), Rome (1896), and Paris (1898) investigates and occasionally repudiates the principles of the Catholic Church. This interest in religious ideology carried over into Zola’s final novel project, a group of works called The Four Evangelists , which he began in 1899 and remained uncompleted at his death.

Zola’s last decade is remembered not for his activities in the world of fiction, but for his role in one of the great political and nationalist controversies of his time. In December of 1894, an army captain named Alfred Dreyfus was convicted of treason against France and sentenced to life imprisonment. It soon became clear that the sentence was based on insufficient evidence, and on anti-Semitic disdain for the Jewish Dreyfus. Zola could not remain silent. In an open letter to the French government entitled J’Accuse (1898), the novelist leveled a series of accusations at the guilty parties in the mismanagement of the Dreyfus Affair, terming these men “spirits of social maleficence.” Zola was brought to trial for libel and forced into a year’s exile in England as a result of this letter.

On September 29, 1902, Zola suffocated in his bedroom due to a blocked chimney. It is unknown whether his death was an accident, or whether it was the result of an assassination engineered by anti-Dreyfusards. In any case, Zola died a hero to many Parisians. A crowd of 50,000 gathered for his funeral, and they marched along chanting the name of the novel that, for many readers today, is considered Zola’s resounding masterpiece: “Germinal! Germinal! Germinal!”

Study Guides on Works by Emile Zola

Germinal emile zola.

The novel is set during a tumultuous time in French history, when the country was in the throws of short-lived regimes and a series of revolutions. It is also during the height of the Industrial Revolution, which began in France later than it did...

• Study Guide
• Lesson Plan

L'Assommoir Emile Zola

Around 1868 Emile Zola had the idea of writing a series of novels that would be devoted to one family - Rougon-Macquart. The fates of the members of this family have been investigated for several generations. The first books from the series did...

The Ladies' Paradise Emile Zola

Commencing in 1870 and continuing through 1893, French novelist Emile Zola produced twenty novels which have come to be termed the Rougon-Macquarts series. These novels, which essentially consumed the writing passion of Zola over the course of...

The Masterpiece Emile Zola

L'œuvre is a French novel by Emile Zola, loosely translated as His Masterpiece or The Masterpiece . The Masterpiece was published as a serial in 1885 and as a novel by Charpentier in 1886. The title is a reference to the problems the protagonist...

Therese Raquin Emile Zola

One of Zola’s first full-length novels, Thérèse Raquin remains one of his best-known. When he sat down to write the story of Thérèse, her acquaintances, and her descent into murder and suicide, Zola was only twenty-seven years old. In 1866, he had...

BOSTON'S PREMIER ONLINE ARTS MAGAZINE

Book Interview: Translator Brian Nelson on Finally Hearing Émile Zola’s Voice in English

By Bill Marx

“Why read Zola now? Leaving aside sheer enjoyment of his narrative art, I’d say: because his representation of society’s impact on the individuals within it memorably depicts what it means to be a human being in the modern world.”

What first turned me onto the greatness of Émile Zola? In the late ’60s I read British novelist and critic Angus Wilson’s study of the French writer, and his description of the Rougon-Macquart cycle’s iconoclasm was bracing in those heady days of defying a dominating system and its stultifying enablers. Wilson portrayed Zola (1840-1902) as a rebellious spirit, a castigator of the privileged, an implacable opponent of repression, a crusader for truth, a connoisseur of the intractable. My favorite Wilson passage offers a representative jolt:

Then, as now, the average reader wanted a saccharine, a sugar-cake world; it could only be by bludgeoning and violence that he would be persuaded to assist at a black mass in which his sacred bourgeois creeds were recited backwards, his angels of virtue revealed as seven deadly sins, and the very Host of his self-esteem was spat upon. The strength of the greatest Rougon-Macquart novels lay in exactly this kind of assault and battery; an attack, planned with the greatest care and conscientious artistry by a writer whose devotion to the creed of art for art’s sake was by no means lip service, and carried out by a journalist of genius.

This image of Zola as no-holds-barred spitter upon self-esteem, a novelist who in his best work squared the circle of journalism and art for art’s sake, is what initially sent me scurrying to masterpieces such as L’Assommoir, La Terre, and Germinal . And I wasn’t disappointed — they are great, offering many more nuanced rewards than Wilson suggests. But most English translations left me dissatisfied. They came off as wooden, wordy, and starchy. Then I learned that passages from the original texts had been excised so that tender sensibilities would not be offended. And this antiquated approach continued with translations published into the ’50s. When would we feel the full blow of Zola’s bludgeon in English?

Émile Zola in 1902. Photo: Wiki Commons.

Now, thanks to the Oxford University Press World Classic series, English readers can get their Zola straight and true. Over the past 25 years the publisher has been releasing new, uncut translations (enhanced by translator and critic Brian Nelson’s smart, nonpedantic introductions and notes) of the 20 volumes in the Rougon-Macquart series, which follows the members of a family whose mix of disease and venality was conceived by its author from the onset to reflect breakthroughs in psychology and theories of heredity.

The cycle’s final volume, Doctor Pascal,  arrived late last year. (I emailed questions to translator Julie Rose about Zola’s wrap-up.) I have read some of the volumes with enormous pleasure and admiration, and they have complicated my idea of Zola’s brilliance. Yes, he’s a rabble-rouser in the Ibsenite mode, proclaiming the unvarnished truth as he thunders against the hypocritical savagery of a society in transformation. But after reading these nuanced versions I now see Zola as a towering artist/diagnostician of a sick society, a multifarious artificer who, as Nelson argues in his Émile Zola, A Very Short Introduction, was “a narrative artist: a craftsman, a storyteller, a fabulist.” Thanks to Nelson, Rose, and the other superb translators in the OUP series, English readers can finally hear all the registers of Zola’s astonishing voice, from the “sensory immediacy” of his descriptions to his grotesque realism and visionary zeal.

I emailed some questions to Nelson about how the new translations may change our appreciation of Zola’s fiction, the appeal of his novels for filmmakers, and which of his books fit the times we are living through best.

AF : Because of what was deemed their amoral or sensational elements, translations of Zola into English were often bowdlerized. My understanding is that some of the volumes in the OUP series are presenting Zola for the first time (in English) in uncut form. Does this change our understanding of him in any way?

Translator, academic, and critic Brian Nelson.

Brian Nelson : The story of Zola and his translators tells us a lot about how radical, how subversive a writer he was. He took aim at every sacred cow of French society — the Church, the political system, financial institutions, the Army, bourgeois family life. He opened the novel up to a new realm of subjects: working-class life, class relations, gender relations. And his work embodied a new candor and explicitness in the depiction of these subjects (especially in relation to the human body and female sexuality). The shock factor of his novels can be measured not only by the extent to which he was attacked by Establishment critics, but also by the forms of translation-censorship to which he was subject. If, for whatever reason, readers use late 19th-century (or some later) translations, they will gain little sense of the power of Zola’s vision and language. These translations (reprinted in recent times, unfortunately, by publishers wanting to avoid translation costs) were often abridged and replete with excisions and euphemistic lexical choices. Even the series of Zola translations published in the ’50s by Paul Elek are dated and relatively weak.

I think the availability of the whole of Les Rougon-Macquart in the Oxford World’s Classics series represents an enormous advance in the presentation of Zola to the English-speaking world. Not just in terms of completeness but also — at the risk of sounding immodest –in terms of the quality of the new translations, that is, their effective communication of Zola’s voice. Julie Rose’s very fine translation of Le Docteur Pascal , the first new translation since 1957, is a case in point!

AF :Are there any aspects of Zola’s genius that are lost or minimized in even the best of English translations?

Nelson : I think not. All I can do, however, is describe my conception of literary translation and my own practice as a translator. I hold the relatively traditional view that a successful translation lies in convincingly recreating a text as though it were written in the language of the translation, thereby producing in the new reader something as close as possible to the emotional and aesthetic impact of the original on its first readers. It’s about finding the text’s “voice.” The art of translation involves a multiplicity of exact choices about tone, texture, register, rhythm, syntax, echoes, connotations: all those factors that make up “style” and reflect the marriage between style and meaning. With Zola, it’s important to capture the density of his metaphoric language, the color and movement of his descriptions, the powerful rhythms of his narratives.

Each novel carries with it a slightly different set of challenges. My most recent translation for Oxford is of L’Assommoir (to be published later this year as The Assommoir ). The key thing with this great novel about slum life in Paris is to be aware of Zola’s astonishing invention of a narrative voice that absorbs into itself the thoughts and feelings of his working-class characters. It’s as if the characters themselves tell their own story. One of the challenges for the translator is to ensure that perspective is aligned with the colloquial style. The translator must make appropriate choices in terms of register and voice. Above all, the translator must avoid translating “up”: rendering in euphemistic or elevated language words and phrases belonging to a robustly colloquial register.

AF : In your excellent Émile Zola, A Very Short Introduction you talk about the writer’s subversiveness. Does Zola remain challenging today? You focus on his strengths as a mythopoetic writer to combat charges that elements in his novels, particularly regarding heredity, have become dated. Why do we need to read Zola now?

Nelson : Zola’s work is in many ways remarkably “undated.” In his 20-volume novel cycle, Les Rougon-Macquart (1871–93), he describes how the various members of the Rougon-Macquart family spread out through all levels of society; and through their lives he examines the social and cultural landscape of the late 19th century, creating an epic sense of social transformation. Zola was fascinated by change, and specifically by the emergence of a new mass society. Why read Zola now? Leaving aside sheer enjoyment of his narrative art, I’d say: because his representation of society’s impact on the individuals within it memorably depicts what it means to be a human being in the modern world. It’s important to note that the world we are living in now is simply a more evolved form of the 19th-century society Zola described. His evocations of the material and social fabric of late 19th-century France — social deprivation and social conflict, the birth of consumer culture, the dynamics of political life, the workings of the stock exchange, the growth of big cities, large-scale real estate speculation, changing gender relations — resonate strongly in our own societies.

A further point is that Zola is an important exemplar of what might be called “committed” writing. He was not committed in the sense that his work was systematically driven by political ideology. But he was committed to the principle of “truth” in art: integrity of representation; and this commitment was based on his conviction that the writer must be socially engaged. He was consciously, and increasingly, a public writer.

Nelson : There’s far more playfulness and craft in Zola’s novels than people sometimes assume (“elephantine” is an ill-informed stereotype). There’s a lot of humor: the scatological humor of Earth , a burlesque expression of the poetry — and never-ending fertility — of the Earth as Zola wished to evoke it; the satirical comedy of Pot Luck , Zola’s anatomy of bourgeois sexual hypocrisy, with its bedroom farce elements and theatrical use of space; the humor that informs the magnificent group scenes in The Assommoir : the wedding party’s visit to the Louvre, the Rabelaisian-carnivalesque description of Gervaise Macquart’s name day feast.

There’s also another form of play: the play of literary self-consciousness. By bringing out the poetic and visionary aspects of Zola’s novels, critics have done a lot to undermine stereotypes of him as a sensationalist writer fond of squalor and violence, or a stolid producer of novels that relied more on documentation than imagination. Reductive readings of his work have been further undermined by critics (like Henri Mitterand and Susan Harrow) who have noted the surprising ways in which his work prefigures themes and textual strategies of modernist literature. Harrow and Mitterand have shown how Zola’s frequent use of reflexivity (that is, the reflection of the work within the work) links him with 20th-century modernism (the railway line in La Bête humaine , for instance, becomes a metaphor for the narrative system itself).

AF : Zola’s novels have appealed to filmmakers, inspiring a number of first-rate films. In 1928,  Money  was made into a terrific silent film by Marcel L’Herbier. Would you say Zola — through his use of repeated images and motifs as well as his embrace of the sensational — anticipated cinematic storytelling?

Nelson : This is a rich topic. L’Herbier’s film is remarkable, as are André Antoine’s silent La Terre of 1921, Jean Renoir’s silent Nana of 1926, and his La Bête humaine of 1938. There’s also the silent Russian film, The New Babylon of 1929 (music by Dmitri Shostakovich), which deals with the 1871 Paris Commune, but which has a tangential relationship to Zola’s The Ladies’ Paradise. Zola’s novels have certainly fascinated filmmakers (there have been 80 or so cinematic adaptations of his novels). This is not simply because they are intensely visual, as you suggest, but also (as Leo Braudy has argued) because Zola was obsessed with observation (his novels are full of people observing, spying and eavesdropping), with the nature of observation, and the tension between involvement and detachment; this makes for a strong affinity with the aesthetic and epistemological nature of the cinema. It’s also worth noting, by the way, that in the eight years before his death in 1902, Zola became obsessed with photography, taking thousands of pictures with his 10 cameras and developing them in the basements of his three homes.

AF : You write about  Nana  and Zola’s conflicted attitudes to women, empathy mixed with misogyny. But what about race and empire? Does the series offer any observations on those topics? You argue that Zola felt himself to be an outsider, which explains his crusade against anti-Semitism in his demand for justice for Dreyfus. How far did that sympathy extend?

Nelson : The themes of race and empire play no significant part in the Rougon-Macquart series. I should note, however, that in his late novel Fécondité (1899), Zola advocated boundless procreation and colonial expansion as solutions to the problem of France’s falling birth rate. But generally speaking, I would stress the enlightened nature of his views. His crusade in defense of Dreyfus (which showed enormous courage) was a crusade against reactionary forms of nationalism and Catholicism; and the whole of Zola’s work after Les Rougon-Macquart , during the last 10 years of his life, can be seen as having been written in anticipation of and under the impulse of the profound social crisis embodied in the Dreyfus Affair. Essentially, Zola’s later works ( Three Cities and The Four Gospels ) set out a utopian vision of a new, revitalized, republican France; they extol the power of science, technology, education, and egalitarianism as means of overcoming religious constraint and social exploitation. It’s a vision that is (apart from Zola’s traditionalist view of the role of women) progressive and “modern.”

AF : Has the OUP complete Rougon-Macquart series stimulated interest in Zola beyond the academy? And do you have a Zola novel that you believe should receive more attention than it has? (Given the state of “global” finance — and the growing extremes between rich and poor — Money seems to me to be worth reconsideration.)

As for your second question, I’d like to speak up for Earth (which Julie Rose and I translated together). This novel, focused on French peasant life, has always been recognized as one of Zola’s finest achievements, but it seems to have fallen out of favor in recent years (though when Zola embarked on it, he said he felt it would be his favorite among his novels). Earth has an extraordinary epic sweep, and the pungency of Zola’s language is exceptional even within an œuvre celebrated for its robustness. Earth is stylistically interesting in that Zola proceeds by stringing clauses together, with scant use of conjunctions. The effect is to produce a relentless virile energy, sometimes bordering on breathlessness, sometimes amplified into boisterous hilarity, always sweeping the narrative along at breakneck speed. It’s a great novel.

In terms of topicality, yes, Money portrays a financial crisis (inspired by the collapse of a French finance house, the Union Générale) that is uncannily like those of recent times. Similarly, His Excellency Eugène Rougon , which describes the court and political circles during Napoleon III’s Second Empire, is surprisingly modern in its representation of the dynamics of the political: the scheming and the rivalries, the patronage and the string-pulling, and the manipulation of language for political purposes (“fake news” has a long pre-history!).

Brian Nelson is a professor emeritus in French Studies at Monash University, Melbourne. He is best known for his translations and critical studies of the novels of Émile Zola. In addition to Émile Zola: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2020), they include The Cambridge Companion to Zola (2007), Naturalism in the European Novel (1992), and Zola and the Bourgeoisie (1983), and translations, for Oxford World’s Classics, of L’Assommoir , The Belly of Paris , Earth (with Julie Rose), The Fortune of the Rougons , His Excellency Eugène Rougon , The Kill , The Ladies’ Paradise , and Pot Luck . He won the 2015 New South Wales Premier’s Prize for Translation. Other publications include The Cambridge Introduction to French Literature (Cambridge, 2015). Since 2020 he has been engaged, as co-editor and contributing translator, on a new edition of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time for Oxford World’s Classics.

[…] Pascal marked the first time that the 20-book cycle was available in print under one publisher. I spoke to Nelson, who contributed thoughtful introductions and notes to all the volumes, about the ways these new […]

Leave a Comment Cancel Reply

Recent posts, coming attractions: september 3 through 16 — what will light your fire, book review: “the de palma decade” — the making of a cinematic legend, september short fuses — materia critica, opera album review: first-ever recording of “shamus o’brien” — a long-forgotten delight by one of britain’s savviest composers, children’s book reviews: just in time for fall — multicultural perspectives.

Sorry, there was a problem.

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required .

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

Image Unavailable

• To view this video download Flash Player

Follow the author

Emile Zola: A Biography Hardcover – January 1, 1988

• Print length 303 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Henry Holt & Co
• Publication date January 1, 1988
• ISBN-10 0805007105
• ISBN-13 978-0805007107
• See all details

Editorial Reviews

From library journal, product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Henry Holt & Co; First American Edition (January 1, 1988)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 303 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0805007105
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0805007107
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.38 pounds
• Best Sellers Rank: #3,244,580 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books )

About the author

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more

Customer reviews

• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 5 star 60% 31% 8% 0% 0% 60%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 4 star 60% 31% 8% 0% 0% 31%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 3 star 60% 31% 8% 0% 0% 8%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 2 star 60% 31% 8% 0% 0% 0%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 1 star 60% 31% 8% 0% 0% 0%

Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.

• Sort reviews by Top reviews Most recent Top reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. please try again later..

Top reviews from other countries

• About Amazon
• Investor Relations
• Amazon Devices
• Amazon Science
• Sell products on Amazon
• Sell on Amazon Business
• Sell apps on Amazon
• Become an Affiliate
• Advertise Your Products
• Self-Publish with Us
• Host an Amazon Hub
• › See More Make Money with Us
• Amazon Business Card
• Shop with Points
• Reload Your Balance
• Amazon Currency Converter
• Amazon and COVID-19
• Your Account
• Your Orders
• Shipping Rates & Policies
• Returns & Replacements
• Manage Your Content and Devices

• Conditions of Use
• Privacy Notice
• Consumer Health Data Privacy Disclosure
• Your Ads Privacy Choices

Welcome to Gale International

You appear to be visiting us from United States . Please head to Gale North American site if you are located in the USA or Canada. If you are located outside of North America please visit the Gale International site.

Emile Zola (1840-1902)

Emile Zola, who lived during the second half of the nineteenth century, was among the most widely read and controversial French writers of his day. Because he challenged certain literary and philosophical conventions and, in the notorious Dreyfus affair, challenged the French government and military establishment as well, he became known as a reformer. Like many writers and thinkers of the late nineteenth century, Zola had high confidence in the capacities of science and scientific thought. Convinced that literature could better represent reality by simply observing and recording human behavior, Zola attempted to use the novel as a vehicle for demonstrating scientific truths in the way that a naturalist's notebooks describe the behavior of animal life. He has become known as a pioneer among the French naturalists, a group which is defined by the  Cyclopedia of World Authors  as advocates of literature that is "scientific in its approach, not imaginative.... Man, according to this point of view, is merely an animal among other animals, the product of his heredity and environment which can be studied almost as in a laboratory and his behavior then predicted."

Zola spent much of his early life in Aix-en-Provence, a coastal region of southwest France with a rich literary and historical tradition. When he was very young, his father died and his mother had to struggle to raise her family on limited resources. As a child, Zola first attended a private school where he was handicapped by the poor education that he received. When he transferred to a public institution, he had to complete an inordinate amount of work to keep pace with his classmates. While attending this second school, he became friends with Baptistin Baille, a future professor at the Ecole Polytechnique, and Paul Cezanne, who later became a prolific Impressionist painter. With his friends Zola often roamed the countryside, discussing literature and visiting places similar to ones that would later appear in his novels.

In addition to becoming familiar with the works of French writers Victor Hugo and Alfred de Musset, Italian poet Dante, and English playwright William Shakespeare, Zola became intrigued by contemporary scientific theories. Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, which argued that the members of species who best adjusted to their environment would be more likely to survive and pass on their traits, was among the scientific ideas that had a profound effect on Zola's writing. Conditions of life in Paris, where political and economic oppression resulted in much human suffering, seemed to validate Darwin's theory of life as a fight for survival.

As one of a number of people who believed that the tenets and methods of science were applicable to other disciplines, Zola proposed a new theory about literature which came to be known as naturalism. Zola and his followers believed they should not invent as much as leave a record of their times. He laid the groundwork for the naturalist movement in essays included in  The Experimental Novel  and in the preface to  La Fortune des Rougon,  the first in a series of novels that followed a single family line over several decades in the tradition of Honore de Balzac's  La Comedie humaine.  According to Philo M. Buck, Jr., in  The World's Great Age: The Story of the Century's Search for a Philosophy of Life,  Zola "armed himself with a notebook and went to the life of France to study it first hand, getting the facts that, when he had put them together, made his novels." The former journalist hoped to provide a study of man as he is more than a declaration of human imagination and ideals.

At the time that Zola began writing the  Rougon-Macquart  series, he was not doing well financially. For a time he served as a critic for the newspaper  Evenement  but was dismissed after writing several articles that were not well received by the public. During the time of hardship that followed, Zola supported himself by writing  Les Mysteres de Marseille,  an inconsequential work that appeared in a Marseillaise newspaper, and  Therese Raquin,  which was regarded by many critics as the author's first substantial piece of fiction. In the latter work Zola showed the effects of his exposure to contemporary science by allowing hereditary factors to play a great role in governing the behavior of his characters. In a preface to the novel the author writes that the people involved in the story are "dominated by their nerves, deprived of free will." As the story progresses, his title character becomes an adulteress, involves herself in a plot to murder her husband, and later commits suicide.

Zola intended for the  Rougon-Macquart  series to provide a forum in which he could further show how hereditary factors were the primary determinants of his characters' behavior. In an essay entitled  "Differences between Balzac and Myself,"  printed in Maurice Le Blond's second edition of  Oeuvres completes  and later in Elliott M. Grant's biography, Zola writes: "My work will be less social than scientific.... Instead of having principles (royalty, Catholicism), I shall have laws (heredity, innateness). I do not want, like Balzac, to influence the affairs of men, to be political, philosophical, moralistic.... A simple exposition of the facts concerning a family, showing the inner mechanism which makes it function."

Zola's focus on heredity spurred complaints from critics who thought that the author placed too much emphasis on uncontrollable forces in dictating the actions of his characters. A number also questioned the author's belief that fiction could serve as a scientific tool. Zola's exploration of human personality seemed to many to be brutally cold, fatalistic, and too clinically detached to be easily accepted. Benedetto Croce summarized in  European Literature in the Nineteenth Century,  "There hardly exists a history of modern French literature which does not take exception to Zola's attempt at `experimental fiction,' directed towards the establishment or verification of `scientific laws,' especially that of `heredity.'"

But Zola did not solely intend to use the series to explore the hypothetical effects of heredity; he also wanted the  Rougon-Macquart  novels to serve a prescriptive purpose. The novelist and the individual, he believed, should use art and other means to construct "the best society." If he could show that scientific laws of succession and environment determined human fortunes, then social workers, psychologists, and lawmakers would have a guide for understanding and, possibly, eradicating social ills. Zola therefore used the  Rougon-Macquart  series to tackle facets of society that desperately needed improvement. Producing approximately one book a year for the duration of the series, Zola attacked problems such as poverty, crime, and church corruption. In  The World's Great Age  Buck noted Zola's success as a reformer, stating that the author "painted with objective fidelity the ills of contemporary French society, roused the popular conscience, and... remedial legislation followed."

The opening volume,  La Fortune des Rougon  (  The Rougon-Macquart Family ), takes place during a social revolution after Napoleon Bonaparte's seizure of the French kingship in 1804. Zola uses this backdrop to comment on provincial politics as well as the alcohol addiction of Adelaide Fouque, one of his characters. Subsequent novels, such as  La Curee  (  The Kill ) and  La Ventre de Paris  (  The Markets of Paris ), deal with avarice and betrayal. The latter book was regarded by Oscar Cargill in  Intellectual America: Ideas on the March  as Zola's one "purely physiological" novel for classifying men as either thin or fat and describing how they survive. In this "astonishing novel," said Cargill, "... the Fat lived off the Thin.... Zola exploited for the first time successfully the reportorial method of assembling all the minutiae of his background for a studied effect, a method which to many minds is Naturalism itself."

L'Assommoir  (  Gervaise: The Natural and Social Life of a Peasant under the Second Empire; A Novel ) depicted the effects of alcoholism on a working-class family. Gervaise, the heroine, is lame as a result of being the daughter of a drunkard. With a limited income and no education, she spends most of her time at the corner bar. She marries, hoping to improve her life, and saves to buy a laundry shop. Her savings are depleted, however, when her husband sustains injuries after an accidental fall and has to recover in a hospital. Also an indulgent drinker, he eventually goes insane and dies in an asylum. Although Zola provided readers with a daunting portrait of the tragic consequences of alcoholism in the novel, he moved critics to have compassion on those who had become its victims. Concerning  L'Assommoir,  F. W. J. Hemmings remarked in his study  Emile Zola,  "By moving us as deeply with his recital of Gervaise's disillusions as any tragic poet with the history of kings... brought to beggary, Zola proved that, contrary to the classical doctrine, ...the fall of a sparrow is, in the artist's eyes, as pregnant with pity and terror as the fall of a conqueror."

Upon its release,  L'Assommoir  was maligned by some critics, including Albert Millaud who felt that it misrepresented the lower classes and contained unnecessarily coarse language. In the newspaper  Bien Public,  Millaud wrote a series of articles that attacked the novel. Zola then publicly defended  L'Assommoir  as an accurate work that relied upon the vernacular of the lower classes in order to make it convincing. The critic responded with a scathing assault not only on Zola's work but on the author himself. After the attack on his character, Zola wrote a second letter, part of which was transcribed in  Zola and His Time  by Matthew Josephson:  "Ah! if you only knew how my friends are amused by the amazing legends with which the public is regaled every time that my name is mentioned! If you knew how much the drinker of blood, the ferocious novelist, is an honest bourgeois, a man of study and art devoted to his principles and living quietly in his corner!  I deny no story about me. I go on working, and leave it to time and the good faith of the public to discover me amid the mass of stupidities which have been piled up." Such controversy served to increase the public's curiosity about the novel, and  L'Assommoir  became a huge success.

Published in 1885,  Germinal  spotlights Etienne Lantier, who arrives penniless in northern France and is hired as a miner. He lives in squalid conditions with a group of fellow employees, and--after coming to understand the miners' troubles--he rises to lead them in a revolt. According to Josephson in  Zola and His Time,  the novel "is perfect ...in representing the philosophy which Zola avowed: man as the pawn of mechanical forces (here, economic), the  thing,  primarily of his age and his social environment. Individual actions, individual destinies, hold their place only in a larger, more universal scheme of actions and reactions; they are part, in short, of a larger and general fate." Biographer Elliott M. Grant regarded the novel as Zola's finest work, stating: "With  Germinal,  Zola reached the top of the ladder of success and achieved his greatest literary triumph. Powerful, extremely poetic in its way, compassionate, indignant, dominated, in spite of the conflict between workers and management, by a strong sentiment of human solidarity, it consecrated Zola's reputation not only in France but in Europe."

In  The World's Great Age  Buck wrote that  Germinal  was Zola's best novel and the one most relevant to his times. Buck observed that Zola had written "more than an indictment of the capitalistic system, when one party must be wrong and the other right. What remains longest after reading is the humanity of the picture, and Zola's essential faith in the soundness at heart of the worker. He is not setting class against class... but examining the humanity of each of the warring classes, to see which fundamentally is the better fitted to survive. He asks for justice... because [the workers] are better fitted to reorganize society. In this way ...  Germinal  is the first great proletarian novel, but with its faith based on no economic or sociological theory." Irving Howe wrote in  The Critical Point on Literature and Culture  that the influence of  Germinal  is still being felt, having released "one of the central myths of the modern era: the story of how the dumb acquire speech. All those at the bottom of history, for centuries objects of manipulation and control, begin to transform themselves into active subjects, determined to create their own history."

Nana  introduces readers to Anna Coupeau, a young French woman who is performing in a musical play at the beginning of the novel. Although Nana has little talent as an actress, she captivates the mostly male audience with her voluptuous attributes. Anna makes money as a prostitute before becoming involved with a rich banker who provides her with a home in the country. Unconcerned with social conventions, she later has affairs with several people, including a count, a comedian who treats her badly, and a fellow prostitute.

"Zola's theme is ... the refined, perverse, destructive sexuality which is incarnate in the expensive courtesan," Martin Turnell related in  The Art of French Fiction: Prevost, Stendhal, Zola, Maupassant, Gide, Mauriac, Proust.  Gervaise's daughter, the nymphet who personified "the frenzied eroticism of the age," inherited her sexual disorder from a series of alcoholics. Here, Turnell said, Zola proved an "adept at playing the dual role of moralist and  voyeur....  Zola had very conveniently provided himself with an excuse for writing a whole novel about sexual relations in their most lurid form, and for describing the intimate  dessous  [underclothes] in the greatest detail on the pretext that he was `correcting' human nature." However, he said, the moralist had "the last word": "What is impressive is the novelist's perception of the essentially destructive nature of eroticism, of the profound connection between the frenzied promiscuity of the age and the death-wish."

Later books in the series continued to address what Zola considered problems in contemporary society.  La Joie de vivre  (  Life's Joys ), which chronicles a man's fruitless attempts at personal achievement, attacks anti-scientific attitudes. Published in 1886,  L'Oeuvre  (  The Masterpiece ) looks at how commercial concerns compromise aesthetics in the field of art. Cezanne interpreted the book as an attack on his work, and its publication damaged their longtime friendship irreparably.  La Bete humaine  ( The Human Brutes ) depicts the dehumanization of workers during an industrial revolution. Biographer Grant regarded the work as Zola's "most pessimistic, his blackest, his most nightmarish book." The author followed the effort with  L'Argent  (  Money ), a novel that details the seedier side of the stock market.

The tragedy of international strife and corruption during wartime was the target of  La Debacle  ( The Downfall ), the penultimate book of the series. The novel caused a great deal of controversy, and Zola was labeled "unpatriotic" for presenting a negative picture of the French army in its pages. Especially graphic were numerous scenes set in the makeshift military hospitals that were erected behind French battle lines. Characteristic of the initial response to the novel, according to Josephson in  Zola and His Time,  was a memo from a Bavarian captain which read: "It is the act of a bad Frenchman.... A German has come forward to reprimand him and teach him a lesson by rendering to the valiant soldiers who died for France the homage which Monsieur Zola should have accorded." Regardless of the cold reception that it received from some critics,  La Debacle  quickly outsold one of Zola's most popular books-- Nana --partly because of the controversy surrounding it.

Zola was supported by some critics who defended the accuracy of the portrait presented in  La Debacle,  and the novel had a contingency of admirers who ranked it with other great literary depictions of war. In his book,  Emile Zola,  Jean-Albert Bede compared  La Debacle  to Leo Tolstoy's epic  War and Peace:  "Sweepingly majestic in its depiction of the battlefields, crystal-clear in its reconstruction of strategic or tactical maneuvers, masterly in its handling of enormous masses of men, it shows Zola at his narrative and epic best." Underscoring Zola's hope for reform,  La Debacle  showed the defeat of a hated regime and presaged the construction of a more just and humane society.

Zola finished the series with  Le Docteur Pascal,  in which the title character examines the genealogy of his family, the Rougon-Macquarts. According to the novel, as quoted in Grant's biography, the doctor's studies reflect "the best and the worst, the vulgar and the sublime, flowers, filth, tears, laughter, the very torrent of life forever sweeping humanity along in its flow." Pascal falls in love with his niece Clotilde and intends to father a child with her in order to rejuvenate the family line. She gives birth to a son, but only after Pascal has died. Madame Felicite Rougon, who fears that the doctor's findings on her family's heredity will cause a scandal, destroys the studies after Doctor Pascal's death. Some critics felt that  Le Docteur Pascal  was a lackluster effort. Zola, however, defended his work in a preface to the novel that was quoted by J. G. Patterson in  A Zola Dictionary:  "It is a scientific work, the logical deduction and conclusion of all my preceding novels, and at the same time it is my speech in defence of all that I have done before the court of public opinion."

Zola was very meticulous in planning and producing the Rougon-Macquart series. To add authenticity to his stories, he learned about the lives of the lower class and put together a glossary of slang terms which his characters used in conversation. In 1972, John Porter Houston's  Fictional Technique in France, 1802-1927: An Introduction  praised the effective use of language in both the dialogue and narration of  L'Assommoir.  Zola investigated horse racing and the theater, which figured prominently in  Nana,  and researched the mechanics of a mining community to lend credence to the working-class lifestyle depicted in  Germinal.  In  Zola and His Time  Josephson outlined Zola's method for writing the books of the Rougon-Macquart series: "He would always start from some general idea, in imagining a novel; a social situation or class, a struggle, a group of individuals. Having chosen the temperament, the Rougon or Macquart he desired `to experiment upon' next, he would involve himself in a mass of documents, books, newspaper-clippings and even field expeditions... in connection with the social level or group he was picturing. For such work Zola had extraordinary power of assimilation." At the time he was writing  La Debacle,  Zola had gained such attention for his hands-on approach to creating novels that members of the Parisian media, as well as his admirers, often hindered him when he was trying to do research.

In regard to Zola's writing, Henry James was among the critics who generally agreed with the author's role as a social critic who risked being called "tasteless" in order to make readers aware of the forces that impinged on their daily lives. He wrote in  Notes on Novelists, with Some Other Notes,  "To make his characters swarm, and to make the great central thing they swarm about `as large as life,'... that was the secret he triumphantly mastered. Add that the big central thing was always some highly representative institution or industry of the France of his time, some seated Moloch of custom, of commerce, of faith, lending itself to portrayal through its abuses and excesses, its idol-face and great devouring mouth, and we embrace the main lines of his attack."

James partly agreed with those who objected to Zola's depiction of human nature as inescapably indecent, however. The critic maintained in  The House of Fiction,  "Nothing tends more to compromise [realism] than to represent it as necessarily allied to the impure." He also questioned the authority on which Zola based his view of nature "as a combination of the cesspool and the house of prostitution" and "foulness rather than fairness as the sign we should know her by." James declared that "this is his great trouble and the weak point of his incontestably remarkable talent." Referring to  Nana  as an example in  The House of Fiction,  he noted, "Never was such foulness so spontaneous and so complete, and never was it united with qualities so superior to itself and intrinsically so respectable."

Some critics acknowledged that Zola's unyielding depictions of the lower class served a purpose. In 1953, V. S. Pritchett wrote in  Books in General  that Zola gave dignity even to those characters who could not rise by the strength of inner nobility out of their "hells" by not belittling them for their condition. Said Pritchett, "Human beings have the right...to be incurable. Zola's sense of corruption was, no doubt, based on specious scientific theories; but it was a larger, more humane sense than the Puritan moralist's trite preaching of domestic virtue and the merits of the savings bank."

Some critics, in fact, pointed out that the author's hard-line approach to naturalism changed throughout his career. In  The World's Great Age  Buck commented: "Zola never ceased to call himself a naturalist. But he... discovered, through it, perhaps, a philosophy of life that has less connection with Zola the man of science.... And above all, because of his minute social studies, he acquired a faith in human nature, a belief in its essential soundness, that [would] make him a defender of the oppressed." Critics have long recognized the irony of the fact that when Zola's novels succeed as masterpieces it is because they do not strictly follow his theories of literary naturalism. Edmund Gosse explained in  The Collected Essays of Edmund Gosse: French Profiles  that although Zola "tried to write books as scientific as anything by [Louis] Pasteur or Claude Bernard, ...his innate romanticism would break through." Support for this view, reasoned Gosse, exists in the unchecked romanticism of Zola's short stories, published before he began the series.

Opinions concerning the validity of Zola's scientific ideals often overshadowed discussion of his novels as well-crafted works of art. Late in the author's life, critics began to comment on the masterful blend of precise description and poetic language in his works. Like other critics, Edward Sackville-West noted in  Inclinations  that Zola was a master of poetic symbolism that could invest simple images with a mythic power. He wrote, "Zola is famously at his best when he allows his imagination to brood over some one thing--the staircase in  Pot-Bouille,  the mineshaft in  Germinal ...until it assumes the monstrous proportions of a nightmare or an hallucination." In the  Rougon-Macquart  series, Zola had produced "a solidly established formal scheme given moment by emotional force and life by shimmering atmosphere--an Impressionist painting of the highest order. It is not `Naturalism' but impressionistic technique which explains Zola's greatness," Wilson claimed.

Plays by Zola, many of them adapted from his fiction, were shaped by the same naturalist aesthetic. Irritated by the optimism of popular theatre, Zola championed "slice of life" drama presented with a minimum of artifice. The stage, like the novel, could be an examination table on which social and psychological forces in action could be scrutinized. Some critics considered his plays, like his novels, pornographic. Sackville-West explained: "The best contemporary critics...were so outraged by the vulgarity of his style and his plots that they failed to perceive the rare epic quality of his imagination; and they firmly implanted in the public mind the image of a gloomy pornographer who thought the very worst of people in general and of his countrymen in particular."

Late in his life, Zola used his skill and reputation as a writer to lash out against injustice in the military. On January 13, 1898, the newspaper  L'Aurore  published a twenty-page open letter to the president of France in which Zola maintained the innocence of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish soldier convicted of treason. The paper's circulation skyrocketed from about forty thousand to three hundred thousand on that day. Speaking directly to the president and the members of the military who had testified against Dreyfus, he accused them of perjury. There was an immediate response from the public and the government. Gorham Munson, writing in  12 Decisive Battles of the Mind: The Story of Propaganda during the Christian Era,  attributed the letter's success to the factors of "surprise, audacity, [and] challenge." Munson continued, "Zola accused the War Ministry and the General Staff of the Army of a gross miscarriage of justice and of shocking efforts to conceal the miscarriage.... He dared the accused to bring him to trial for breaking the Libel Laws." Unable to ignore such a challenge, the government charged Zola with libel, and the Dreyfus issue was brought into civil court, ultimately leading to a new and fair trial for the captain. Dreyfus was exonerated of all charges and reinstated largely due to the efforts of Zola, who was hailed as a public hero and a spokesman for the human conscience.

Although Zola had works published after 1893, none of them matched the success of his  Rougon-Macquart  novels.  Les Quatre Evangiles  ("Four Gospels"), a tetralogy, was Zola's final work; it expressed his personal doctrines for eradicating social ills. In the fall of 1902, Zola was writing  Justice,  the last volume of the four-part series, but passed away before its completion. One night before going to bed he lit the fireplace in his Paris home. On the next day both he and his wife were found unconscious, suffocated by fumes from a defective chimney. Efforts to revive Zola did not succeed. Though much maligned during his life for his views, he was honored with a state funeral and eulogized as a national hero by Nobel prize-winning writer Anatole France. He was buried in Paris; in 1908 his ashes were reinterred in the Pantheon in Rome.

Zola's achievements assured him of a permanent place in the literary history of France and of the entire Western world. In Zola's works were the foundations for literary naturalism, the new journalism, and the use of cinematic techniques in fiction. His view of human nature and society derived from evolutionary theory, his emphasis on the non-heroic figure or the antihero, and his concern for modern social problems, particularly those experienced by the lower classes, affected a number of works that were written after his death. According to Josephson in  Zola and His Time,  literature written after the author's death did not live up to the precedent that Zola had set: "In the new directions assumed, one sees only in the rarest and briefest instances that `energy' which is an eternal quality of great art; that combative vigor, that sheer  puissance,  which was the most signal and unforgettable trait of Emile Zola."

From: " Emile Zola ."  Gale Literature: Contemporary Authors , Gale, 2009.

FURTHER READING

• Baguley, David,  Naturalist Fiction: The Entropic Vision,  Cambridge University Press, 1990.
• Baguley, editor,  Critical Essays on Emile Zola,  G. K. Hall, 1986.
• Beach, Joseph Warren,  The Twentieth-Century Novel: Studies in Technique,  Prentice-Hall, 1932.
• Bede, Jean-Albert,  Emile Zola,  Columbia University Press, 1974.
• Bell, David F.,  Models of Power: Politics and Economics in Zola's "Rougon-Macquart,"  University of Nebraska Press, 1988.
• Berg, William J.,  The Visual Novel: Emile Zola and the Art of His Times,  Pennsylvania State University Press (University Park, PA), 1992.
• Berg, William J., and Laurey K. Martin,  Emile Zola Revisited,  Twayne (New York City), 1992.
• Block, Haskell M.,  Naturalistic Triptych: The Fictive and the Real in Zola, Mann, and Dreiser,  Random House, 1970.
• Brown, Frederick,  Zola: A Life,  Johns Hopkins University Press (Baltimore), 1996.
• Buck, Philo M., Jr.,  The World's Great Age: The Story of a Century's Search for a Philosophy of Life,  Macmillan, 1936, pp. 282-305.
• Cargill, Oscar,  Intellectual America: Ideas on the March,  Macmillan, 1941.
• Carter, Lawson,  Zola and the Theater,  Presses Universitaires de France, 1963, pp. 207-11.
• Case, Frederick Ivan,  La Cite ideale dans travail d'Emile Zola,  University of Toronto Press, 1974.
• Croce, Benedetto,  European Literature in the Nineteenth Century,  Knopf, 1924.
• Dictionary of Literary Biography,  Volume 123: Nineteenth-Century French Fiction Writers: Naturalism and Beyond, 1860-1900,  Gale, 1992.
• Gosse, Edmund,  The Collected Essays of Edmund Gosse: French Profiles,  Volume 4, Heinemann, 1913, pp. 125-47.
• Grant, Elliott M.,  Emile Zola,  Twayne, 1966.
• Guieu, Jean-Max, and Alison Hilton, editors,  Emile Zola and the Arts,  Georgetown University Press, 1988.
• Hemmings, F. W. J.,  Emile Zola,  Clarendon Press, 1953, reprinted, Oxford University Press, 1970.
• Hemmings,  The Life and Times of Emile Zola,  Scribners, 1977.
• Hewitt, Winston,  Through Those Living Pillars: Man and Nature in the Works of Emile Zola,  Mouton, 1974.
• Houston, John Porter,  Fictional Technique in France, 1802-1927: An Introduction,  Louisiana State University Press, 1972, pp. 62-94.
• Howe, Irving,  The Critical Point on Literature and Culture,  Horizon, 1973, pp. 59-76.
• Howells, W. D.,  Criticism and Fiction and Other Essays,  edited by Clara Marburg Kirk and Rudolph Kirk, New York University Press, 1959.
• International Dictionary of Theatre,  Volume 2: Playwrights,  St. James Press, 1994.
• James, Henry,  Notes on Novelists, with Some Other Notes,  Scribners, 1914, reprinted in  The Art of Fiction and Other Essays by Henry James,  Oxford University Press, 1948, pp. 154-80.
• James, Henry,  The House of Fiction: Essays on the Novel,  edited by Leon Edel, Rupert Hart-Davis, 1957, pp. 274-80.
• Josephson, Matthew,  Zola and His Time,  Macaulay, 1928.
• King, Graham,  Garden of Zola: Emile Zola and His Novels for English Readers,  Barnes & Noble, 1978.
• Knapp, Bettina,  Emile Zola,  Ungar, 1980.
• Lapp, J. C.,  Zola before the "Rougon-Macquart,"  University of Toronto Press, 1964.
• Lethbridge, Robert, and Terry Keefe, editors,  Zola and the Craft of Fiction,  Leicester University Press, 1990.
• Mossman, Carol A.,  Politics and Narratives of Birth Gynocolonization from Rousseau to Zola,  Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1993.
• Munson, Gorham,  12 Decisive Battles of the Mind: The Story of Propaganda during the Christian Era,  Greystone Press, 1942, pp. 141-59.
• Nelson, Brian,  Emile Zola: A Selective Analytical Bibliography,  Grant & Cutler, 1982.
• Patterson, J. G.,  A Zola Dictionary: The Characters of the Rougon-Macquart Novels of Emile Zola,  Dutton, 1912.
• Priestly, J. B.,  Literature and Western Man,  Harper, 1960.
• Pritchett, V. S.,  Books in General,  Chatto & Windus, 1953, pp. 110-22.
• Richardson, Joanna,  Zola,  St. Martin's Press, 1978.
• Sackville-West, Edward,  Inclinations,  Secker & Warburg, 1949, pp. 199-204.
• Schor, Naomi,  Zola's Crowds,  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.
• Symons, Arthur,  The Symbolist Movement in Literature,  revised edition, Dutton, 1919, pp. 162-79.
• Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism,  Gale, Volume 1, 1978, Volume 6, 1982, Volume 21, 1986, Volume 41, 1991.
• Turnell, Martin,  The Art of French Fiction: Prevost, Stendhal, Zola, Maupassant, Gide, Mauriac, Proust,  Hamish Hamilton, 1959, pp. 140-79.
• Untermeyer, Louis,  Makers of the Modern World,  Simon & Schuster, 1955, pp. 156-64.
• Vizetelly, Ernest A.,  Emile Zola: Novelist and Reformer,  R. West, 1904.
• Walcutt, C. C.,  American Literary Naturalism, A Divided Stream,  Greenwood, 1973.
• Walker, Philip,  Zola,  Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985.
• Walker,  "Germinal" and Zola's Philosophical and Religious Thought,  John Benjamins, 1984.
• Wilson, Angus,  Emile Zola: An Introductory Study of His Novels,  Secker & Warburg, 1964.

PERIODICALS

• American Scholar,  summer, 1997, pp. 461-64.
• Atlantic,  August, 1903, pp. 193-210; November, 1904, pp. 710-12.
• Bookman,  December 1901; November, 1902, pp. 400-50.
• Cahiers de la Quinzaine,  Volume 4, Number 5, 1902, p. 144.
• Choice,  January, 1997, p. 859.
• Current Literature,  November, 1902, pp. 526-28.
• French Review,  March, 1980, p. 613.
• Hispania,  Number 1, 1968, pp. 424-32.
• Indiana,  December 18, 1902, pp. 3023-26.
• Library Journal,  September 15, 1996, p. 81.
• London Review of Books,  September 5, 1996, p. 7.
• Modern Language Journal,  September, 1979, p. 307.
• North American Review,  July, 1880, pp. 79-88.
• Living Age,  November 8, 1902, pp. 376-78.
• Mosaic,  Volume 5, Number 3, pp, 179-87.
• New Statesman & Society,  June 7, 1996, p. 39.
• New Yorker,  June 10, 1967, pp. 139-41.
• Popular Science,  January, 1900, p. 388.
• Review of Research,  Number 62, 1971, pp. 283-88.
• Saturday Review,  April 5, 1969, pp. 38-39.
• Times Literary Supplement,  March 30, 1967, p. 264; March 21, 1975, p. 311; October 3, 1980, p. 1107; June 28, 1984, p. 730; April 11, 1986, p. 396; October 9, 1987, p. 1096; December 4, 1987, p. 1354.
• Washington Post Book World,  July 28, 1996, p. 13.
• Yale French Studies,  (special issue on Zola) No. 42, 1969.

You might also be interested in...

Nikolai gogol.

Discover the enigmatic life of Nikolai Gogol and unravel the mysteries of his life and mind.

Shirley Jackson

Explore the life of Shirley Jackson and gain a deeper understanding of her chilling narratives that continue to captivate.

R. K. Narayan

Journey through the life of R.K. Narayan and delve into the cultural richness that inspired his capivating stories.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Dive into the fascinating life of Fyodor Dostoevsky and uncover the inspiration behind his gripping tales.

Dante Alighieri

Embark on a pilgrimage through the life of Dante Alighieri and uncover the influences that shapes his poetic vision.

Tim O'Brien

Discover the impact of war on literature through the life and experiences of Tim O'Brien.

Mary Shelley

Uncover the inspirations and struggles of Mary Shelley, the visionary author behind "Frankenstein".

EXPLORE OTHER WESTERN EUROPEAN AUTHORS

RETURN TO DATABASES EXPLORED (LITERATURE)   |    ABOUT GALE DATABASES

REQUEST A FREE TRIAL    |    CONTACT YOUR LOCAL GALE REPRESENTATIVE    |    SUPPORT AND TRAINING

JAVASCRIPT IS DISABLED. Please enable JavaScript on your browser to best view this site.

The Best Picture Project

A film lover's journey through every oscar-winning best picture in chronological order.

• About the Project
• About the Film Lover
• Theatre Set-Up
• Poster Gallery
• The Winners

The Life of Emile Zola (1937)

I’m referring to the Dreyfus affair , but before that explosive event occurs we are introduced to the man who would eventually write about it and change the course of history with his open letter published in a Paris newspaper, “I Accuse!” (“J’accuse …!”). It should be mentioned that while this film is a biography and the second consecutive Best Picture in that genre, it is understood from the start, as with The Great Ziegfeld , that poetic license is firmly in place. After the main titles, a full-screen text card appears with a disclaimer that was likely written by a team of Warner Bros. lawyers:

“The production has its basis in history. The historical basis, however, has been fictionalized for the purposes of this picture and the names of many characters, many characters themselves, the story, incidents and institutions, are fictitious. With the exception of known historical characters, whose actual names are herein used, no identification with actual persons, living or dead, is intended or should be inferred.”

Kinda trips off the tongue like the fine print in a legal contract, doesn’t it?

We first meet young Zola with his close friend Paul Cezanne (Vladimir Sokoloff) when they are struggling roommates during the Bohemian days of Paris in 1862. They burn popular novels in their small stove to keep warm while they vow to set the world on fire by painting and writing about the truth. The room fills with smoke, and Cezanne opens a window so they can breathe. It wasn’t until the end of the film that I realized this was perhaps a foreshadowing of Zola’s own demise.

Paul Muni as Emile Zola and Vladimir Sokoloff as Paul Cezanne.

Paul Muni gives a terrific performance as the title character, taking the renowned author from his early 20s to his early 60s. The makeup, hair, and costumes help a great deal, but Muni is quite convincing at each stage of development. It’s worth noting that the scenes were shot in reverse chronological order, beginning with the “old” Zola and ending with the first scene described above. Muni required less time in his makeup chair as production went on. He received an Oscar nomination for this role, having just won the year prior for The Story of Louis Pasteur . And he starred the same year as Zola in another Best Picture contender, The Good Earth , opposite Luise Rainer, who earned her second consecutive award as Best Actress for that film. To say that Muni’s career was “hot” at that moment would be an understatement.

We witness Zola’s rise to prominence and fame after that. His first novel is called Nana , and the title character is played on screen with poignant weariness by Erin O’Brien Moore. It’s an exposé on the seedy underside of Parisian life as seen through the eyes of a prostitute. One successful book after another follows, with each of them revealing shocking and often unpleasant truths about the state of the world around him. Zola marries Alexandrine, portrayed as a warm and loving spouse by Gloria Holden, fresh from her memorable turn as Dracula’s Daughter in 1936.

Ultimately, there is a falling-out between Zola and Cezanne. The latter visits the celebrated novelist to say he’s leaving Paris for the country and observes that Zola has become rich, fat, and sedentary in his ways, the very things they rebelled against in their youth. Zola doesn’t quarrel with the assessment. Instead, he quietly asks his old friend if he’ll write to him, and Cezanne reflects for a moment, then replies, “No, … but I will remember.”

Gale Sondergaard and Joseph Schildkraut as Lucie and Alfred Dreyfus.

Much of the story after that is devoted to the Dreyfus affair, and we are first introduced to Captain Alfred Dreyfus, played with noble conviction by Josesph Schildkraut in an Oscar-winning performance, and his devoted wife Lucie, portrayed by another recent Oscar-winner Gale Sondergaard. For me, Sondergaard is the heart of this film. I was more impressed and moved by her fine work here than with all other performances, and there are quite a few good ones.

The plot kicks into high gear when Captain Dreyfus is wrongfully accused of treason. It should be pointed out that much of the motivation behind this willful act was stripped clean by order of studio head Jack Warner. Dreyfus, you see, was a Jew, and there is only one on-screen reference to it in the form of a descriptive profile reviewed by the corrupt French army officers as they plot their evil course. It’s written under Dreyfus’s name on a piece of paper. Jack Warner had all other instances of the word “Jew” stricken from the screenplay, fearing it too controversial at the time, with rising fear and resentment and a war looming in Europe.

This is infuriating from today’s perspective, but perhaps removing the specifics of an antisemitic motive helped make the injustice more universal, and it won audiences over with a reminder of how established governments and their military regimes can indeed become corrupt and turn on any of us, at any time, for any reason.

The officers, led by Major Henry (an effectively menacing Robert Warwick), follow through with their accusation of Dreyfus even after Colonel Picquart (Henry O’Neill) discovers the real traitor, Major Walsin-Esterhazy (Robert Barrat). Dreyfus is found guilty, then transported for life and imprisoned on Devil’s Island, a remote penal colony in French Guiana. All the while, we see Zola, who is indeed rich, fat, and sedentary, just as his friend Cezanne observed. Content to rest on his past laurels, Zola is annoyed hearing so much about the Dreyfus case in the news, and it isn’t until Dreyfus’s wife Lucie (Sondergaard) shows up, imploring him to help, that he heeds the call. After years of hoping and hunting, she has obtained copies of the letters identifying the real traitor, and she won’t rest until her husband is released from his wrongful imprisonment.

Knowing full well what these accusations will cost him, Zola accepts the challenge. He comes alive again and finds new purpose. After he researches the facts and prepares an explosive statement, his open letter “I Accuse!” is published in the paper. For all intents and purposes, the second half of this movie shifts into a powerful courtroom drama. Zola is arrested and charged with libel. His attorney (Donald Crisp) battles in vain with a judge who won’t allow the closed Dreyfus case to be submitted by the defense as evidence while a string of military officers perjure themselves on the stand. It’s the perfect example of power over truth. Ultimately, Zola is found guilty and sentenced to a year in jail. Before he is taken away, he flees Paris for London, where he continues to write as a fugitive, stirring up widespread resentment. The French government proceeds to crumble over this botched resolution of the Dreyfus affair until a new army administration steps in and cleans house. As a result, the evil Major Henry commits suicide while other colluding officers resign or flee the country. Dreyfus is at long last released, and Zola receives a full pardon. But on the eve of Dreyfus’s public exoneration, Zola tragically succumbs to carbon-monoxide poisoning from a leaky stove in his house.

This is a good story. The courtroom scenes in particular stir the blood. So does the emotional climax when an emaciated Dreyfus passes in utter disbelief for the last time through the iron bars of his remote island prison. But it’s a trio of actresses—Gale Sondergaard, Gloria Holden, and Erin O’Brien Moore—that anchor the drama and give this movie its heart. The Life of Emile Zola is a well-crafted film with excellent performances and a hopeful message that truth and justice will prevail in the end. As storm clouds gathered in 1937, foreshadowing a second global war in Europe, I can only imagine audiences embracing this sentiment wholeheartedly.

The Life of Emile Zola

The Life of Emile Zola (1937) — 2 Comments

I guess it doesn’t pay to multi-task. I missed the carbon dioxide piece, but I did catch his comments about whether there would be a tomorrow for his work. That gave me a hint might not see the sunrise.

I found the Jew reference in the movie jarring. It sort of came out of nowhere, which made it more pronounced for me.

Paul Muni certainly did justice to Pasteur and Zola. I enjoyed seeing the two back to back.

Muni is such a good actor! He caries this film (and several others from that era) so well. It’s interesting that the reference to Dreyfus being Jewish jarred you. I kept waiting for it myself, because I knew about the famous case and didn’t understand at first why it wasn’t made more obvious as a driving factor. It wasn’t until I dug around and discovered that Jack Warner had intentionally wanted it downplayed for general audiences in that era. I can’t imagine seeing this film in 1937, knowing how the Nazis were on the rise in Europe. Scary stuff.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

HTML tags allowed in your comment: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

10 Best Émile Zola Books (2024)

Flat affect.

In his youth, Émile Zola was friends with the painter Paul Cézanne. Zola, however, was a photographer, a medium in which the impressions of the artist matter little. This inclination carried over into his writing and is immediately apparent in the best Émile Zola books.

Instead of indulging in impressionism, this author regarded himself as an almost-dispassionate observer of events. In a sense, he’s a scientist or at least a psychologist , placing his characters in situations determined by which hypothesis he happens to be testing and simply noting down their reactions as if they were experimental results.

Best Émile Zola Books

Little flash, lots of substance.

As his era’s top naturalist writer, Émile Zola’s books don’t contain the idealized, exaggerated characters you find in Ayn Rand’s or even Ernest Hemingway’s works. Compared to those of his contemporaries like Victor Hugo and Honoré de Balzac, they’re not even particularly memorable: nobody breaks out in soliloquy or has sudden, world-shaking epiphanies.

“What’s the point of writing about ordinary people doing ordinary things,” you may ask, “don’t we have local newspapers for that?” If you do insist on reading about outlandish heroes doing outlandishly heroic things, well, you’ll always have Nelson DeMille . If you’re willing to dig below the surface of a more realistic narrative for meaning, however, you may be about to start devouring the best novels by Émile Zola one by one.

The 13 th of 20 Books

Widely regarded as the best Émile Zola novel, Germinal is actually part of the Les Rougon-Macquart series, which has more sequels than Star Wars . Many of the mid-19 th century settings and themes will be familiar to readers of Charles Dickens, though Zola’s writing style and approach are very different.

Though undoubtedly touching on the politics of a rapidly-changing world, Germinal isn’t really ideological in nature and doesn’t try to offer any solutions to the problems of the early Industrial Revolution. Zola doesn’t dwell on the unfairness of the system. Instead, the fate of the working class is shown only as it affects the protagonist Étienne Lantier, who is first introduced in L’Assommoir. You don’t have to read all of these novels to figure out what’s going on, though, as each can stand on its own.

The plot of this book is pretty bleak at times, with plenty of squalor and conflict to be found against the backdrop of a miners’ strike. Though Zola is unflinching in his descriptions of misery and injustice, Germinal also manages to strike a hopeful note: the situation sucks, sure, and it’s certainly not guaranteed to improve, but there is still room for human qualities like hope and kindness.

However, it’s really the descriptive prose, not the juxtaposition of good and bad, that makes this Émile Zola’s best book. Instead of a sweeping condemnation of the evils of unbridled Capitalism, he presents the story through a tapestry of vivid, everyday details. This novel manages to draw in the reader completely within only the first dozen pages or so, and doesn’t let go until you’ve reached the final paragraph.

L’Assommoir

The dark side of paris.

L’Assommoir quickly became a bestseller, probably due at least partly due to the controversy it stirred up among the higher classes of French society. Zola went to a great deal of effort to portray the Parisian poor as accurately as possible, saturating the dialogue with contemporary slang phrases (which may or may not come through accurately in translation a century and a half later).

A few curse words weren’t all that brought this Émile Zola book bad reviews when it was published, though. The author simply believed in portraying characters and events as they are, not as we’d like them to be. In the case of the urban poor of his time, this meant discussing promiscuous sex, domestic violence, and alcoholism ( L’Assommoir is a cheap tavern).

Humanity, Beautiful and Flawed

All of the best Émile Zola novels strike a balance between optimism and despair, beauty and repulsion, kindness and cruelty. You can expect nothing less from L’Assommoir.

You won’t find any cut-and-paste morality in these pages, though some of the characters are highly sympathetic. Things don’t work out for them just because they’re pure of heart, though, and their deterioration only continues with future generations in the Les Rougon-Macquart cycle, particularly in the novel Nana .

La Bête Humaine

The human beast.

While Étienne Lantier (the protagonist of Germinal ) is a basically decent though imperfect human being, his brother Jacques is dominated by a dark side. In modern terms, he’s a budding serial killer.

He’s not guilty of the murder which this thriller revolves around, though, but the only witness. Nor is he the (only) bad guy: he and everyone around him seem to be fighting their own private, internal struggles against impulses involving sex, jealousy, and violence. Naturally, some of them lose the battle, leading to a complicated and fascinating series of events.

Ahead of Its Time

La Bête Humaine is way more than a simple detective novel populated by stock-standard characters. The level of action and suspense is certainly on a par with Murder on the Orient Express , though Agatha Christie is of course less on the nose when it comes to violence and sex.

It is the complex and deeply insightful characterization that makes this one of the best books by Émile Zola. What’s equally remarkable is that Sigmund Freud was barely known in France at the time it was written, much less his “death drive” concept which could be said to make up the premise of this book.

Au Bonheur des Dames

Out with the old, in with the new.

Translated as The Ladies’ Paradise , this book also falls under the Les Rougon-Macquart umbrella, though you should have no trouble figuring out its what and who without having read the ten preceding novels. Like the previous three Émile Zola books we’ve ranked, it’s set against the backdrop of the Industrial Revolution uprooting livelihoods and old certainties.

In this book, though, we’re not taken to a Parisian slum or a small coal mining village. The protagonist’s job in the new-fangled department store of the title is at least a little genteel, and Capitalism’s effect on the people involved, while still pervasive, isn’t all negative.

Walmart, But in 1882

I wouldn’t ordinarily be all that interested in descriptions of a long-gone store’s day-to-day business and working conditions, but Zola and his incomparable eye for detail manage to make these compelling. These are only important for the impact they have on the characters, though.

For the first time, young women could be financially independent and even attain a certain social standing without marrying. Unlike many authors of his own (and even the modern) era, Zola writes female characters as complete persons. The protagonist, for instance, isn’t blessed with good looks, but instead integrity and a strong work ethic. Martin Amis should have taken notes.

Femme Fatale

A major theme in all of the Les Rougon-Macquart novels is how family and upbringing end up determining a person’s character and lot in life. First seen in L’Assommoir , the protagonist is hardly destined for greatness, having run away from her abusive, dysfunctional family and turned to prostitution.

As Nana opens, however, she’s a rising star in the theater. Her earlier experiences have taken their toll, though: she uses her sex appeal as a weapon, causing one tragedy after another. It’s hard to like her ambition and indifference to others, yet the reader can’t help but see her as a lifelong victim.

Hidden Depths

Of course, as in all of the most popular Émile Zola books, Nana isn’t simply a two-dimensional caricature. Though she despises some of her numerous lovers, for instance, she cares deeply for others. Many critics have accused Zola of writing shallow characters – this is very unfair in my view.

Every reader should remember, however, that this author is first and foremost a naturalist and realist. He doesn’t “tell”, he “shows”, so it’s up to you to keep up. He also treats all of his characters as individuals. If you insist on seeing Nana as an archetype for all of womanhood, you’re going to neither understand nor enjoy this novel.

Thérèse Raquin

A dark morality tale.

This novel is not actually part of the mammoth Les Rougon-Macquart cycle, but clearly demonstrates that many of the ideas that characterize Émile Zola’s best books were already fully formed at the ripe old age of 27. One of these is determinism (though not entirely in the philosophical sense ): given who a person is, which is largely a result of their prior experiences, you can pretty much predict what they’ll do in any given circumstances.

In Thérèse Raquin , this involves a woman and her lover choosing to kill her husband so that she can escape an unsatisfying marriage. Most of this book consists of a clinical, harsh, uncompromising look at the personalities of the murderers (and the guilt they feel after the fact).

Grim Reading

You don’t, generally, pick up one of Émile Zola’s books in order to enter a happy world full of puppies and rainbows. In Thérèse Raquin , however, he seems to go out of his way to make the reader miserable. This isn’t just to be cruel, though: the novel is after all a study of how “human brutes” can be led by their impulses without being free of their consciences afterward.

It’s also worth keeping in mind that this book, like much of the Émile Zola book list, was written so it could be published piece by piece in newspapers and magazines. The same is true for a lot of Charles Dickens and other contemporary literature : Zola may be regarded as highbrow today, but back in his own time he basically wrote for anyone who had a few sous to spare.

L’Œuvre (The Masterpiece)

A portrait of artists.

Zola’s fellow naturalist writer Henry James liked to compare the act of writing a novel to that of painting: combining a thousand tiny details into one coherent and compelling picture. The mid-19 th -century Parisian art scene, which included poets, painters, sculptors, and novelists like the author itself, was certainly a vibrant and interesting one. There are worse ways of trying to understand it than reading L’Œuvre ( The Masterpiece ).

This is perhaps the best Émile Zola book in the sense that he truly experienced the atmosphere involved himself, unlike with Germinal and Nana . The main character seems to be based on several famous painters Zola knew himself, including his childhood friend Paul Cézanne.

Drawn from Life

Claude Lantier is the brother of Étienne (hero of Germinal ) and Jacques ( La Bȇte Humaine ) – this book is another installment in the Les Rougon-Macquart series of novels. He’s a talented and innovative painter, but his unorthodox style isn’t what an increasingly commercialized and cliquey art world wants.

Both Zola and Cézanne suffered their fair share of criticism and failure. In this book, these are presented as an integral and perhaps even necessary part of the creative process, at least when greatness is the goal. The artists portrayed in this book persist until the end regardless, drawn to their art like moths to a flame.

Le Ventre de Paris (The Belly of Paris)

Beautifully descriptive.

The writing in The Belly of Paris is noticeably less mature than that found in Zola’s later works like Au Bonheur des Dames , though the greater part of his genius is already clearly discernible. Like most of his novels, the world his characters inhabit is changing rapidly. This is seen, at first glance, in the modern architecture of Les Halles, Paris’ central market.

The recently revamped building is the least of it, though. The rich and bourgeoisie of 1855 (or thereabouts) have access to an unprecedented range of goods, including the food sold in the market and described in delectable detail. The poor, meanwhile, are struggling to scrape by, while political discontent and turmoil simmer just beneath the surface.

Intrigue, Gluttony, and Human Nature

If all high school history books were written like Le Ventre de Paris , the voting age could be lowered to 15. Although this is one of his earlier works, the author manages to sketch an entire scene or era in just a few paragraphs, just like in all the best-rated Émile Zola books. He truly had a gift for selecting exactly the right details to set a stage, relating them without resorting to any flights of fancy yet telling his readers exactly what they need to know.

These sensual descriptions are counterbalanced by similarly realistic yet powerful characterization. In a sense, this book is about the clash between the human and the material, but both of these aspects are given their due.

La Fortune des Rougon

Start at the beginning.

The Fortune of the Rougons is the very first novel in the cycle that finally finds its conclusion in Le Docteur Pascal , Émile Zola’s last book as well as the one that ties together all of Zola’s theories on “heredity”. Remarkably, the author had the entire series sketched out at 28 years of age, before he’d even finished writing this book.

He not only knew the rough outline of the story, but had decided how he was going to approach it and what he wished to say. Aside from emphasizing the role of family and upbringing in a person’s character and actions, this meant showcasing the hedonism and materialism that lead to so many of the tragedies in the Les Rougon-Macquart saga.

Ambition and Idealism

As usual, politics aren’t far from Zola’s mind. This novel is set around 1851 and Napoleon III’s coup d ‘ état and the abolition of the French Republic. Turbulent times offer great opportunities, of course – for those willing to embrace them.

Not many people have the time or patience to take on the whole of the cycle that defines Zola’s work and philosophy. Actually learning French is probably easier and more rewarding. If you really like this author’s somewhat cynical outlook and exceptional prose, though, and you feel that it will be worth it to learn where the Rougon and Macquart families’ roots truly, lie, La Fortune des Rougon is indeed a natural starting point as well as a great novel in its own right.

La Curée (The Kill)

Much more than a rerun.

The Kill follows directly on events in La Fortune des Rougon . Though it doesn’t show the author at his full brilliance, it remains one of the best-selling Émile Zola books.

New fortunes have recently been made, but it turns out that trickle-down economics works as poorly in 19 th -century France as it does in 21 st -century America. The nouveau riche flaunt their wealth and seek new ways to amuse themselves while scrabbling for political power. Meanwhile, a new kind of capitalist – the property speculator – appears, devouring the guts of Paris like hunting dogs eat the entrails of the prey immediately after “the kill” referred to in the title.

Relevant Even Today

When do opportunism and ambition creep over into vulgar, predatory materialism? In what ways do those who desire wealth above all else end up suffering? Are those who’ve always had money without having to work crippled in one sense or another?

This book encourages the reader to think about these questions. As usual, Zola’s unaffected yet poetical descriptions draw you in from the very first chapter. Characters are fleshed out in much the same way – it’s highly likely that you’ll recognize a few people from your own life, just translated into another time and place.

Final Thoughts

More than one reader has complained that Zola takes too much pleasure in glorifying the corrupt and amoral parts of human nature. In his own era, the amount of sex in his books caused particular outrage. Modern readers won’t find too much to be offended by in this regard, but many of Zola’s characters really are appalling and depressing to read about.

However, to quote the man himself “A society is only strong when it places the truth in the full light of the sun.” There may be good in everyone, but it would be foolish to ignore the darker parts of human nature. Zola’s works force us to confront these unflinchingly, yet his books are far from unpalatable, thanks especially to this author’s unique gift for realistic yet insightful description.

Michael Englert

Michael is a graduate of cultural studies and history. He enjoys a good bottle of wine and (surprise, surprise) reading. As a small-town librarian, he is currently relishing the silence and peaceful atmosphere that is prevailing.