The generic title Rougon-Macquart gathers a whole of twenty novels written by Emile Zola between 1871 and 1893. It carries like subtitles Natural history and social of a family under the Second Empire. the purpose of Inspired of the human Comedy of Balzac, the work is in particular to study the hereditary tares of a family on five generations, originating in Plassans, since the ancestor Adélaïde Fouque (born in 1768) to a child to be born, fruit of the incestueuse connection between Pascal Rougon and his niece Clotilde (1874). He wants to also depict the company of the Second Empire in the most exhaustive possible way, by not forgetting any the components of this company and by making a broad place with the great transformations which occur at that time (Parisian town planning, department stores, development of the railroad, appearance of the modern trade unionism, etc). This whole of novels marks the triumph of the literary movement called naturalism , whose Zola is with Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, then Guy of Maupassant, the principal representative.

Genealogy and Heredity

Before even writing the first novel of the series, Zola had drawn up in 1868 and 1869 a family tree of its characters. Modified in 1878, then in 1889, the tree will be published under its final version in 1893, at the time of the publication of the Doctor Pascal . Each family member has a box made up itself of three parts: a short chronological summary of its life, its hereditary tendencies, its trade (and possibly of the details on its current life, when he did not die). For heredity, Zola took as a starting point the work of the doctor Prosper Lucas (1805-1885), from whom it borrows terms such as election (exclusive resemblance to one of the two parents), mixture welding (fusion of the features of the father and the mother in the same product) or inneity (absence of hereditary features). As example, here the description of three characters among most famous:

  • Gervaise ( the Pole-axe ): born in 1828; has two boys of a lover, Lantier, whose ascent counts the paralytic ones, which takes it along to Paris and gives up there; marry in 1852 a workman, Coupeau, of alcoholic family, of which it has a girl; dies of misery and drunkenness in 1869. Election of the father. Conceived in intoxication. Lame. Washing machine .
  • Etienne Lantier ( Germinal ): born in 1846 . Mix dissemination. Physical resemblance of the mother, then of the father. Minor. Still saw, in Noumea, deportee. Married over there, one says, and has children, perhaps, whom one cannot classify .
  • Jacques Lantier ( the human Animal ): born in 1844, dies into 1870 of accident . Election of the mother. Physical resemblance of the father. Heredity of alcoholism being turned in madness homicide. State of crime. Mechanic .

Such descriptions make today smile, just like the theories on heredity lengthily exposed in the Doctor Pascal . But it was a question for Zola of affirming that, in the novel naturalist, there is no more barrier between science and literature. These designs were very close to the Théorie of the degeneration then very in vogue in the scientific circles and medical. The detractors of Zola made fun of its tree. Alphonse Daudet would have said that, if it had had such a tree, it would have been hung with his higher branch.

List of the twenty novels

Strongest pullings

The table below presents two columns: on the left, the strongest pullings reached in 1927-28 by the editions Carpenter; on the right the strongest pullings reached in 1993 in the collection the Book of pocket (source: Dictionary of Emile Zola , coll Books , Robert Laffont 1993). It is noticed that the Rout , very read formerly, completely disappeared from the hit-parade in 1993 (the novel arrives only in seventeenth position). Conversely, With the Happiness of the Ladies , modest fourteenth in 1927-28, arrives at the fourth rank in 1993.

See too

  • Psychomorphologie

External bonds

  • the family tree with the cards drawn up by Zola

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