The Fortune of the Rougons (1871) is a novel by French author Émile Zola. The first of twenty volumes of Zola’s monumental Les Rougon-Macquart series is an epic story of family, politics, class, and history that traces the disparate paths of several French citizens raised by the same mother. Spanning the entirety of the French Second Empire, Zola provides a sweeping portrait of change that refuses to shy away from controversy and truth as it gets to the heart of heredity and human nature. Adelaide Fouque is a woman of Plassans, a town in southern France. Alongside her son Pierre Rougon, whose deceased father was her husband, Adelaide raises the Macquart siblings, her children from a brief, passionate affair. Despite their shared upbringing, the three children take vastly diverging paths in life. Pierre, desperate to prove his legitimacy, becomes an ambitious middle-class man whose deepest desire is to win favor with the aristocracy and to climb even further from his humble roots. Meanwhile, his half siblings struggle to make a living for themselves and their working-class families. As Pierre’s ambitions lead him to not only disinherit the Macquarts, but to position himself as a supporter of Napoleon III in his attempt to overthrow the French government. At the same time, Silvère Mouret, Adelaide’s grandson, and his lover Miette Chantegreil find themselves on the side of the republicans who attempt to resist Napoleon’s coup. The Fortune of the Rougons is a story of family and fate, a thrilling and detailed novel that sets up a world rich enough for its author to explore in nineteen subsequent volumes. This edition of Émile Zola’s The Fortune of the Rougons is a classic work of French literature reimagined for modern readers.
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Émile Zola (1840-1902) was a French novelist, journalist, and playwright. Born in Paris to a French mother and Italian father, Zola was raised in Aix-en-Provence. At 18, Zola moved back to Paris, where he befriended Paul Cézanne and began his writing career. During this early period, Zola worked as a clerk for a publisher while writing literary and art reviews as well as political journalism for local newspapers. Following the success of his novel Thérèse Raquin (1867), Zola began a series of twenty novels known as Les Rougon-Macquart, a sprawling collection following the fates of a single family living under the Second Empire of Napoleon III. Zola’s work earned him a reputation as a leading figure in literary naturalism, a style noted for its rejection of Romanticism in favor of detachment, rationalism, and social commentary. Following the infamous Dreyfus affair of 1894, in which a French-Jewish artillery officer was falsely convicted of spying for the German Embassy, Zola wrote a scathing open letter to French President Félix Faure accusing the government and military of antisemitism and obstruction of justice. Having sacrificed his reputation as a writer and intellectual, Zola helped reverse public opinion on the affair, placing pressure on the government that led to Dreyfus’ full exoneration in 1906. Nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1901 and 1902, Zola is considered one of the most influential and talented writers in French history.
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