Editing Émile Zola (section)

==Scope of the Rougon-Macquart series==
Zola's [[Les Rougon-Macquart|Rougon-Macquart]] novels are a panoramic account of the [[Second French Empire]]. They tell the story of a family approximately between the years 1851 and 1871. These twenty novels contain over 300 characters, who descend from the two family lines of the Rougons and Macquarts. In Zola's words, which are the subtitle of the Rougon-Macquart series, they are ''"L'Histoire naturelle et sociale d'une famille sous le Second Empire" ("The natural and social history of a family under the Second Empire").<ref name="Daily Telegraph 5 December 2015">{{cite news |last=Cummins |first=Anthony |title=How Émile Zola made novels out of gutter voices and ultra-violence |url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/how-emile-zola-made-novels-out-of-gutter-voices-and-ultra-violenc/ |date=5 December 2015 |newspaper=[[The Daily Telegraph]] |location=London|access-date=3 November 2016}}</ref><ref name="Encyclopædia Britannica">{{cite web |url=https://www.britannica.com/topic/Rougon-Macquart-cycle |title=Rougon-Macquart cycle: Work by Zola |author=<!--Staff writer(s); no by-line.--> |website=[[Encyclopædia Britannica]] |publisher=[[Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.]]|access-date=3 November 2016}}</ref>''

Most of the Rougon-Macquart novels were written during the [[French Third Republic]]. To an extent, attitudes and value judgments may have been superimposed on that picture with the wisdom of hindsight. Some critics classify Zola's work, and naturalism more broadly, as a particular strain of decadent literature, which emphasized the fallen, corrupted state of modern civilization.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Bernheimer |first=Charles |chapter=Unknowing Decadence |title=Perennial Decay: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence |publisher=University of Pennsylvania Press |year=1999 |isbn=|editor-last=Constable|editor-first=Liz |location=Philadelphia |pages=50–64}}</ref> Nowhere is the doom-laden image of the [[Second French Empire|Second Empire]] so clearly seen as in ''[[Nana (novel)|Nana]]'', which culminates in echoes of the [[Franco-Prussian War]] (and hence by implication of the French defeat).<ref>{{Cite book |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=2kdK-qPMBbAC&q=zola+nana+french+defeat&pg=PA135 |title=The Cambridge Companion to Zola |last=Nelson |first=Brian |year=2007 |publisher=Cambridge University Press |isbn=9781139827270 |language=en}}</ref> Even in novels dealing with earlier periods of Napoleon III's reign the picture of the Second Empire is sometimes overlaid with the imagery of catastrophe.{{Citation needed|date=October 2016}}

[[File:Gil_Blas_-_Germinal.jpg|thumb|right|Poster by [[Léon Choubrac]] advertising the publication of Zola's novel ''[[Germinal (novel)|Germinal]]'' in ''[[Gil Blas]]'', 25 November 1884]]
In the Rougon-Macquart novels, provincial life can seem to be overshadowed by Zola's preoccupation with the capital.{{Citation needed|date=October 2016}} However, the following novels (see the individual titles in the Livre de poche series) scarcely touch on life in Paris: ''[[La Terre]]'' (peasant life in Beauce), ''[[Le Rêve (novel)|Le Rêve]]'' (an unnamed cathedral city), ''[[Germinal (novel)|Germinal]]'' (collieries in the northeast of France), ''[[La Joie de vivre]]'' (the Atlantic coast), and the four novels set in and around Plassans (modelled on his childhood home, Aix-en-Provence), ({{Lang|fr|[[La Fortune des Rougon]]}}, ''[[La Conquête de Plassans]]'', ''[[La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret]]'' and ''[[Le Docteur Pascal]]'').{{Citation needed|date=October 2016}} ''[[La Débâcle]]'', the military novel, is set for the most part in country districts of eastern France; its dénouement takes place in the capital during the civil war leading to the suppression of the [[Paris Commune]]. Though Paris has its role in {{Lang|fr|La Bête humaine}} the most striking incidents (notably the train crash) take place elsewhere. Even the Paris-centred novels tend to set some scenes outside, if not very far from, the capital. In the political novel ''[[Son Excellence Eugène Rougon]]'', the eponymous minister's interventions on behalf of his so-called friends, have their consequences elsewhere, and the reader is witness to some of them. Even Nana, one of Zola's characters most strongly associated with Paris, makes a brief and typically disastrous trip to the country.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Zola |first=Émile |title=Nana |publisher=Livre de poche |year=2003 |isbn=978-2253003656 |location=Paris, France |pages=}}</ref>