Zola, Émile Edouard Charles Antoine (1840–1902)

A portrait of the French novelist and social reformer Émile Zola.

French novelist and social reformer. He made his name with Thérèse Raquin (1867), a grim, powerful story of remorse. With La Fortune des Rougon/The Fortune of the Rougons (1867) he began a series of some 20 naturalistic novels collectively known as Le Rougon-Macquart, portraying the fortunes of a French family under the Second Empire. They include Le Ventre de Paris/The Underbelly of Paris (1873), Nana (1880), and La Débâcle/The Debacle (1892). In 1898 he published J'accuse/I Accuse, a pamphlet indicting the persecutors of Alfred Dreyfus, for which he was prosecuted for libel but later pardoned.

Zola was born in Paris. He became a journalist and a clerk in the publishing house of Hachette. He wrote literary and art criticisms and published several collections of short stories, beginning with Contes à Ninon/Stories for Ninon (1864). Having discovered his real talent as a novelist, he produced the volumes of Le Rougon-Macquart steadily over a quarter of a century, proving himself a master of realism. Other titles in the series are La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret/The Simple Priest (1875), L'Assommoir/Drunkard (1878), Germinal (1885), La Terre/Earth (1888), La Bête humaine/The Human Beast (1890), and L'Argent/Money (1891). Among later novels are the trilogy Trois Villes/Three Cities (1894–98) (Lourdes (1894), Rome (1896), Paris (1898)), and Les Quatre Evangiles/The Four Gospels (1899–1903) (Fécondité/Fecundity (1899), Travail/Work (1902), Vérité/Truth (1903), and the unfinished Justice).

Zola had the artist's imagination, a unique genius for description, and the power of bring life to a crowd, a shop, a market, or a mine; these collective scenes are often more alive than the individual characters. The unsparing realism of his writing, its brutality and coarseness where appropriate, are well illustrated in L'Assommoir, in which he graphically describes the effects of drink on the fortunes of a working-class family. In many of his novels the sense of impending doom is all-pervasive: a notable example is La Débâcle, a novel of the Franco-Prussian war. Some of Zola's works subordinate characterization, and even plot, to the inculcation of socialist philosophy, which was his personal solution to the material, and, to some degree, the spiritual problems of his age. Les Quatres Evangiles exemplifies this aspect of his work.