Emile Zola Biography and List of Works

French novelist and critic, the founder of the naturalist movement in literature. Zola redefined Naturalism as "Nature seen through a temperament." Among Zola's most important works is his famous Rougon-Macquart cycle (1871-1893), which includes such novels as L'ASSOMMOIR (1877), about the suffering of the Parisian working-class, NANA (1880), dealing with prostitution, and GERMINAL (1885), depicting the mining industry. Zola's open letter J'ACCUSE on January 13, 1898, reopened the Dreyfus case, in which the Jewish Captain Alfred Dreyfus was sentenced to Devil's Island.

"I am little concerned with beauty or perfection. I don't care for the great centuries. All I care about is life, struggle, intensity. I am at ease in my generation."
(from My Hates, 1866)

Emile Zola was born in Paris. His father was an Italian engineer, who had taken French citizenship in 1862. Zola spent his childhood in Aix-en-Provence, southeast France. When he was seven, his father died, leaving the family with money problems - his mother was largely dependent on a tiny pension. In 1858 Zola moved with his mother to Paris. In his youth he became friends with the painter Paul Cézanne and started to write under the influence of the romantics. Zola's widowed mother planned a career in law for him. However, Zola failed his baccalaureate examination. According to a story, Zola was sometimes so broke that he ate sparrows that he trapped on his windowsill.

Before his breakthrough as a writer, Zola worked as a clerk in a shipping firm and then in the sales department of the publishing house of Louis-Christophe-Francois-Hachette. He also wrote literary columns and art criticism for the Cartier de Villemessant's newspapers. As a political journalist Zola did not hide his antipathy toward the French Emperor Napoleon II and his Second Empire.

During his formative years Zola wrote several short stories and essays, 4 plays and 3 novels. Among his early books was CONTES Á NINON, published in 1864. When his sordid autobiographical novel LA CONFESSION DE CLAUDE (1865) was published and attracted the attention of the police, Zola was fired from Hachette.

After his first major novel, THÉRÈSE RAQUIN (1867), Zola started the long series called Les Rougon Macquart, the natural and social history of a family under the Second Empire. "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 al 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." The family have two branches - the Rougons are small shopkeepers and petty bourgeois, the Marquarts are poachers and smugglers and have problems with alcohol. During the story some members of the family would rise to the highest levels of society, and some would fall as victims of social evils and heredity. Zola presented the idea to his publisher in 1868.

"The Rougon-Macquart - the group, the family, whom I propose to study - has as its prime characteristic the overflow of appetite, the broad upthrust of our age, which flings itself into enjoyments. Physiologically the members of this family are the slow working-out of accidents to the blood and nervous system which occur in a race after a first organic lesion, according to the environment determining in each of the individuals of this race sentiments, desires, passions, all the natural and instinctive human manifestations whose products take on the conventional names of virtues and vices."

At first the plan was limited to 10 books, but ultimately the series comprised 20 volumes, ranging in subject from the world of peasants and workers to the imperial court. Zola prepared his novels carefully. The result is a combination of precise documentation, dramatic imagination and accurate portrayals. Zola interviewed experts, wrote thick dossiers based on his research, made thoughtful portrait of his protagonists, and outlined the action in each chapter. He rode in the cab of a locomotive when he was preparing LA BÊTE HUMAINE (1890, The Beast in Man), and for Germinal he visited coalmines. This was something other than Balzac's volcanic creative writing process, which produced La Comédie humaine, a social saga of nearly 100 novels.

The publication of L'ASSOMMOIR (Drunkard, 1877), a depiction of alcoholism, made Zola the best-known writer in France. He bought an estate at Médan and attracted imitators and disciples. Inspired by Claude Bernard's Introduction à la médecine expérimentale (1865) Zola tried to adjust scientific principles in the process of observing society and interpreting it in fiction. Thus a novelist, who gathers and analyses documents and other material, becomes a part of the scientific research. He did not much believe in the possibility of individual freedom but emphasized the importance of external influences on human development. His treatise, LE ROMAN EXPÉRIMENTAL (1880), manifests the author's faith in science and acceptance of scientific determinism.

In 1885 Zola published one of his finest works, GERMINAL. It is the first major literary work based on a strike, drawn from his research notes on labour conditions in the coalmines. Right-wing political groups attacked the book as a call to revolution. NANA (1880), explores the world of sexual exploitation. Zola's tetralogy, LES QUATRE EVANGILES, which began with FÉCONDITÉ (1899), was left unfinished.

Also notable in Zola's career was his involvement in the Dreyfus affair with his open letter J'ACCUSE. "In making these accusations, I am fully aware that my action comes under Articles 30 and 31 of the law of 29 July 1881 on the press, which makes libel a punishable offence." Alfred Dreyfus (1859-1935) was a French Jewish army officer falsely charged with giving military secrets to the Germans. He was transported to Devil's Island in French Guiana. The case was retried in 1899 and Dreyfus was found guilty but pardoned, a verdict that was later reversed. "The truth is on the march, and nothing shall stop it," Zola announced, but in 1899 he was sentenced to imprisonment and removed from the roll of the Legion of Honour. He escaped to England, and returned after Dreyfus had been cleared.

Zola died on September 28, 1902, under mysterious circumstances; overcome by carbon monoxide fumes in his sleep. According to some speculation, Zola's enemies blocked the chimney of his apartment, causing poisonous fumes to build up and kill him. At Zola's funeral Anatole France declared. 'He was a moment of the human conscience.' In 1908 Zola's remains were transported to the Panthéon. Naturalism as the literary movement that he represented fell out of favour after Zola's death, but his integrity influenced deeply such writers as Theodore Dreiser, August Strindberg and Emilia Pardo-Bazan.

For further reading: Emile Zola by Angus Wilson (1952); Emile Zola by F.W.J. Hemmings (1953); Zola's 'Germinal' by Elliott M. Grant (1962); A Zola Dictionary by I.G. Patterson (1969); Emile Zola: A Selective Analytical Bibliography, ed. by Brian Nelson (1982); Critical Essays on Emile Zola, ed. by David Baguley (1986); A Bourgeois Rebel by Alan Schom (1987); Emile Zola: A Biography by Alan Schom (1988); Zola by Marc Bernard (1988); Zola and the Craft of Fiction, ed. by Robert Lethbridge (1990); Emile Zola: 'L'Assommir' by David Baguley (1992); Emile Zola Revisited by William J. Berg and Laurey K. Martin (1992); Thresholds of Desire by Ilona Chessid (1993) - Note: The American writer Henry James was not enthusiastic about naturalism and wrote that the "only business of naturalism is to be - natural, and therefore, instead of saying of Nana that it contains a great deal of filth, we should simple say of it that it contains a great deal of nature." - Film: The Life of Emile Zola (1937), dir. by William Dieterle, screenplay Norman Reilly Raine, Heinz Herald, Geza Herczed, from a story by Heiz Herald and Geza Herczeg, starring Paul Muni, Gale Sondergarrd, Joseph Schildkraut, Gloria Holden. Source material, Matthew Josephson's Zola and His Time. - "Rich, dignified, honest and strong, it is at once the finest historical film ever made and the greatest screen biography, greater even than The Story of Louis Pasteur with which Warner's squared their conscience last year." (Frank S. Nugent in the New York Times) - Negotiations were carried out with Dreyfus' widow, Lucie, to ensure that she would find the film acceptable. - Other film adaptations: Thérèse Raquin, 1953, dir.by Marcel Carne; Gervaise, 1955, dir. by René Clément; Pot-Bouille, 1957, dir. by Julien Duvivier; La curée, 1966, dir. by Roger Vadim; La faute de Abbe Mouret, 1970, dir. by Georges Franju -Museum: Maison d'Emile Zola, 26 rue Pasteur, 78670, Medan, Yvelines - Zola's home from 1878 - See also: Wladyslaw Reymont, Guy de Maupassant, Gore Vidal

CONTES Á NINON, (1864)
LA CURÉE, (1874)
LE VENTRE DE PARIS, (1874)
LA CONQUÊTE DE PLASSANS, (1874)
LA FAUTE DE L'ABBÉ MOURET, (1875)
UNE PAGE D'AMOUR, (1878)
NANA, (1880)
POT-BOUILLE, (1882)
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)
NOUVEAUX CONTES À NINON, (1874)