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Updated: June 18, 2025
"The Fortune of the Rougons" is the initial volume of the Rougon-Macquart series. Though it was by no means M. Zola's first essay in fiction, it was undoubtedly his first great bid for genuine literary fame, and the foundation of what must necessarily be regarded as his life-work.
Zola, in his essay on "The Experimental Novel," states that the proper function of setting is to exhibit "the environment which determines and completes the man"; and the philosophic study of environment reacting upon character is one of the main features of his own monumental series of novels devoted to the Rougon-Macquart family.
Zola is perhaps unduly depreciated nowadays, but certainly, if Carlyle's "infinite capacity for taking pains" as a recipe for genius ever was put to the test, it was by the author of the Rougon-Macquart series.
The only difference that I perceive between his latest work, "Paris," and certain Rougon-Macquart volumes, is that with time, experience and assiduity, his genius has expanded and ripened, and that the hesitation, the groping for truth, so to say, which may be found in some of his earlier writings, has disappeared.
We had never heard of the naturalist school, though Monsieur Zola had already published some volumes of the Rougon-Macquart; but ideas are in the air; and we, for ourselves, discovered the possibilities of naturalism simultaneously, as it were, with the acknowledged apostle of that form of art.
He is a sweet sage, who studies life, therefore he gathers "human documents," builds laboriously the genealogical tree of the family of Rougon-Macquart, whose descendant he is himself, and on the strength of his observations he comes to the same conclusion as Zola. To which?
Just pay them compliments, nothing but compliments, always compliments; in that way, if you say anything foolish it will be overlooked. Do you know Meissonier's paintings?" "I should say I do." "Have you read the Rougon-Macquart series?" "From first to last." "That's enough. Mention a painting from time to time, speak of a novel here and there and add: "'Superb! Extraordinary!
Mann's chief work, indubitably one of the best German novels of the last decades, is entitled The Buddenbrooks, the Degeneration of a Family . The book would perhaps never have been written without the example of Zola in Les Rougon-Macquart, but it is far from being a mere copy; for a much more personal conception of the subject and a tone of narration in which the finest irony is mingled raise it far above the arid level of the roman expérimental.
"Rome," "Lourdes," "Paris," and all M. Zola's other works, apart from the "Rougon-Macquart" series, together with the translations into a dozen different languages English, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Danish, Portuguese, Bohemian, Hungarian, and others are not included in the above figures. Otherwise the latter might well be doubled.
Probably no other author has succeeded better than Emile Zola in combining the epic and the novelistic moods of fiction; and the novels in the Rougon-Macquart series are at once communal and personal in their significance.
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