His Excellency Eugène Rougon: Les Rougon-Macquart (French Edition) Paperback
by Émile Zola (Author), Thomas Langois (Editor)
Émile ZOLA (1840-1902), born in Paris, of an Italian father, a public works engineer, and French mother. As a result of the death of the head of the family, the orphan, only son, and the widow, experienced serious economic shortages, until the young Émile came into contact with Louis Hachette, who hired him as a clerk in his bookstore. March 1, 1862. From an early age, he considered writing his true vocation. His childhood friends Paul Cézanne and Jean-Baptistin Baille were his first readers. Zola is considered the leader of the French naturalist school. He had been influenced by contemporary theories of heredity and experimental science. The first volume, “La Fortune des Rougons”, of his main work, “Les Rougon-Macquart”, is presented as a “natural and social history of a family under the Second Empire”. The result is a panorama of the French lifestyle, particularly of the middle and working class, during the 19th century, done with rigorous and systematic documentation and focused on vice, misery, human instincts and appetites. "Germinal" (1885). Throughout the adventures of Etienne Lantier, Zola builds a formidable epic fresco on the world of mining with its conflicts and catastrophes, describing the titanic struggle and the misery of those who integrate it. During Zola's funeral in 1902, a huge crowd chanted a single word: "Germinal, Germinal".