The Fortune of the Rougons

The Fortune of the Rougons

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Emile Zola (#5 in our series by Emile Zola)
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Title: The Fortune of the Rougons
Author: Emile Zola
Release Date: February, 2004 [EBook #5135]
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE
FORTUNE OF THE ROUGONS ***
THE FORTUNE OF THE ROUGONS By Emile Zola
Etext prepared by Dagny, [email protected] and John Bickers,
[email protected]

THE FORTUNE OF THE ROUGONS
BY
EMILE ZOLA
EDITED WITH INTRODUCTION BY ERNEST ALFRED
VIZETELLY

INTRODUCTION
"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. The idea of writing the "natural and social history of a family
under the Second Empire," extending to a score of volumes, was
doubtless suggested to M. Zola by Balzac's immortal "Comedie
Humaine." He was twenty-eight years of age when this idea first
occurred to him; he was fifty-three when he at last sent the manuscript
of his concluding volume, "Dr. Pascal," to the press. He had spent
five-and- twenty years in working out his scheme, persevering with it
doggedly and stubbornly, whatever rebuffs he might encounter,
whatever jeers and whatever insults might be directed against him by

the ignorant, the prejudiced, and the hypocritical. Truth was on the
march and nothing could stay it; even as, at the present hour, its march,
if slow, none the less continues athwart another and a different crisis of
the illustrious novelist's career.
It was in the early summer of 1869 that M. Zola first began the actual
writing of "The Fortune of the Rougons." It was only in the following
year, however, that the serial publication of the work commenced in the
columns of "Le Siecle," the Republican journal of most influence in
Paris in those days of the Second Empire. The Franco-German war
interrupted this issue of the story, and publication in book form did not
take place until the latter half of 1871, a time when both the war and
the Commune had left Paris exhausted, supine, with little or no interest
in anything. No more unfavourable moment for the issue of an
ambitious work of fiction could have been found. Some two or three
years went by, as I well remember, before anything like a revival of
literature and of public interest in literature took place. Thus, M. Zola
launched his gigantic scheme under auspices which would have made
many another man recoil. "The Fortune of the Rougons," and two or
three subsequent volumes of his series, attracted but a moderate degree
of attention, and it was only on the morrow of the publication of
"L'Assommoir" that he awoke, like Byron, to find himself famous.
As previously mentioned, the Rougon-Macquart series forms twenty
volumes. The last of these, "Dr. Pascal," appeared in 1893. Since then
M. Zola has written "Lourdes," "Rome," and "Paris." Critics have
repeated /ad nauseam/ that these last works constitute a new departure
on M. Zola's part, and, so far as they formed a new series, this is true.
But the suggestion that he has in any way repented of the
Rougon-Macquart novels is ridiculous. As he has often told me of
recent years, it is, as far as possible, his plan to subordinate his style
and methods to his subject. To have written a book like "Rome," so
largely devoted to the ambitions of the Papal See, in the same way as
he had written books dealing with the drunkenness or other vices of
Paris, would have been the climax of absurdity.
Yet the publication of "Rome," was the