In one XIXe literary century dominated by the romantic kind, Émile Zola, fascinated by the scientific method, convinced that the novelist is an observer and an experimenter, continues a dream of total knowledge of the human subject, whose novel must be the instrument. In this aiming, it merges with the naturalism like esthetics and vision of the world, but in return the naturalism merges with him: he, at the same time, invented and exhausted the method and his possible achievements.

In 1858, eighteen years old, it joined his mother in Paris, where she tries to make recognize her rights by the Company of the channel of Aix. It loses its lawsuit in 1859, the year when Zola fails the baccalaureat. This failure leads it to give up its studies to seek work: during three years it will not find anything and will know a true destitution. It writes however already much - poems, tales, marked nostalgia of idealized Provence and a romanticism which it soon will try to kill in him -, attends the workshops of friendly painters and approaches the adverse republicans to the policy of the Second Empire.  

Edition with journalism
Lastly, in 1862, it finds a modest employment with the Bookstore Hatchet, where it will remain until 1866. In a few months, he becomes chief of publicity and valley a large number of relations with the “authors from Hachette”, who have inter alia as a name Taine, Littré or Emile Deschanel, promised to a political career. Since 1863, Zola collaborates in various newspapers; its activity of journalist will always occupy an essential place in its life. From 1866, it holds in the Event the literary chronicle as well as an artistic chronicle. With the Illustration, it gives two tales. He then writes in a newspaper left, the Barber, in the Earth, the Gallic one and the Freethinking. In 1871, he is parliamentary correspondent with the Bell and regular collaborator of the Semaphore of Marseilles and the Messenger of Europe, monthly magazine in which will appear into 1878 the contemporary Novelists and, in 1879, the poetic art of the movement naturalist, the experimental Novel.

The training of the trade of writer
The last years at Hachette had made it possible Zola to understand the business and evolution of ideas: thus it has a presentiment of perfectly the decisive role of publicity. He writes and works indefatigably, and, in 1867, he publishes its first novel, Therese Raquin, while he throws on paper the plans of his History of a family (he envisages ten volumes, there will be twenty of them, whose writing will take twenty-five years). He then attends Manet, Monet, of the critics, the intellectuals. In 1870, it Marie and specifies her project of Rougon-Macquart, without dissimulating which it is a question for him of being made a place and of earning money, which will be, until the success of the Pole-axe, one of its obsessions with that to return to his/her mother her lost social dignity.

Two theoretical texts structure work of writing of Rougon-Macquart: the foreword of the Romance first of the cycle, the Fortune of Rougon (1870), and the experimental Novel (appeared in 1880). The foreword delimits a territory - a French family under the Second Empire - and proposes to evoke, through the contrary destinies of its various members, the adventures and the transformations of the social body. It is to say that the immediate history will count and that the formidable economic movement (sudden fortunes and ruins, mixing business and politics and corruption) which agitates the Second Empire will be in the foreground. In the middle of the course - the experimental Novel is contemporary of Chick, the ninth novel of the cycle -, Zola gives a progress report on what became an esthetics: that of the Romance naturalist, genuine crucible where the collected facts are subjected proof against modifications that impose the circumstances and the mediums.  

A family marked by heredity
For as much, the novel of Zola is not an objective transcription - nor mathematics - reality: the novelist is well a creator, a temperament which sees and reveals a corner of the world. This temperament is guided by a choice, a directing wire in the darkness of reality: for Zola, this wire will be that of heredity, tool which will enable him to classify materials of the novel scientifically. At the top of the family tree of Rougon-Macquart, there is the heredity of aunt Dide, who is confined of an infinity of possible according to the temperaments and the mediums.  

First novel of the saga, the Fortune of Rougon is a true novel of the origins: it tells the fight of two sons of aunt Dide, Pierre Rougon and Antoine Macquart, the first seizing fortune of his mother to the detriment of her half-brother. The action is played between the 7 and on on December 11th, 1851, a few days after the coup d'etat of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte: Rougon are, a notch in lower part, usurpers like Napoleon the Small one, and, like him, they will succeed by the flight, the crime and corruption. Doctor Pascal, the last novel, is a setting in abyss of all work: biologist, the doctor studies heredity, and its family is her privileged object. Glance of the novelist in the novel, it reveals the original tare, the madness of aunt Dide, and, in spite of the obstacles, explains to his/her Clotilde niece - who becomes her mistress - laws of the life and forces of the nature, for which, definitely, it is necessary to make confidence. Rougon-Macquart finish on a morals simple but conquered on as well sufferings, of hatreds, crimes, of illusions, as it appears singularly serious: to know and like the life, to live it such as it must be lived.  

A gallery of characters
During all the cycle, Zola built unforgettable intrigues and figures, invented powerful contrasts which take in the memory of epic and mythical dimensions: opposition of the “fats” - happy affluent and conformists - and of “thin” - idealistic dreamers -, in the Belly of Paris; the still of the Pole-axe, dreadful gears of alcoholism and violence; the madness of gold and the flesh in Chick, superb prostitute died in nineteen years, corroded by syphilis, femme fatale where the man comes to lose himself; the requirement of creation like an absolute, in the Work, where the painter Claude Lantier fights hopelessly to make life with fabric and colors, and, another victim of heredity, ends up being hung in front of an unfinished table; fascination disturbs that the mechanic Jacques Lantier tests, in the human Animal, for Lison, its engine, that he likes like a woman. Vis-a-vis these accounts, some novels seem true fairy tales: A page of love, With the happiness of the ladies or the Dream.  

A network of images and myths
In this saga which brews so many characters, of events, of facts, which accumulates the clinical cases without never separating them from the obsessing weight of the social world, of the universe of the trades, of the entertainments, of the business, passes what Michel Serres regards as the true contemporary knowledge of Zola. Its “scientific claim” is thus not vain, not counting it is directed against romantic which dissimulates while idealizing or by moving the true social mechanisms, which gives him political value: to name and show is then to be republican and man of the left. With this interest first is added some at once another, which makes of Zola an authentic writer: all the critics noticed the formidable mythical metamorphosis whose novel of Zola is the place. The cosmic forces - ground and powerful germinations which work it, or sky as escaped towards the purity - as much as the forces of an untamed nature are there: the sex, violence, that Freud will call soon the instinct of dead in the man, the will to destroy and to destroy themselves, the continent terrifying of female, the madness, fury of the money and the pleasure. All these words would be appropriate of the capital letters: they are allegories, which gives to romantic of Zola an epic breath which does not prevent characters and individualities to emerge.  

Rougon-Macquart will ensure Zola financial independence that it wished, and it will manage profitability of it by associating publication in serials and volumes, by adapting for the theater some of its novels and while drawing left the scandals which will accompany several by its works.  

The supporter of Dreyfus
But rather than by these works - important in its spirit, since they build a Utopia, prolonging the dream of social reform consequently to which it passionately stuck -, the last years of the life of Zola are crossed by two major events: one, deprived, the meeting of Jeanne Rozerot, in 1888, who will be her mistress and will give him two children; the other, public, in 1898, the publication of the Letter in France, on on January 6th, then, the 13, in the Dawn, that of I show, open letter with the president of the Republic, Félix Faure. Convinced of the innocence of the Dreyfus captain, accused of high treason, but actually victim of a virulent anti-semitism, Zola obliges by this article the persons in charge to make burst the scandal: appointing the highest military chiefs like the accomplices of a legal crime, it contributes to make leave the lawsuit the door - closed where one had wanted to maintain it. Dreyfus will be rehabilitated only after death of Zola, which will pay expensive its courage: two lawsuits, an exile of a few months in London, an outburst of hatreds and calumnies obscure the end of its life. He dies in 1902, of an asphyxiation which one still doubts that he was really accidental.  

The one time old witness

Polygraph, extraordinary worker, prolix creator engaged in the combat of its time in fertile years in upheavals, in scandals, where the modern policy starts to come up, where the charts are redistributed, where the working class organizes and becomes aware of itself, where capitalism seems creator of richnesses but watch already its obscure face, Zola is a witness. And it is not a chance if one of its durable passions is photography, to which initiated in 1888 the journalist Victor Billaud. It had to make some 6000 photographs, of humble photographs memories, landscapes natural or urban, but also original portraits in their composition and true tables. Photographer, Zola remains novelist and is made painter: he seizes things seen, but he embraces all, he wants all “to keep”.  

The success of Zola was and remains immense. Admittedly, if it were essential like an essential presence in the culture of its time, it is often with the scandals that it had it - by “wallow in the refuse”, one ends up drawing the attention -, and it was suspect for the French Academy, where its repeated candidatures led only to failures. But a certain popular culture always asserted it, and the film adaptations of its works do not amount any more.