The Fortune of the Rougons, or La Fortune des Rougon, published in 1871, is the first in a monumental series of twenty novels by French author Émile Zola, subtitled “The Natural and Social History of a Family Under the Second Empire”. The series charts the lives and inherited traits of the fictional characters in a family tree descending from Adélaïde Fouque, who gradually slides into mental illness. One branch of her descendants is legitimately born and largely respectable in social position (the Rougon side of the family) and the other side is illegitimate and lower in the social order (the Macquart side).
Throughout, Zola explores his theories of heredity, genetic predisposition and environment; he is interested in how appetites are shaped into virtues or vices according to the milieu in which they develop. The novels are naturalistic in style, and set in different social, economic or professional spheres, so overall the series paints a vivid and detailed picture of France and its social/political structures at that time.
Zola was inspired to write his Rougon-Macquart novel cycle by Honoré de Balzac’s La Comédie humaine, but whereas Balzac wanted to describe a whole society, Zola wanted to focus more minutely on a single family, writing “My big task is to be strictly naturalist, strictly physiologist”.
I find the Rougon-Macquart series to be a stunning sequence of books, with my favourite being the powerful Germinal. The books can be read individually, or in any order, but The Fortune of the Rougons is the first in the series, both in the chronology of Zola’s writing and in terms of plot and the story timeframe. It introduces most of the characters (some 66, I think) who feature in later books in the series, and it sets the scene for their genetic heritage.
You can download a copy of the e-book from Project Gutenberg and an audiobook version from LibriVox. But any unabridged edition (paper, digital or audiobook) is fine.
Something that strikes me in reading all of our Book Club selections so far (and the opening section of this one in particular) is the hefty amount of description that authors used to include in their stories. Generally speaking, modern novels seem to have fewer (and shorter) descriptive passages. I wonder whether this might be because the advent of visual media has changed the way in which we approach the written word?
It does. “The word” (spoken, written, transmitted or acted out) used to be the main story telling device. And you need quite a lot of words to describe things most people have never seen. Like the world outside a 20 Mile radius of their village.
I’m slowly working my way through the Rougon-Macquart. When I say slowly, I read my first one as part of my degree in 1979 and I think I’ve read about seven of them so far… Part of the problem is that in order to pretend to myself that I’ve haven’t forgotten how to speak French, I’m reading them in French, and Zola is notorious for the difficulty of his vocabulary. It’s not the grammar or syntax which is difficult, at all, it’s that he describes everything in such minute detail…
E.g. There are parts of La Faute de l’Abbé Mouret or La Curée when he spends page after page describing a garden or a conservatory, itemising every single plant, and I don’t know what any of them are, even when I’ve looked them up in English.
But apart from that, they’re brilliant books and well worth the effort and it’s really time I picked up Son Excellence again
Not reading along, but have previously read this book as part of my goal of finishing the entire cycle (15 down, 5 to go)
First off: nice to see others reading Zola! I think his works are often neglected among anglophones. I started reading the cycle a number of years ago and love how he does these deep dives into different parts of French society.
Second: I think it is worth it to spend a bit of time on Wikipedia reading up on the political context to this time period, as Zola does assume some degree of familiarity with the different factions at play. I had not realized just how politically turbulent this century in France was, so it was really eye-opening and helped me better understand what was going on.
Finally, if you struggle to get into this installment, don’t be put off of Zola altogether! Alot of this book is set up - while I enjoyed it for allowing me to better understand how all the characters related to each other (I think I read it after having already completed about five others), it doesn’t have as strong of a thematic core. My personal favourites are probably Son Excellence Eugène Rougon, Germinal (which I appropriately read while I was participated in a 5-month long strike), and La faute de l’abbée Mouret.
If it makes you feel any better, I am natively bilingual (though these days, I mostly read and write in English) and found myself with the same problem in these same passages! There is a lot of specialist language which can at times be hard to sift through. I have mostly read them on ereader and have found the ability to look up words on wikipedia with a single tap particularly useful for these instances.
I do think this is partly an older style of writing, but for Zola specifically, you can chalk it up in part to his naturalist style, as well as his journalistic background. He really wants to paint a tableau of what the world was like and did tons of research on each of his subjects. In some parts of the series, this can get a bit overwhelming (see what I just wrote), though I don’t remember this particular book having too many scenes with an tons of specialist vocab. Mostly because this opening chapter is all about the political intrigue, rather than doing a deep dive of a particular industry.
Like you, I make good use of the lookup feature on an ereader (though it’s usually the French dictionary of course, rather than Wikipedia) – much more convenient than a paper dictionary. But I can usually make do with only looking up the occasional word with most French authors – you don’t need to know every single word to get a lot out of a book – but not with Zola when he gets into itemisation mode…
