Émile Zola

Émile Zola was born in Paris in 1840, the son of an Italian-born engineer who died when Zola was seven, leaving the family in financial difficulty. He grew up in Aix-en-Provence, where he was a childhood friend of Paul Cézanne, then moved to Paris to work as a shipping clerk for the publisher Hachette before establishing himself as a journalist and critic. He became the central figure of literary Naturalism — the belief that the novel should apply scientific method to human behavior, documenting the environmental and hereditary forces that shape character with the precision that a naturalist brings to the description of species.

The Rougon-Macquart series, which occupied him from 1871 to 1893, comprises twenty novels tracing the lives of two branches of a family (the legitimate Rougons and the illegitimate Macquarts) across the Second Empire of Napoleon III. The project was explicitly biological: Zola intended to demonstrate how heredity and environment produced different outcomes across the social spectrum — the bourgeoisie, the peasantry, the working class, the aristocracy, the demimonde. Each novel has a social milieu: L'Assommoir (1877) is about working-class alcoholism; Nana (1880) is about prostitution and the demimonde; Germinal (1885) is about coal miners; La Terre (1887) is about peasants; La Bête Humaine (1890) is about a murderous train driver. Germinal is generally considered the masterpiece: a strike novel that manages simultaneously to understand the miners, the mine owners, and the different strands of socialist ideology competing for the workers' allegiance.

His methodology required research. He descended into coal mines in the Pas-de-Calais to write Germinal. He spent time in the Paris markets for Le Ventre de Paris. He visited a laundry for L'Assommoir. The resulting novels have an authority of surface detail — how things work, what they cost, who does what and when — that distinguishes them from fiction content with imagining from the outside.

In 1898, during the Dreyfus Affair, Zola published "J'Accuse...!" — an open letter to the President of the French Republic accusing the military high command of a cover-up in the wrongful conviction of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish army officer convicted of treason on fabricated evidence. The letter was published in L'Aurore on the front page and is one of the most famous journalistic interventions in political history. Zola was convicted of criminal libel and fled to England for a year. The Affair was eventually resolved in Dreyfus's favor; the letter is understood as a founding document of the concept of the engaged intellectual.

Zola died in September 1902, asphyxiated by carbon monoxide from a blocked chimney flue. Some have suggested assassination by anti-Dreyfusards; the official finding was accidental. He was sixty-two. His funeral was attended by Anatole France and Alfred Dreyfus.