Émile Zola

Émile Édouard Charles Antoine Zola was a French novelist, journalist, playwright, and the best-known practitioner of the literary school of naturalism. Born in Paris on 2 April 1840, he lived and worked during the upheavals of nineteenth-century France, including the French Second Republic, the Second Empire under Napoléon III, and the long public battle over Alfred Dreyfus. Zola became a major figure in the political liberalization of France, and his newspaper opinion piece J’Accuse...! helped press the case for the exoneration of the falsely accused and convicted army officer Dreyfus.

Zola’s early life mixed culture, loss, and hardship. His father, François Zola, was an Italian engineer born in Venice, with some Greek ancestry, and his mother, Émilie Aubert, was French. The family moved to Aix-en-Provence when Émile was three. His father died in 1847, leaving his mother on a meager pension. At the Collège Bourbon, where he entered as a boarding student in 1852, Zola later complained of poor nutrition and bullying. In 1858, he moved with his mother to Paris, where his childhood friend Paul Cézanne soon joined him. His mother hoped he would study law, but he failed his baccalauréat twice.

Before he could live by writing, Zola worked for minimal pay as a clerk in a shipping firm and then in the sales department at the publisher Hachette. He wrote literary and art reviews for newspapers and, as a political journalist, made no secret of his dislike for Napoleon III. His early work included short stories, essays, plays, and novels. Contes à Ninon appeared in 1864, and La Confession de Claude in 1865 drew police attention and cost him his job at Hachette. Les Mystères de Marseille was serialized in 1867, the same year as his first major novel, Thérèse Raquin.

Zola is most closely associated with Les Rougon-Macquart, a twenty-volume cycle tracing one family under the reign of Napoléon III. He planned the series from the age of twenty-eight, shaping it around heredity, environment, and the social pressures of the Second Empire. The books examine the respectable Rougon branch and the disreputable Macquart branch across five generations. His thinking was influenced by ideas of heredity and milieu associated with Claude Bernard and Hippolyte Taine. With L’Assommoir in 1877, Zola became wealthy; later sales of Nana in 1880 and La Débâcle in 1892 surpassed it. Other works included L’Œuvre, Fécondité, Travail, plays, and volumes of criticism.

Zola married Éléonore-Alexandrine Meley on 31 May 1870. She helped promote his work and remained with him until his death. In 1888 he met Jeanne Rozerot, with whom he had two children, Denise and Jacques; after Zola’s death, they were given his name as their lawful surname. He wrote every day for around thirty years and took as his motto Nulla dies sine linea, “not a day without a line.” Nominated for the first and second Nobel Prizes in Literature in 1901 and 1902, Zola died on 29 September 1902. His words still carry force because they came from a writer who joined close observation of society to public courage.