The Fortune of the Rougons

The Fortune of the Rougons, published in 1871, is the first novel in Émile Zola's twenty-volume Rougon-Macquart cycle. Set in the fictional Provençal town of Plassans during Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte's coup d'état of December 1851, it provides the family history on which the later novels are built.

From Adélaïde Fouque—known as Tante Dide—descend the legitimate Rougon branch and the illegitimate Macquart branch. Pierre and Félicité Rougon see the political crisis as their chance to gain the money and social standing they have long coveted.

Against their calculation, the young lovers Silvère and Miette join the republican insurgents marching through the Var. Their idealism gives the novel its emotional center while the Rougons turn fear, betrayal, and violence to their advantage.

Zola joins political satire to his developing ideas about heredity and environment. The rise of the family and the birth of the Second Empire mirror one another, and the Rougons' fortune is quite literally paid for in blood.

"On quitting Plassans by the Rome Gate, on the southern side of the town, you will find, on the right side of the road to Nice, and a little way past the first suburban houses, a plot of land locally known as the Aire Saint-Mittre."