Lisa's daughter, the little girl Pauline in The Belly of Paris, will grow up to be a leading character in La Joie de vivre

Throughout the Rougon-Macquart novels the harshest social criticism is leveled at the bourgeois class, Zola's class. In The Belly of Paris Lisa and Quenu are the great examples of the petite bourgeoisie, but there are similar couples in other novels, always fat, complacent, and obsessed with order. Curiously, they always have one child, a daughter, which provided the cycle of novels with an ample supply of bourgeois women. Women who read Zola may be inclined to stop dieting, for these bourgeois women, such as Lisa, drive men wild with their plumpness. Even while Lisa abuses Quenu and Florent with her small-mindedness, the sight of her ample round flesh excites the boy Marjolin to the brink of madness as he sneaks glimpses of her and her ample waist through the window.

The Belly of Paris was a hit when it first came out in 1873. Flaubert praised it, though the young Anatole France wrote that it was “vain, empty, detestable virtuosity,” and another critic called it “obscene.” There was a bit of both shock and fascination about this young writer who wrote about voluptuous women and the delights of food. The book expanded the young writer's readership and reputation. The first edition sold out in a month. Though it is good enough for a lesser writer to have built an enduring reputation on, it was eclipsed by the writer's later work. Zola himself considered it one of his best works, a better novel, he said, than L'Assommoir, which is generally considered one of his masterpieces. Most writers have a book that they regard as one of their best even though it never got its due. For Zola it was Le Ventre de Paris.

Le Ventre de Paris was one of five novels he adapted for the theater. It ran three and a half months at the Théâtre de Paris, not a spectacular success. The play has never been published. He coauthored it with William Busnach, with whom he had done his other adaptations. Letters from Busnach to Zola indicate that the stage adaptation had been thrown together hastily. Reviewers seemed to feel that the production relied more on spectacular settings—Les Halles at daybreak was singled out—than on true dramatic moments. But even Zola's most successful play the stage adaptation of Thérèse Raquin, comes off as a melodrama. Although Zola never achieved the triumph as a playwright that he did as a novelist, his novels are conspicuously theatrical. He develops characters and sets scenes and always gives rich visual backdrops. Almost every novel he wrote could easily be adapted to film.

To fully comprehend this novel, it must be understood that at the time Zola was writing it, France, and Paris in particular, had experienced more than eighty years of regular violent street uprisings. These events were considerably bloodier than the demonstrations brutally crushed by the police during the Algerian war or the skirmishes of May 1968. These were pitched battles on the streets between well-armed and -trained, war-hardened troops and armed rebels in which hundreds died. Though the would-be revolutionaries of Le Ventre de Paris make reference to the uprisings of 1848 and 1852 and even the violence of the 1830s and the late-eighteenth-century Revolution, in which 19,000 people were killed in the year-and-a-half-long “terror” of 1793–94, no doubt what Zola and his readers thought about was the recent events. In 1871, the uprising following the Franco-Prussian War claimed more lives than any battle of the war. While 900 of the 130,000 Versailles troops sent to crush the uprising were killed and another 6,500 were wounded, it is not even known how many Parisians they slaughtered on the streets during the six-day siege known as la semaine sanglante, the bloody week. A widely accepted estimate is between 25,000 and 30,000 dead. Many of them were executed by firing squads. Bodies were piled up around Paris. Gutters literally ran red with blood, and in places so did the Seine.