. . He magnifies everything he touches.’ Zola himself, in a letter of 1885 to Henri Céard, puts it this way: ‘We all lie one way or another [. . .] I think that for my part I lie in the direction of the truth. I have hypertrophy when it comes to realist detail, I spring towards the stars from the trampoline of exact observation. Truth rises on a wingbeat towards the symbol.’

Part of the problem has been a tendency among critics and students to read Zola’s ‘theory’ as an explanation of the novels themselves, and to treat the famous preface he wrote to the Rougon-Macquart series as more than a manifesto: a manifesto outlines what a writer or artist (or politician) wishes to do, but does not necessarily explain what they have done, let alone what happens (to them, to the work itself ) while they are writing it. The tendency to slide back from the complex, difficult, and often rewardingly inconsistent work of art to a piece of explanatory theory that makes it easier to categorize, is understandable. It is important, of course, to consult what an author thinks, or claims to think, he is doing in order to clarify what he has actually done. But it must also be remembered that good art is always in excess of the theory that produces or supports it: if this were not the case, the theory would suffice, and the art would be mere illustration of principles and ideas better expressed elsewhere. This is never the case with Zola, even when his fiction appears most narrowly to obey the theory he brings to bear upon his project.

People, Place, and Politics

The Conquest of Plassans, which appeared in 1874 though is set more than a decade earlier, is the fourth novel in the Rougon-Macquart series. It follows on from the first novel, The Fortune of the Rougons (1871), in which Zola lays the foundations for his cycle by introducing the two branches of the family—the Rougons and the Macquarts—in a work that follows parallel but also intertwined family ‘fortunes’ (Zola puns on financial fortune and fortune as fate). Zola also spends an important portion of that novel delving into pre-Revolutionary France in order to explore the historical, social, and even medical backgrounds of the characters who will people the cycle as it ramifies, like a family tree, down and along the byways of nineteenth-century France. He embeds Rougons and Macquarts into the very fabric of French history, and works them into every level of French society. We have, on the one hand, high-powered politicians, ministers, and businessmen, and, on the other, factory workers, miners, shopkeepers. As well as these, Zola also gives us Rougon-Macquarts whose professions lie outside the conventional social hierarchies, but allow them to move up and down the social ladder: the doctor, the priest, and, memorably in Nana, the prostitute.

The Conquest of Plassans traces the gradual but unstoppable ascent of Abbé Faujas, sent by his political masters in Paris to conquer the town of Plassans for the Bonapartist side. The abbé manipulates his way to political power through religious influence, especially over the town’s women, and the mix of politics and religion makes this Zola’s most overtly anticlerical novel. These political masters are kept, as in many Zola novels, shadowy and out of the narrative picture: they are alluded to, suggested, mentioned in whispers, but never shown, though we know one of their leaders is Eugène Rougon, a cynical and ambitious schemer first encountered in The Fortune of the Rougons. Nor is the recent malfeasance of Faujas in Besançon explained, though it too is referred to on several occasions. It is part of his dark aura, and we note that when Zola describes Faujas he emphasizes the darkness of his clothes, the shadowy unreadability of his expression, and his looming, watchful silences. The town of Plassans, which seems to be the whole world of many of the characters, is merely a pawn in a larger game. Plassans, we know from The Fortune of the Rougons, had already been won for the Bonapartist side by Pierre Rougon, whose son Eugène (who has his own novel, the 1876 His Excellency Eugène Rougon), a politician loyal to Napoleon III, helps his father and his mother, the devious and manipulative Félicité, to gain control of Plassans in the aftermath of the 1851 coup d’état. It is a bloody victory, full of betrayal and double-dealing, in which the Rougons are responsible even for the murder of their own flesh and blood.

By the beginning of this novel, however, political control has slipped to the Legitimists, in other words, to the royalists, who support the succession of the Bourbon dynasty against both the Orléanist dynasty that had ruled France from 1830 to 1848, and the Imperial regime of Napoleon III. This grand and complex political drama might seem foreign to us, but to Zola’s readers these contexts were alive and relevant: The Conquest of Plassans was published in 1874 and, though it describes events that took place more than a decade before, Zola gave his readers an insight into their near past; a near past, moreover, whose consequences didn’t just affect their present but defined and even explained it. The novel appeared three years after the Paris Commune and four years after the defeat by Prussian forces of Napoleon III at Sedan, a symbol of French national humiliation—two crucial dates in French history. It depicts a triumphant Imperial regime, but was published when that regime was in tatters and Napoleon III in exile. Today’s reader does not need any special knowledge of the historical and political contexts to enjoy the book, however, because Zola makes sure that his scheming politicians and their parasitical, cowardly, and self-interested followers are sufficiently universal to be recognizable regardless of time, place, or political system. Nonetheless, the novel’s political background is worth establishing, since the plot moves so fast that there is little chance for the reader to stop and pick apart the threads.

The story takes place between 1858 and 1864, and Zola immerses us in the ongoing consequences of coup d’état of 2 December 1851, in which Napoleon III, nephew of Napoleon I, came to power through intrigue, deceit, demagoguery, and brute violence. He further embedded his rule through two plebiscites, in which he overwhelmingly won approval for his dissolution of the National Assembly, and, on 2 December 1852, the restoration of the Empire, which lasted until Napoleon III’s ignominious defeat in 1870, dramatized by Zola in the penultimate Rougon-Macquart novel, La Débâcle (The Debacle, 1892). In The Fortune of the Rougons, we had seen Pierre Rougon receive the Légion d’honneur for his own efforts, backed by Eugène and Félicité, to conquer Plassans for the Emperor.