Marthe is presented as weak-minded, yearning, passive, and unfulfilled. She is, as Faujas rightly surmises, ready to be lured into religion, a focal point for her hysterical tendencies and thwarted sexuality. Marthe’s faith is obsessive and erotic, and she becomes Faujas’s creature in ways that alienate her from her husband and children and help further the schemes of Faujas and Félicité.

Faujas conquers the town through religion, and he conquers it through the women, first by encouraging them to donate to a project, a religious centre, the ‘Work of the Virgin’, for the protection of working-class young girls, and then by using his hold over the women to attain power over their husbands, who are, by a symmetrical process, encouraged to start up a youth club. One of the great literary figures Zola evokes in The Conquest of Plassans is Molière’s classic figure of Tartuffe, a religious hypocrite who poses as a man of faith in order to win over the gullible Orgon and gain his daughter’s hand and her inheritance. Tartuffe, like Faujas, is a lodger who gradually gains control over the household, though unlike Faujas, Tartuffe only fools Orgon and his devout mother. Tartuffe is a comedy that ends well, whereas The Conquest of Plassans is a tragedy that ends in melodramatic catastrophe. At one point in this novel, Mouret even calls Faujas ‘le tartuffe’, and the name is still used in French to designate a religious fraud with ulterior motives that are in fact worldly, materialistic, and wholly unspiritual.4

The secondary characters in Plassans, a small-town bourgeois society and its minor aristocracy, are presented as hypocritical, sour, vain, and greedy, riddled with snobbery, poisoned by rivalry, two-faced and weak. While they are capable of low cunning, they too become instruments in Félicité’s and Faujas’s game. Zola held Napoleon III and those who served him in contempt, and his own politics were Republican. He never hid his disgust, in fiction or in journalism, for the Imperial regime, and much like Marx (who in Eighteenth Brumaire excoriated the corruption and dictatorialism of Napoleon III), saw it not just as a reactionary low point in post-Revolutionary France but also as a masquerade of pomp and sleaze, aping the lost grandeur of Napoleon. The Conquest of Plassans shows the regime, as it were, from the margins and from the ground: while Paris might be the centre of national politics, the towns and provinces have their own branchlines of corruption and power. Much as Balzac divided his novels between Parisian centre and provincial edges, so Zola reveals the connections between the different levels of national life, which seem so far apart but are in fact intimately linked. We may also think of the Russian novelists Gogol and Dostoevsky, who paint the banal dramas of provincial life in all their cut-throat absurdity and ruthlessness, with their political functionaries and their rival families, ugly microcosms of the country itself. We have the reprobate Monsieur de Condamin and his flighty but scheming wife; the ugly and resentful, but easily-bought, Paloque couple; and the cynical Doctor Porquier who allows Mouret to be committed to the asylum. There is Monsieur de Rastoil and his family, Monsieur Péqueur des Saulaies, and the town’s mayor, Monsieur Delangre. Some are Bonapartists, some Legitimists, and, as Mouret explains to the newly arrived Faujas: ‘on my right, I have at the Rastoils’ the flower of the Legitimists, and on my left, at the sub-prefect’s, the bigwigs of the Empire’ (p. 36). With a dramatic irony Zola is fond of, Mouret warns Faujas not to get involved in politics . . . Amid this melee we also have rival priests and a lazy, ineffectual bishop, a docile layer of bourgeois and business interests, and a marginalized working and peasant population outside town and beyond the narrative’s parameters.

Zola is a skilful novelist of foreboding: from the moment we see the Mourets, we know that their peace is fragile, and when we meet the sinister, silent Abbé Faujas himself, arriving early and inopportunely to take up his room in their household, we sense a darkness we cannot quite define. While nothing can prepare us for the novel’s violent ending, the signs accumulate from the start: the house and garden, the family unit that is fraught with imprecise unease, the distracted, languid Marthe and her unstable husband, the mention of the asylum in the first few pages, the unwelcome intrusion of the inscrutable priest and his looming mother . . . all of these factors are choreographed by Zola with a skill that is the hallmark of a novelist and not a mere recorder of facts. For a writer who rarely stinted on description and documentation, Zola was also able to make it all count on the narrative, the symbolic, or the psychological levels too. In his own way, Zola is a novelist of economy: he makes the apparent excess of information and description germane to the reader’s experience, a skill he shares with Balzac. Sometimes doing less with more—catching the world’s overspill and channelling it towards a coherent but unreductive end—is just as good as the more conventionally admired skill of doing more with less. Zola does not always economize on words; his novels are voraciously inclusive—of data, facts and figures, descriptions and details—but he rarely repeats himself. While it is true that The Conquest of Plassans is, by Zola’s standards, a lean and plot-driven novel, it is also full of lyrical description and recurring symbolic motifs.

Faujas, whose name contains the French for ‘false’, faux, is a strict and unmaterialistic priest who installs himself in the Mouret house and makes it his centre of operations.