Zola was shocked both by the anarchy of the Commune and by the savagery with which it was repressed.

1872

Publication of La Curée, the second of the Rougon-Macquart novels. Part of it had appeared in serialized form (September–November 1871), but publication had been suspended by the censorship authorites.

1873

Publication of Le Ventre de Paris, the third of the cycle set in and around the market of Les Halles.

1874

Publication of La Conquête de Plassans.

1875

Publication of La Faute de l’Abbé Mouret.

1876

Son Excellence Eugène Rougon follows the career of a minister under the Second Empire. Later in the same year, the seventh of the Rougon-Macquart novels, The Drinking Den (L’Assommoir), begins to appear in serial form and immediately causes a sensation with its grim depiction of the ravages of alcoholism and life in the Parisian slums.

1877

The Drinking Den is published in book form and becomes a bestseller. Zola’s fortune is made and he is recognized as a leading figure in the Naturalist movement.

1878

Zola follows the harsh realism of The Drinking Den with a gentler tale of domestic life, Une page d’amour. Buys a house at Médan.

1879

Nana appears in serial form, before publication in book form in the following year. The central character, whose childhood and adolescence were described in The Drinking Den, grows up to become a high-class prostitute; the novel was to attract further scandal to Zola’s name.

1880

Publication of Les Soirées de Médan, an anthology of short stories by Zola and some of his Naturalist ‘disciples’, including Maupassant. Zola expounds the theory of Naturalism in Le Roman expérimental. In May, Zola’s literary mentor, the writer Gustave Flaubert, dies; in October, Zola loses his much-loved mother. A period of depression follows and he suspends writing the Rougon-Macquart for a year.

1882

Zola’s next book, Pot-Bouille, centres on an apartment house and the character of the bourgeois seducer, Octave Mouret. The novel analyses the hypocrisy of the respectable middle class.

1883

Mouret reappears in Au Bonheur des Dames which studies the phenomenon of the department store.

1884

La Joie de vivre. Towards the end of the year, Germinal starts to appear in serial form and is published in book form the next year. Set in a northern French mining community, this powerful novel is Zola’s most politically committed fictional work.

1886

L’Œuvre provides a revealing insight into Parisian artistic and literary life, as well as a reflection of contemporary aesthetic debates, drawing on Zola’s friendship with many leading painters and writers. However, Cézanne reacts badly to Zola’s portrait of him in the novel, and ends their friendship.

1887

La Terre, a brutally frank portrayal of peasant life, causes a fresh uproar and leads to a crisis in the Naturalist movement when five ‘disciples’ of Zola sign a manifesto against the novel.

1888

Publication of Le Rêve. Zola begins his liaison with Jeanne Rozerot, the mistress with whom he will have two children.

1890

La Bête humaine, the story of a pathological killer, is set against the background of the railways. Though not the best novel in the cycle, it is to be one of the most popular.

1891

L’Argent examines the world of the Stock Exchange.

1892

La Débâcle analyses the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and the end of the Second Empire.

1893

The final novel in the cycle, Le Docteur Pascal, develops the theories of heredity which have guided Les Rougon-Macquart.

1894

With Lourdes, Zola starts a trilogy of novels, to be completed by Rome (1896) and Paris (1898), about a priest who turns away from Catholicism towards a more humanitarian creed. In December, a Jewish officer in the French army, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, is found guilty of spying for Germany and sentenced to life imprisonment in the penal colony on Devil’s Island, off the coast of French Guiana.

1897

New evidence in the case suggests that Dreyfus’s conviction was a gross miscarriage of justice, inspired by anti-Semitism. Zola publishes three articles in Le Figaro demanding a retrial.

1898

Zola’s open letter, J’Accuse, in support of Dreyfus, addressed to Félix Faure, President of the Republic, is published in L’Aurore (13 January). It proves a turning-point, making the case a litmus test in French politics: for years to come, being pro- or anti - Dreyfusard will be a major component of a French person’s ideological profile (with the nationalist Right leading the campaign against Dreyfus). Zola is tried for libel and sentenced to a year’s imprisonment and a fine of 3,000 francs. In July, waiting for a retrial (granted on a technicality), he leaves for London, where he spends a year in exile.

1899

Zola begins a series of four novels, Les Quatre Évangiles, which would remain uncompleted at his death. They mark his transition from Naturalism to a more idealistic and Utopian view of the world.

1902

29 September Zola is asphyxiated by the fumes from the blocked chimney of his bedroom stove, perhaps by accident, perhaps (as is still widely believed) assassinated by anti-Dreyfusards. On 5 October his funeral in Paris is witnessed by a crowd of 50,000. His remains were transferred to the Pantheon in 1908.

INTRODUCTION

(New readers are advised that this Introduction
makes the details of the plot explicit.)

The Drinking Den (L’Assommoir)1 was one of the publishing sensations of nineteenth-century French literature, selling out edition after edition from the time of its first publication in January 1877; by November of that year it had already reached sales of fifty thousand copies. The success represented a turning-point in Emile Zola’s life, confirming his reputation as one of the leading figures in the literary world of his time and the most prominent exponent of literary Naturalism. It also brought him a measure of financial stability and allowed him to buy a house, in Médan.

He was coming up to his thirty-seventh birthday – it fell on 2 April 1877 – and was already the author of a collection of short stories, three plays and eleven other novels, as well as a steady output of journalism. He contributed regularly to the Russian review Vestnik Evropy, published in St Petersburg by Mikhail Stassiulevich, who had been introduced to Zola by their friend, the writer Ivan Turgeniev. Zola’s novels were rapidly translated into Russian and his reputation, at least before the publication of L’Assommoir, was probably higher in St Petersburg than it was in Paris.

However, the success of The Drinking Den was to a great extent a succès de scandale. Before its appearance in book form, the novel had been published in instalments in Le Bien public, from April 1876, and immediately attracted hostile criticism. After six parts, publication was suspended, and not resumed until later in the year in a different newspaper, La République des lettres (from July 1876 to January 1877), concluding a couple of weeks before the book itself came out, on 24 January. By that time, Zola’s novel was already notorious and the subject of heated debate.