Similarly the ‘Cognet girl’, Jacqueline, who from being the skivvy becomes the mistress of Hourdequin, representative of the progressive large farmer interested in new ideas of chemical fertilizers' and machinery, seems almost too much of a nymphomaniac to be true. Zola still had a tendency to see the Scarlet Woman around him, a tendency which only vanished when he had established, a couple of years later, his liaison with his own servant, Jeanne Rozerot.

There are many other vivid, concretely realized, minor characters. We see the comical drunken gamekeeper and bell-ringer Bécu, the constant drinking companion, ironically enough, of the professional poacher Jesus Christ, who enjoys also the favours – perhaps services is the better word, for she is extremely ill-favoured – of the skinny Madame Bécu. There is Berthe, the daughter of one of two feuding innkeepers and their warring wives, nicely contrasted, one nastily bitchy, the other sluggishly apathetic – the lads of the village call her Berthe Not Got Any, for she is rumoured to be bald in parts hardly ever hairless, at least not in western Europe. How do they know, we wonder? And talking of fur, we must not forget that most human of animals – far nicer than some of the villagers – the intelligent donkey Gideon, who can open doors and knows that a good bucketful of wine is well worth drinking, even if it leads to his making an exhibition of himself in front of the shocked hypocritical Charles.

At the more respectable end of the scale there is the likeable priest Godard, the apoplectic and kind-hearted curé of a neighbouring parish ruthlessly exploited by the parishioners of Rognes, too mean to pay for a priest of their own and basically quite indifferent to religion or indeed God, yet insisting on his offering them regular Mass as well as providing them with church christenings, weddings and funerals. Poor Abbé Godard! His Daughters of Mary are continually becoming pregnant… One of them goes off to Paris and becomes a successful high-class tart, although there are hints that she finishes up in hospital with an assortment of nasty diseases. Indeed, although the villagers of Rognes are depicted so unflatteringly, Zola seems to give the impression that both those who leave the village and those who come in from outside are less admirable or vigorous characters than those who, so to speak, grin and bear it. The rather cocky Nénesse, Fanny Delhomme's son, who goes off to the city and ends up as the Charles' son-in-law running the brothel, is far less sympathetic than the honest, bullet-headed Delphin, who stays on the land; the craven, seedy bailiff's man is no match for generous-hearted Jesus Christ, scoundrel that he is; even Jean Macquart himself, gentle, rather clumsy and easily led, is pale beside Françoise and Buteau. Country folk may be dreadful: but here beats a mighty heart that, after all, keeps the whole of France alive with its produce.

So we find in La Terre a lively canvas, grand and broad, peopled by characters who can be almost heroic in their evil and, certainly, humorous in their humanity, and who often have something of each; but is this splendid canvas, worthy of Hieronymus Bosch or Bruegel, painted in over-sombre colours? Or worse, is Zola's picture of French peasants under the Second Empire so nasty as to be obscene? Many of his contemporaries thought so, and while the novel was still appearing in serial form five of his naturalist colleagues and acquaintances launched their celebrated manifesto in which, while quite reasonably exposing some of Zola's more pretentious scientific claims, they attacked him hip and thigh on other grounds. His observation, they cried, was superficial and his technique was out of date. His narrative style was common and flat – they failed to realize that rhetoric or other fine writing needs to be deliberately eschewed in such a slice of life. But above all, they thought, Zola had descended to such depths of filth that La Terre read at times like a collection of scatology. They charitably attributed this wallowing in dirty rubbish first to Zola's kidney trouble, secondly to his excessive chastity (this seems a very French argument) and thirdly (this is perhaps where the shoe really pinched) to his successful preoccupation with writing books that would sell – near-pornography is obviously a means of achieving this end. In this connection, it is amusing to note that one of the signatories of the Manifeste des cinq had recently written a book on the long taboo subject of masturbation.

However, our times are less innocent or less hypocritical than the 1880s. No one is likely to be greatly shocked by La Terre, which is no more scandalous or obscene than daily reports of happenings in our free media, read by millions. Indeed, from the beginning there were percipient critics who brushed aside the manifesto and, ignoring the brutishness of certain scenes (for when people are treated like animals they will behave like them – or worse), they drew attention to the many positive aspects of the novel: the epic grandeur of the theme of birth and death and rebirth; the sharpness of Zola's observation of people and things; his sombre but intelligent appraisal of so many social, economic and political aspects of the nineteenth century – even if his chronology was faulty, for the sixties were in fact a time of prosperity, not of hardship, for French farmers.

Almost all critics use the term epic of this novel; some – including that outstanding doyen of Zola studies in England, Professor Hemmings, and the equally outstanding French Zola scholar, Guy Robert, who set the standard for all future Zola criticism in his masterly La Terre d'Emile Zola – have gone so far as to apply the adjective tragic to it. I find it difficult to agree: certainly the novel arouses pity but tragedy implies a tragic flaw in a character punished with undeserved severity. But how could Fouan, loving the land and unable to till it, do otherwise than divide it amongst his children? He did it, in fact, with his eyes open and his children, as it happened – particularly Buteau – were as mean and brutal and ruthless as old Fouan himself is described as having been in his youth. Françoise, too, brings her own fate on her head and she is shown as realizing this herself by refusing to break the unwritten family pact of solidarity and make a will in Jean's favour. In a word, all these characters are so much of the earth, earthy, so much part of the soil, that there can be no question of tragedy, perhaps barely even of pity. With the land, with the soil, everything that is has to be: a hailstorm is a hailstorm, just as rape is just rape and incest just incest – both shown, indeed, as the almost everyday occurrences that they may well be for peasants, events more common than people think, if less common than people say. All these things are built-in necessities of an existence in bondage to that hard and impartial taskmistress, Mother Nature – a taskmistress whom the peasants are shown, rightly or wrongly, as unwilling to exchange for any other.

Nor is everything in the novel pathetic squalor, although any joy is usually sensual rather than spiritual: the peasants can no more afford love than they can afford religion and their relationship to the land is certainly utilitarian rather than aesthetic. But the peasant has other qualities and other rewards. His toil, if it provides little pecuniary reward, receives some compensation from the rich yellow soil of Beauce and the golden glow of its wheat. And if life connotes death, in between the two there is room for many things, not all physical misery or sexual indulgence: there is courage and deep moral satisfaction, and if the novel strikes many a chord of harsh pessimism, it ends on a heroic note; for in the last chapter, in early spring, after old Fouan's grotesque funeral, with its ludicrously petty and superstitious squabbles about the siting of his grave, the reader's eye, like Jean Macquart's, is seized by the green expanse of winter wheat and, as at the beginning, the peasants, like tiny insects dwarfed by the boundless horizon of Beauce, are once again, as they always have done and always will do, making the eternal gesture of the sower casting the good seed on the land.

In retrospect, we can now see that Zola stood at the right point of time to produce what is certainly a masterpiece. Under the influence of realism – the desire to depict, in painting and literature, the hitherto neglected lower-middle and working classes in all their contemporaneity – the urban and rural proletariat had become an accepted subject. Such a depiction, which aimed at objective impartiality, was certain to appear both unflattering and bold: middle-class critics were bound to hold up their hands in horror at, for example, a writer who not only wrote about coitus interruptus, but described it in some detail – despite the fact that it must have been a universal practice as the poor man's contraceptive, and an important one when sex was the only free pleasure. So despite academic reservations about the solidity of his research, Zola's detailed, concrete and vivid observation – not necessarily, be it noted, of significant detail but frequently of meaningless detail, all the more effective and real because of its apparently random nature – creates a solid, satisfying effect of immediacy and plausibility. We feel that any appeal to the heroic or to our pity springs from the plain, unvarnished nature of the tale: we might be reminded of Courbet's paintings of the rural proletariat, such as the Casseurs de pierres, crouched and awkward at their toilsome yet so necessary task. And this is, I think, ultimately the sort of general image that remains with the modern reader, long after many details have faded from his mind; not so much the set passages, sometimes a trifle ponderous, but the honest, relatively balanced depiction, in its unspoken heroism as well as in its inevitable wretchedness, of a class that is at last granted citizen's rights in the serious novel.