The Fortune of the Rougons by Émil Zola
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Zola introduces Adélaïde Fouque (Tante Dide), whose descendants split into two branches: the ambitious Rougons and the marginalized Macquarts. This origin story sets the stage for the entire saga, exploring how environment and heredity shape destiny.
Preface by Émil Zola
The characteristic of the Rougon-Macquart family, the group which I propose to study, is their unbridled passions—those great revolutionizing elements of our age, inciting to excessive self-indulgence. Physiologically speaking, these appetites are the gradual outcome of certain nervous and sanguineous modifications which manifest themselves in a race of beings as a consequence of some previous organic lesion. They determine the sentiments, desires, and passions of each individual of the race according to his surroundings; in short, all those natural and instinctive manifestations of human nature which, in their results, assume the conventional names of virtues and vices.
Historically speaking, these appetites originate among the people, whence they spread to contemporary society, affecting all classes under the influence of that impulse—essentially modern—which is communicated to the lower orders during the progress of their social development. They thus tell the story of the Second Empire, by means of their individual dramas, from the perfidy of the Coup d’État to the treason of Sedan.
I had been collecting documents for this vast work for about three years, and the present volume was, indeed, already written when the fall of the Bonapartes—essential to complete my picture, and which, with a kind of fatality, always turned up at the end of the drama—came to my aid. Though I had not dared to expect it so near, it supplied the terrible and necessary issue of my work. The latter is now complete; it moves in a finished circle; it becomes the picture of a defunct reign, of a strange epoch of folly and shame.
This work, which will comprise several episodes, embodies in my mind the natural and social history of a family under the Second Empire. And the first episode, The Fortune of the Rougons, may, for scientific purposes, be very aptly entitled…