What we’re about
A group thirsting for esprit de corps with timeless French literature.
An offshoot to the main reading group. Here we explore and fulfill our mad completist desires for Zola, Balzac, Proust, Flaubert, Dumas, Sand, Germaine de Staël, Hugo and others.
We start for the first year and a half with Émile Zola's: Les Rougon-Macquart.
All are welcome to join this group but we start on novel three of Émile Zola's collection of 20 novels. Émile Zola's magnum opus was Les Rougon-Macquart, the collective title given to a cycle of twenty novels following the lives of two branches of a fictional family during the time of the Second French Empire (1852-1870). Zola was an advocate for the political liberalization of France and a major figure in the exoneration of falsely accused army office Alfred Dreyfus. His famous newspaper opinion is headlined "J'Acuse...!"
Zola was known especially as a proponent of literary naturalism, an extension of realism that focused primarily on individuals on the lowest rungs of human society. His writing was influenced by Darwin’s theory of evolution and the nature-versus-nurture debate that grew out of it. His subject matter was viewed through a dark lens and covered the topics of: poverty, disease, racism, alcoholism, prostitution, and prejudice. Zola's depictions were characteristically raw and sordid. The renowned Norwegian writer Henrik Ibsen famously said of him, “Zola descends into the sewer to bathe in it."
This website details a recommended reading order for Les Rougon-Macquart:
https://readingzola.wordpress.com/recommended-reading-order/
