Émile Zola

Émile Zola was born in Paris on April 2, 1840. In 1843 his family moved to Aix-en-Provence, where his father, Francesco, a civil engineer of Italian origin and meager means, had found work planning a new water-works system. Four years later, he contracted a fever and died, leaving his widow, Émilie, and Émile in acute financial peril. With the help of family and friends, Émile studied at the College Bourbon in Aix, where he became a close friend of the future painter Paul Cézanne. After he and his mother moved to Paris in 1858, he continued his studies, with the help of a scholarship, at the Lycée Saint-Louis. Though he had won academic awards at school in Aix, his performance at the Lycée was undistinguished. He failed the baccalauréat exam twice and could not continue his studies, instead sinking into a grim state of unemployment and poverty.

In 1862 Zola was hired by the publisher Hachette, and he rose quickly through the ranks of the advertising department to earn a decent living. At the same time, he began to write journalistic pieces and fiction. In the latter, he sought to truthfully depict life and not censor the experiences of brutality, sex, and poverty. His explicit autobiographical novel, Claude’s Confession (1865), created such a scandal that the police searched his house for pornographic material. Zola left Hachette in 1866 to work as a freelance journalist, and he inflamed readers with his opinionated critiques of art and literature. In 1867 he published his first major work, Thérèse Raquin. In his preface to this novel about adultery and murder, Zola introduced the term “naturalist” to describe his uncompromisingly “clinical” portrayals of human behavior.

A year after his marriage in 1870 to a former seamstress, Gabrielle Alexandrine Meley, Zola began publishing a series of novels that was to occupy him for more than twenty years. Under the umbrella name Les Rougon-Macquart, the series details the fortunes of three branches of a French family during the Second Empire (1852-1870). Among the twenty volumes are several masterpieces, including The Drunkard (1877), Germinal (1885) , Earth (1887), and Nana (1880) . As Zola’s fame grew, he often retired to his second home in the countryside, where he was surrounded by fellow writers and literary disciples. As he claimed in his aesthetic manifesto, The Experimental Novel (1880), he and his friends created groundbreaking narratives that proudly defied the conventions of Romantic fiction.

While Zola was at work on a new series, The Three Cities, France was shaken by a scandal in the highest ranks of the military. In 1894 a Jewish officer, Alfred Dreyfus, was convicted of leaking secret military information to a German military attache. When it became clear that Dreyfus had been framed by French officials under a cloud of anti-Semitism, Zola wrote “J’Accuse”—an open letter excoriating the military and defending the wrongfully convicted officer. Then Zola himself was convicted of libeling the military and sentenced to prison; he fled to England but returned the next year for Dreyfus’s second court martial. The subsequent years were relatively much quieter for Zola as he worked to finish a new series of novels, The Four Gospels.

In 1902 Emile Zola died from carbon monoxide poisoning that some said was planned by fanatics offended by his role in the Dreyfus Affair. At Zola’s funeral, which was attended by some 50,000 people, Anatole France eulogized him as “a moment in the history of human conscience.” Zola was buried at Montmartre Cemetery, but in 1908 his remains were moved to a place of honor in the Panthéon in Paris.