Zola, Émile (āmēl` zôlä`), 1840–1902, French novelist, b. Paris. He was a professional writer, earning his living through journalism and his novels. About 1870 he became the apologist for and most significant exponent of French naturalism naturalism, in literature, an approach that proceeds from an analysis of reality in terms of natural forces, e.g., heredity, environment, physical drives. The chief literary theorist on naturalism was Émile Zola , who said in his essay
..... Click the link for more information. , a literary school that maintained that the novel should be scientific in a strict sense. Inspired by his readings in social history and medicine, Zola decided to apply scientific techniques and observations to the depiction of French society under the Second Empire. He composed a vast series of novels in which the characters and their social milieus are impartially observed and presented in minute and often sordid detail.

Of his many novels, those considered most important are among the 20 that constitute the series Les Rougon-Macquart (1871–93), an account of the decay of a family as the result of heredity and environment, with special emphasis on alcoholism, disease, and degeneracy. Perhaps the best known of these are L'Assommoir (1877, tr. The Dram-Shop), on lower-class life in Paris; Nana (1880); and Germinal (1885, tr. 1901), a "proletarian" novel involving coal mining in N France. He also began the socialistic Quatre Évangiles [four gospels], of which he finished Fécondité (1899, tr. Fruitfulness, 1900), Travail (1901, tr. Labor, 1901), and Vérité (1903, tr. Truth, 1903).

Zola had an ardent zeal for social reform. He was anti-Catholic and wrote many diatribes against the clergy and the Church. His part in the Dreyfus Affair Dreyfus Affair (drā`fəs, drī–), the controversy that occurred with the treason conviction (1894) of Capt.
..... Click the link for more information. (notably his article, "J'accuse," 1898) was his most conspicuous public action, and he became the special object of the hatred of the anti-Dreyfus party. Prosecuted for libel (1898), he escaped to England, where he remained a few months until an amnesty enabled his return to France. He was accidentally asphyxiated in his bedroom after inhaling fumes from a blocked chimney.

Bibliography

See biographies by A. Schom (1988) and F. Brown (1995); studies by F. W. J. Hemmings (2d ed. 1966), A. Wilson (1952, repr. 1973), and D. Baguley (1986).

Zola, Émile (-Édouard-Charles-Antoine)

(born April 2, 1840, Paris, France—died Sept. 28, 1902, Paris) French novelist and critic. Raised in straitened circumstances, Zola worked at a Paris publishing house for several years during the 1860s while establishing himself as a writer. In the gruesome novel Thérèse Raquin (1867), he put his “scientific” theories of the determination of character by heredity and environment into practice for the first time. These ideas established him as the founder of naturalism in literature. In 1870 he began the ambitious project for which he is best known, the Rougon-Macquart Cycle (1871–93), a sequence of 20 novels documenting French life through the lives of the violent Rougon family and the passive Macquarts. It includes L'Assommoir (1877), a study of alcoholism that is among his most successful and popular novels; Nana (1880); Germinal (1885), his masterpiece; and La Bête humaine (1890). Among his other works are two shorter novel cycles and treatises explaining his theories on art, including The Experimental Novel (1880). He is also notable for his involvement in the Alfred Dreyfus affair, especially for his open letter, “J'accuse” (1898), denouncing the French army general staff. He died under suspicious circumstances, overcome by carbon-monoxide fumes in his sleep.