Les Rougon-Macquart cycle of twenty novels by Émile Zola is a portrayal of the Second Empire and a study in heredity through the lens of a single family. In this, the first book in the cycle, Zola lays out the origins of the family and its branches, with the main action taking place during the coup d'état in which Napoléon III overthrows the Second Republic.

The Revolution of 1848 found all the Rougons on the lookout, frustrated by their bad luck, and ready to use any means necessary to advance their cause. The were a family of bandits lying in wait, read to plunder and steal.

Pierre Rougon is the legitimate son of Adélaïde Fouque and the progenitor of one side of the family. A greedy schemer, Pierre and his equally avaricious wife plot to win wealth and a better position in life, by taking advantage of the confusion in the provinces after the coup. Pierre's illegitimate half-brother, Antoine Macquart, is a lazy do-nothing who sides with the doomed Republicans because he believes they will take from the rich and allow the poor like him to live a life of un-worked-for luxury. Silvère Macquart, son of Antoine's sister, is a young idealistic boy of seventeen, in love with an even younger local girl, Miette. Silvère and Miette are innocents, caught up in their dreams of a Republican Utopia and a life together.

The first part of the book contains the origin story of the Rougon-Macquart family, with all the key players sketched, and I found this part of the book quite interesting, more so than the story of Silvère and Miette, which takes up the middle portion. Most of the action takes place in the last third of the book, when Pierre and Félicité are scheming during the coup. Because so much of this book is the setup for what is to follow, it's hard to comment on the themes of heredity and social history. What is striking is Zola's detailed descriptions of nature, doing for a field what Balzac did with a teapot. This focus on nature is both descriptive and a foil for the social commentary that Zola wishes to convey.

The sleeping countryside awoke with a start, quivering like a beaten drum; it resounded in its very depths, repeating with each echo the stirring notes of the national anthem. Then the singing seemed to come from everywhere. From the horizon, from the distant rocks, the ploughed land, the fields, the copses, the smallest bits of brushwood, human voices seemed to be rising up. The great amphitheatre, stretching up from the river to Plassans, the gigantic torrent over which the bluish moonlight flowed, seemed filled with a huge, invisible crowd cheering on the insurgents; and in the depths of the Viorne, along the water streaked with mysterious metallic reflections, every dark spot seemed to conceal people taking up the refrain with increasing passion. The air and earth seemed alive; it was as if the whole countryside was crying out for vengeance and liberty. As the little army descended the slope, the roar rolled on in sonorous waves broken only by sudden outbursts which shook the very stones in their path.

Note that I read the Brian Wilson translation, the first new translation in over 100 years. It read smoothly and is reputed to be a much truer translation that the bowdlerized version by H. Vizetelly. The introduction in the Oxford World's Classic edition was extremely helpful in laying out the history of the time period, Zola's influences and themes, and a family tree. ( )

I am embarking on reading the whole Rougon-Macquart cycle written by Emile Zola. I have absolutely loved several of the books that occur later in the cycle, and I decided to join in on a group read to read them in order.

[The Fortunes of the Rougons] is the first book in the cycle, and it sets up the family origins that will be explored throughout the subsequent novels. Adelaide is the matriarch and she has children with two different husbands. These children and their children will form the basis of exploration. It was really interesting to read about this, already having a little glimpse into future characters through my Zola reading. Also in this book, Zola sets up the politics of the Second Empire and has his characters either supporting Louis-Phillipe's regime or as Republicans hoping for a more democratic France. I had to do a refresher on French politics of the time period and I'm still not sure I have it really sorted out, but I think it will continue to clarify as I read more.

Also in this story is the love story of the very young Silvere and Miette. Their story was the most engaging part of the book for me, but it was odd to have years of their relationship encapsulated within the short days of the revolution in their hometown of Plassans. At first I was confused about what was happening with the timeline.

This book is not Zola's best, but it's important as set up for what will happen later on. And, still present is his striking imagery. I loved the description of the enormous cloaks the women would wear as the walked with their lovers, enveloping both. And no one does a death scene like Zola. :-)

If you want a taste of Zola, don't start here, but if you already love his writing, you'll enjoy this. ( )

This is the first novel in Zola's 20 novel series about the Rougons and the Macquarts following the downfall of the Second French Empire (circa 1850-1870's) The Rougons were a pretty miserable lot until the Coup d'Etat by Louis-Napoleon. Napoleon's success was also the success of the Rougons, thieving scoundrels that most were. I can't say this book was terribly interesting, it was a bit mediocre. However, I have read that this book is the historical foundation(s) for the coming novels. There was a plethora of characters, but a family tree was provided. I may have enjoyed this book more had I known more about the history of this period. I think I will read up on it before I go on to read book two. 392 pages ( )

In 1789, the French rebelled against their hereditary monarchs and created a Republic. In time, the Republic thickened into Empire, before returning to monarchy. And then, in 1848, the monarchy fell for a second time, to a Second Republic. But in 1851, in what amounted to a coup, Napoleon III restored his family line into a Second Empire.

Got all that? By 1851, the French were divided between republicans, monarchists, monarchists 2.0 (those who didn't believe in the original line of kings and queens, but in their relatives who had taken over the throne years earlier), and lovers of empire. As well as, no doubt, some socialists and the like. For twenty years, the French survived an Empire, before it too finally came crumbling down.

It is across these twenty years that Emile Zola sets his twenty book cycle, of which The Fortune of the Rougons is the first. Through three interconnected families - one proletariat, crushed by the boots of the self-interested; one bourgeois and crippled by madness; and one nouveau riche Emperor-butt-kissing clan - the author explores life under the Second Empire in a dizzying array of forms. Each book has its own tone, cast of characters, genre, and plot, but all are connected through a family web.

Fortune is stuck with a lot of exposition, so you'll probably want to a) have some patience, and b) move on to a second book afterward so as to use all of this knowledge. At the same time, it is littered with hilarious and moving character portraits, ambience, and genuinely beautiful writing. Taking place in the days immediately following the coup, and set in the Provencal town of Plassans, Zola weaves a narrative of, well, fortunes. Those whose fortunes rise and those that fall as some conspiracies buckle, and others blossom. All mixed in to a tawdry family history that goes back to the 1780s, when France was in its final, blistering years of monarchy.

From here, you can venture to any one of the other Rougon-Macquart novels (except the last, Doctor Pascal). The next book published was The Kill which I'd probably recommend next. Zola himself had a preferred reading order that goes on to His Excellency Eugene Rougon - that is, however, one of the drier books in the series, so perhaps only go to that one if you're feeling particularly enchanted by Fortune. ( )

I already enjoyed reading two novels in the Rougons-Macquart series. This first installment of the series describes a family, dealing with an uprising of republicans against the French monarchy. While the young Silvére en Miette show genuine inocence, the rest of the world (with exeption of his uncle Pascal) are driven by greed and feelings of revenge.

Zola's style of writing is excellent and I felt drawn into his world from the first page. The characters are interresting, even though they are sometimes for from sympathetic. This said however, I have to give a warning. This is not an uplifting book. It has scenes of astounding cruelty and a very dark worldview. You will need to call a friend, to cheer you up after this. That said; it is a novel which will make you glad that you have read it. It will give you a personal view into the lives of an extraordinary family, in a small French town. ( )

The first installment in Zola's family epic roman-fleuve, Les Rougon-Macquart, La Fortune des Rougons was, as others have warned, a difficult place to begin even if a natural one. I ended up getting bogged down for a while which may be why it took me the longest it's taken for a while to finish a novel in French but at the end of it all, even if it's quite a scrappy and exposition-heavy origin story, I have to admire Zola's achievement with this book. Contained in this novel is a full accounting of the roots of an entire family*, their dreams, ambitions, personalities, feuds and schemes; the fall of the Second Republic and the birth of the Second Empire in its wake, buttressed by the most grasping social climbers of the French middle classes; and two plots both of which intertwine and contrast to give a full portrait of an era of revolutionary change.

If it's not a great novel as such it's still an enjoyable one, especially if you understand the politics and society of France at the time - the Rougon-Macquarts are already demonstrating themselves to be quite a brood of vipers by the end of this first chapter in their story, and there's enough betrayals and plots to keep the intrigue in this novel even if the number of sympathetic characters so far is low (how easily political allegiances shift and transform according to outside circumstance and convenience alone is an enjoyably cynical part of Zola's perspective on the petit-boureoisie milieu of the tale).

* I ended up having to keep an improvised family tree by my bedside to keep track of things and will probably continue to update and expand it as I work through these novels - recommended if you're crazy enough to try and do this project too. ( )

Io voglio spiegare come una famiglia, un piccolo gruppo di persone, si comporta in una societa’, sviluppandosi per dar vita a dieci, a venti individui che, a prima vista, sembrano profondamente diversi, ma che, analizzati, si rivelano intimamente connessi gli uni agli altri. Come in fisica la gravita’, cosi’ l’eredita’ ha le sue leggi. (3)

Secondo l’opinione comune, i Rougon-Macquart rivelavano la loro vera natura divorandosi tra loro; (131)

Lontano si snodavano le strade maestre, tutte bianche per il chiarore lunare. La colonna degli insorti, nella campagna fredda e chiara, riprese la sua marcia eroica. Era come un’ampia corrente d’entusiasmo. Il soffio di epopea che trascinava Miette e Silvere, questi grandi fanciulli avidi di amore e di liberta’, faceva dileguare, con una generosita’ sublime, le commedie vergognose dei Macquart e dei Rougon. (183)

Pascal fissava uno sguardo penetrante sula demente, su suo padre, su suo zio; il distacco dello studioso aveva il sopravvento: studiava quella madre e quei figli con l’attenzione di un naturalista che osserva le metamorfosi d’un insetto. E pensava a quella discendenza d’una famiglia, d’un ceppo da cui dipartono rami diversi, e la cui linfa acre trasporta gli stessi germi fin nei ramoscelli piu’ lontani, curvati in modo diverso a seconda che si trovino all’ombra o al sole. Per un istante, come alla luce d’un lampo, a Pascal sembro’ di vedere il futuro dei Rougon-Macquart, come una muta di cani lanciati contro la preda e satollati, in uno sfavillio d’oro e di sangue. (340-1)

( )

This was a re-read of the first novel in Zola's 20 novel Rougon-Macquart cycle about the lives of two related families in the Second Empire period of Napoleon III between 1851-70. When I first read this almost exactly ten years ago, I wasn't too impressed and found it dull and slow moving. I have a more positive opinion now, and quite enjoyed most of the interplay between the generations of the two branches of the family, especially the opportunism and desire for fame and fortune of Pierre Rougon, dominated by his wife Felicite, the tragic backstory of his mother "Aunt" Dide, and the youthful romanticism, both political and emotional, of Silvere and Miette. While some of the manoeuvrings around the fictional town of Plassans dragged a bit, for the most part I enjoyed the story and feel an appetite now to tackle the following books in the series, which I did not feel ten years ago. At one point, the families are described colourfully as "a pack of unbridled, insatiate appetites amidst a blaze of gold and blood". Once the Coup d'Etat has brought the Emperor to power and buried the second French Republic, it is the Rougons' time to prosper: "Their appetites, sharpened by thirty years of restrained desire, now fell to with wolfish teeth. These fierce, insatiate wild beasts, scarcely entering upon indulgence, exulted at the birth of the Empire — the dawn of the Rush for the Spoils. The Coup d’Etat, which retrieved the fortune of the Bonapartes, also laid the foundation for that of the Rougons." ( )

4.5 stars
In this book, Zola gives us the "origins," Of the Rougon Macquart family, such as it is. Focusing on a little Pueblo in Southern france during a time of insurrection against the coup d'etat of Louis bonapart, Napoleon's grandson, We get "treated" to a Little Love story between miette and Silvere, the grandson of the matriarch of the Rougon family, Aunt Dide.

Aunt Dide, whose name was Adelaide, was a wild child who would have been better off with no children. Her husband Rougon died, and she had a love affair with a poacher and smuggler named Macquart. She had one child by Mr Rougon, named Pierre. Two children by Macquart: Antoine and Ursule. Suffering from a neurological disease, she would have convulsions.
She never really took care of her children, she just like to play with them and kiss them. She would disappear with him when Macquart came back from his poaching, roaming the countryside. Of course the neighbors were terrible to her, not blaming Macquart, but blaming her for the "illegitimate" children.
She and Macquart cut a door in the stone wall that separated where she lived, from a shack where Macquart lived, so they could see each other more easily. Neighbors were shocked.
"...'people should at least keep up appearances,' the most tolerant women would say. But Adelaide did not understand what was meant by "appearances". She was happy, very proud of her door; she had helped macquart to pull the stones from the wall and had even mixed the mortar so that the job could be finished more quickly; and in the morning she arrived like a delighted child to inspect the work by daylight - an act that was deemed supremely shameless by three gossips who watched her gazing at the fresh masonry."
Adelaide lived on land that belong to her family, the Fouques. When her children were grown, her two sons, Pierre and Antoine, were shameless to their mother. Ursule married, and died young.
Pierre got rid of Antoine by sending him off to enlist in the army. Then he got busy getting rid of anything left to their mother, so when Antoine got out he wouldn't get anything, money or land. Pierre
"... Devised a plan, without consulting anyone, even the solicitor, whose suspicions he was afraid of arousing. He knew how to twist his mother around his little finger. One fine morning he took her to a notary and made her sign a deed of sale. Provided she could keep the shack in the impasse Saint-mittre, Adelaide would have sold the whole of Plassans. Besides, Pierre guaranteed her an annual income of 600 francs, and made the most solemn promises to look after his brother and sister. The oath satisfied the good woman. She parroted in front of the notary the phrases her son had made her learn. On the following day the young man made her sign a document in which she acknowledged having received 50,000 francs as the price of the property. This was his stroke of genius, the act of a rogue. He contented himself with telling his mother, who was a little surprised at signing such a receipt when she had not seen a centime of the 50,000 francs, that it was a pure formality. as he slipped the piece of paper into his pocket, he thought to himself: 'now, let the wolf cubs ask me to render an account. I'll tell them the old woman has squandered everything.'..."
Then he married Felicité, who
"... Despite her ugliness, however, Felicité had a distinctive kind of gracefulness that made her quite seductive. People said of her that she could be as pretty or ugly as she pleased. It depended on how she tied her magnificent hair; but it depended even more on the triumphant smile that lit up her tanned face when she thought how she had got the better of somebody...."

I really hated the character of Felicity when I read this excerpt, where she purposely killed a tree.
".. the remaining bourgeois supporters of the Republic saw the government tottering, and quickly rallied around the conservatives. Thus the Rougons' hour had come; the new town almost gave them a standing ovation on the day when the Liberty tree [which had been planted when the Republic was declared, in its honor], planted on the square in front of the subprefecture building, was cut down. This tree, a young poplar brought from the banks of the viorne, had gradually withered, to the great despair of the Republican workmen, who would come every Sunday to observe its slow decline without understanding the cause of it. Eventually a hatter's apprentice declared that he had seen a woman come out of Rougons' house and pour a bucket of poisoned water at the foot of the tree. Thenceforward it was generally accepted that Felicité herself got up every night to sprinkle the poplar with vitriol. When the tree was dead, the Town council declared that the dignity of the Republic required its removal. As they were afraid of how the working class would react, they arranged for this to be done late one evening... "

Silvere was the son of Ursule, who went to live with his grandmother when his mother died, and his father died not long after. He was an apprentice at a carriage makers, and he had made friends with miette, when he observed her weeding in her uncle's farm lot. Her father had been sent to prison for shooting a policeman, though it was in self-defense. Boys in the village made fun of her, calling her la Chantegreil, her father's name.
" 'your la Chantegreil, aren't you?' He said abruptly.
She recoiled and stopped smiling; her black eyes became serious, flashing with defiance. So this lad was going to insult her like the others! She was already turning her back without giving an answer when silvere, surprised by her sudden change of expression, quickly added:
'please don't go... I don't want to upset you.. there's so much I wanted to say!"
She turned around, still distrustful. Silvere, whose heart was in his mouth, remained speechless, not knowing how to carry on, afraid that he might again say the wrong thing. At last he put all his feelings into a single sentence:
'would you like me to be your friend?' He said, his voice shaking.
Miette looked up at him in surprise, her eyes soft and smiling again; and so he quickly continued:
'I know how people try to hurt you. It's time to put a stop to it. I'll protect you from now on. Would you like that?'
the child beamed with delight. This offer of friendship relieved all her dark feelings. However, she shook her head, and answered:
'no, I don't want you to get into fights on my account. It would be too much for you. Besides which, there are people you can't protect me from.'
Silvere wanted to declare that he would defend her against the whole world, but she silenced him with a gentle wave of the hand, and added:
'it's enough to have you as a friend.' "

An insurrection begins when Louis Philip, the descendant of Napoleon bonaparte, carries out a coup d'etat in paris. Workmen from the surrounding countryside of plassans, who are republicans, unite and begin a night March through the countryside, 3,000 strong.
Felicité, the foxy cunning wife of Pierre, has all this time schemed at and been envious of her more wealthy bourgeois counterparts in the village. She longs to be the wife of an official. Their oldest son eugene, who is a petty official in paris, and began sending letters, advising his father on how to use the insurrection to his advantage. Felicité sneaks them out and reads them while Pierre is sleeping. She's furious that her son would tell his father to keep it from her. But for now, she keeps her quiet.
The night of the insurrection, when the insurrecting workmen are near, Pierre hides in his mother's house, telling his fellow conservatives that he will stay to keep the town safe. Meanwhile, the insurrection is take prisoner the towns officials, Marching them onward to the next town.
As the officials are missing in action, the next day Pierre and his fellow hiding conservatives, announced to each other that they will be the interim office holders of the mayor, council members, etc. They manage to convince the people of plasSans that they are heroes. At least for a while.
"Pierre went home feeling very downcast, creeping along in the shadows of the houses. He felt that plasSans was turning against him. He heard his name being mentioned in various tones of anger and contempt. He climbed the stairs sweating and with his head spinning. Felicité, looking dismayed, greeted him in silence....
Then, as her husband remained silent, she went mechanically to the window - the window where she had breathed in with delight the sweet smell of an entire sub prefecture [the post Eugene has said will be Pierre's]. She saw a number of large groups of people on the square; and she closed the shutters on noticing heads turn towards their house, for she was afraid they might be jeered at. She was sure the people down below were talking about them.
Voices floated upwards in the twilight. A lawyer was yapping away in an exultant tone:
'that's just what I said. The insurgents left of their own accord, and they won't be asking the 41 for permission to come back. The 41! What a farce! I think there were at least 200 of them!'
'no, no,' said a burly trader, an oil dealer and a great politician, 'there were probably not even 10. There was no fighting or we would have seen some blood in the morning. I went to the town hall to have a look; the courtyard was as clean as a whistle.'
Then a workman, who stepped timidly up to the group, added: 'it wasn't very hard to regain possession of the town hall. The door wasn't even shut.'
this provoked a certain amount of laughter, and the workman, encouraged by this response, continued:
'as for those rougons, everybody knows they're a bad lot.'
This insult cut Felicité to the quick. The ingratitude of these people upset her, for she herself was at last beginning to believe in the mission of the rougons..."

Aristide, the middle son of felicite and pierre, observes silvere being shot by the policeman whose eye he had put out during the scramble of the insurrectionists. (Miette had been shot by soldiers going after the insurrectionists.)
The Rougons manage to pull off their deception, and Pierre is actually awarded some French medal of Honor. He's also appointed to the sub-prefecture's position. Though they're extremely in debt from throwing all the dinners for the town's conservatives, they put on a huge feast, where Aristide confesses to Felicité his silence:
" 'what happened to silvere?'
The young man, startled by the question, replied, also in a whisper:
'he's dead. I was there when the gendarne blew his brains out with a pistol.'
Felicite gave a shudder. She opened her mouth to ask why her son why had done nothing to prevent the murder; but she suddenly hesitated and sat down again without saying a word. Then aristide, who had read her question on her trembling lips, whispered:
'I didn't say anything, you understand.. it was his hard luck, after all! I did the right thing. Good riddance to him.'
This brutal frankness was not to felicite's liking. So now aristide too had a corpse on his hands, just like his father and mother. He would certainly not have confessed so freely that he had been strolling about the fauBourg and had let his cousin be shot if the wine from the hotel de Provence and the dreams he was constructing in anticipation of his arrival in Paris had not made him less circumspect than usual. Having uttered the words, he swayed backwards and forwards on his chair. pierre, who had been watching the conversation between his wife and son from a distanc, understood what had transpired and looked at them like an accomplice begging them to hold their tongues. This was the last time the Rougons felt a terrible chill in the midst of the Splendor and euphoria of the dinner. . ." ( )

I'd read l'Assommoir and Nana in college, so I thought I'd take a trip to where the whole series began. I don't think I got all the political background about the beginning of the Second Empire, but there were some good character descriptions and action. ( )

As is usual with French classics, I felt somewhat put off at first by the sociopolitical data one should be familiar with to fully understand what's happening, but then it becomes a bit clearer, one gets through the symbolic nature descriptions which go on for miles of paper, cleans off the burrs and starts actually enjoying watching Zola creating characters, profiling them meticulously and then throwing them on the board to see how they run.

And it does work: they fall awkwardly and get up and start acting and turning Zola into the author he became 20 novels later. And Zola seems to have this sly grin of having known and warned you that that's what was going to happen.

Some passages, particularly the obviously signifying details, the topography (one feels it could be easier to just put a map on the frontispiece and be done with it, fantasy style) and the melodrama are painfully extensive, but not to the point of dehydration, just mild thirst for action, and it does not fail to arrive.

And now I do look forward to a sequel. Go, Zola! ( )

The Rougon-Macquart cycle was partly inspired by Balzac's vast Comédie humaine, but it was conceived as a much more tightly-planned and focussed study, following the career of one particular family through the period of the Second Empire (1851-1871). Zola wants to show us how every aspect of French society was infected by the corruption, greed, and cynical self-interest coming down from the top, and over the course of the 20 volumes (originally he wanted to do it in 10...) and more than 20 years of work, that's pretty much what he did.

In this first volume Zola introduces us to the many members of the family, the lucky possessors of genetic material from Adélaïde Fouque (epileptic and mentally-disturbed) and her husband Rougon (vile peasant) or her lover Macquart (criminal). By the logic of 19th-century genetic science, we know that nothing could possibly go right with this mix, and it doesn't. The family is as corrupt as the government it lives under.

Because there are so many characters to introduce for future use and so much back-story to establish, this doesn't feel like a particularly well-balanced book, but from Zola's point of view we need all this information if we are to make sense of what follows, so you'd better be taking notes. Or have one of those editions that has Zola's famous crib-sheet in the endpapers.

The foreground story takes place over a few days in December 1851 as the sleepy provincial town of Plassans (Aix-en-Provence) reacts to the news of Louis Napoléon's coup-d'état. The idealistic teenager Silvère and his 13-year-old playmate/budding girlfriend Miette join the peasant army that is setting off to no-one-knows-where to defend the Republic against the evil Bonapartists, whilst Silvère's uncle Pierre schemes to ally himself to whichever side looks like giving him a worthwhile civic appointment when the dust settles. Normally in a historical novel it's a problem for the author that we already know who is going to win, but Zola cunningly exploits our hindsight to supply the tragic irony behind the story of the young revolutionaries and the black comedy of coup, counter-coup, and counter-counter-coup that plays out between the entrenched, the suppressed, and the upwardly-mobile in Plassans, in what we are obviously meant to take as a small-scale parody of the even more unseemly political events in Paris.

This book doesn't have the same kind of detailed excavation of the life of a particular aspect of society that we find in the later books in the cycle - it's obviously mostly based on Zola's own childhood memories of small-town life at the time of the coup, and so we don't get quite as much interesting detail as I would like, and we do get rather more than I would like of the sentimental adolescent friendship/love-affair of Silvére and Miette. But still definitely worth reading! ( )

I loved this book, it was beautifully writing and I enjoy reading every bit of it. I will admit it did try my patients. The took a lot to make it through the first four chapters. So it was hard to stick with it, due to the unlikeable of the characters and the very long chapters. I was glad when I got to chapter five. It was like sunlight break through the darkness. After reading about all the scheming and lack of just human decency with each other. I just need the innocence moments of love between Silvere and Miette. After this point it was easier to finish the book and it made the first four chapter worth every bit of the struggle it was. If Zola didn’t stick that chapter in, I don’t think I would of finish the book.
I feel a bit for Adelaide with her mental illness. We don’t have a lot of information, so even though she neglects her children and lived here life on whim. I don’t feel disgust for her, just sympathy for the lack of control from her illness.
Even thou her illness is past down to other people in the family, I don’t fine this as the true illness of the family. I almost think the illness of this family is the lack of sympathy, understanding, ruthless. The family seem to eat itself for that little bit of edge to get a head. It is great to have ambition and to want to have more than you do, but if it is at the cost of yourself and lives of others it is something to be re-looked at before taking action. For Pierre and Felicite it was like they were really interested in be good leader of the town or anything else. It was the envy that they had for others and their own poor self-image of these selves. I don’t think Pierre would have pulled any of it off without Felicite and their son Eugene.
Nothing good to say about Antoine Macquart, just total dislike him.
I was a bit disappointed in Pascal Rougon, towards the end. I wanted him to stick up for his grandmother. In the end he just looks at this grandmother not as a person, but an object of study. He never stands up against his father and uncle, but just seem to study them also. For eh lives the science and forget the living.
For Silvere and Miette, well life and ideals don’t work out the way we like and as a conquest we lose our life sometimes. I do wish Emile Zola let them live, but oh well, it is just ends up being a bitter sweet moment. I love the book enough to carry on with the series.
( )

I love Zola’s writing, I have meant to read more of his Rougon-Macquart series, but I hadn’t read anything for such a long time because I was wondering just how to set about it:

•I could carry on picking random books from the series as they could catch my eye.
•I could read them in the order they were written.
•I could read them in the author’s recommended reading order.

I inclined towards the latter, but I hesitated to pick up this first book; because I feared that it would be a complicated setting a lot of things up but not so interesting for its own sake kind of book.

When I found a group that was beginning to read the whole series, I knew that it was time for me to begin.

I found that my fears weren’t entirely unfounded: there were a lot of characters, there were many stories opening up, and I would have been lost quite early on had my book not had a family tree I could consult; and I’m still not entirely sure about the political history or all of the implications of the story I read.

That said though, I loved this book, I’m very glad that I read it. Zola’s writing about his characters and the world around them is so very vivid, and as I began to the roots and branches of this fictitious family tree I was intrigued by the possibilities it presented; for future stories and for what those stories might say.

The scene is set, and then this story begins with a pair of young lovers who will be caught up in republican protests. Silvère had planned to join the ranks, and he had brought the gun that had always hung on the wall in his grandmother’s home; Miette had thought that she would be left behind, but she was caught up too and found herself carrying the flag.

Then the story went back in time, recounting the recent history of Silvère’s family.

Adelaide Fouque was the descended from a family of a market gardeners. She was a simple soul, and after the death of her parents during the French Revolution she was wealthy and completely alone in the world. She was courted by a farm worker named Rougon, she married him, and she gave birth to a son, Pierre.

Rougon died not long after the birth of his son, and his wife fell in love with a smuggler and heavy drinker named Macquart. They had two children together: a boy named Antoine and a girl named Ursula. The three children grew up in a haphazard wild manner, and it wasn’t long before Pierre soon began to resent his illegitimate half-siblings and his weak minded mother.

Fortune seemed to favour him: Antoine was conscripted into the army, Ursula married and moved away, and when Macquart was killed and Adelaide retired to his cottage to mourn he saw a wonderful opportunity .

Pierre tricked his mother into signing over the family home to him, he sold it off, and he used the proceeds to set himself up in the world. He married Felicité, the daughter of a merchant, and a young woman who was every bit as socially ambitious as he was. They rose very little, but they managed to send their sons to good schools and then university, and they hoped and prayed that they would be successful and elevate their family..

The three boys are educated, but with no capital behind them, their options are limited. Pascal, the middle child, becomes a doctor, he does good work but the other two … well, they are rather too like their parents …

It seems that the ambitions of Pierre and Felicité will always be thwarted, but finally they have a piece of luck. Their son Eugène had moved to Paris, he was mixing with important people, and he passed information to his parents that would allow them to chose the right associates, express the correct views, and rise to the very top of society in Plassans.

Silvère came to Passans after the death of his mother, Ursula, and her husband, Mouret. He lived with his grandmother, Adelaide, now known to all as Aunt Dide; he was apprenticed as a wheelwright and he was introduced to Republican politics by his uncle, Antoine.

Antoine had returned from the army and he was the bitterest opponent of his half brother Pierre, who he claimed had cheated him of his inheritance.

When the clash of the republicans with the government came to its climax, the Rougons’ yellow drawing room had become the centre of political activity in Plassan as the great and good of the town rallied to support the status quo.

Could Pierre and Felicité achive their greatest ambition?

What would happen to Silvère and Miette?

How would the fallout affect Aunt Dide, Antoine, the three sons of the Rougons?

Those are the bare bones of the plot; a plot driven by character, by family relationships and by history. I was so impressed by the portrayal of those family relationships and of how, together with circumstance, they affect the formation of character and the making of decisions; sometimes for good but often, it seems, for bad.

I was impressed by the writing. The characters lived and breathed, and everything feel utterly real. I caught the author’s cynicism; I caught his passion for his subject; and sometimes I caught his anger. One thing that particularly impressed me was the way he could take a small incident and use it to say so much.

I was particularly taken with the story of the young lovers, and the writing about the natural world that ran through their story. That was something that I hadn’t found in Zola’s books before, and it balance the writing about the Rougons and the town beautifully.

There were times when I thought he spent too long with one side of the story; and there were characters I saw too much and others not enough. But maybe as I read on I will see the bigger picture better.

I found much to admire, I felt many emotions as I read; and, most of all, I was struck by how very well Zola laid the foundations for so many more books in this one. ( )

Excellent translation by Brian Nelson.

The Fortune of the Rougonsis the first book in Emile Zola's chronicle of the Rougon and Macquart families. While Zola planned at the outset to write more than one book, "several episodes", he probably didn't anticipate that he would write twenty of them over the next twenty-two years. His aim was ... to explain how a family, a small group of human beings, behaves in a given society... He wanted to solve "the dual problem of temperament and environment". In his preface to this first volume, he says that he had already been working for three years on the background material for his books.

Zola wanted to tie together two of the great studies of the nineteenth century: that of heredity as a determinant of character, and that of the rise through the class system, "... the essentially modern impulse that sets the lower classes marching through the social system." As if these two huge areas of interest weren't enough, he also wanted what he called "the dramas of their individual lives" to be a social, military and economic history of the Second Empire.

Zola tells us at the outset

The great characteristic of the Rougon - Macquarts, the group or family I propose to study, is their ravenous appetites, the great upsurge of our age as it rushes to satisfy those appetites.

Who then were these people? They were the descendants of Adélaide Fouque, a respectable enough girl, the last in a line of prosperous market gardeners. However, Adélaide's father died insane and when she began to exhibit odd behaviour, the neighbours started to talk. When she married the hired peasant Rougon, the neighbours were shocked. Zola spends a lot of time writing about the small minds of many, the craving for gossip, the inevitable exaggerations and misrepresentations of any situation.

Deprived of an excuse for gossip when more than a year went by before the Rougons' son Pierre was born, the neighbours were ecstatic when Rougon died suddenly and Adélaide took as a lover "that beggar Macquart". The two never married, but had two children, Ursule and Antoine, whom Macquart acknowledged and gave his name.

It is the story of these three children and some of their offspring that constitutes the first novel. Necessarily, a lot of time is spent building up their individual backgrounds, for they will be the foundation of the books and characters to come. At times this exercise of outlining three generations of the family makes it difficult to realize that most of the actual action of this particular novel takes place in one month, December 1851. This action is the republican struggle against Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, who had dissolved the National Assembly on the second of the month in as effort to restore the Empire with himself as Emperor, a feat he would accomplish the next year.

We see the townspeople of Plassans (Aix), terrified of choosing the wrong side in this struggle, of losing their possessions and livelihoods, and what status they have. There are lies and double crosses, bribery and manipulation, as the town is forced to choose a course. Zola's depictions of veniality and self preservation are superb. His science seems dated today, but his descriptions still hold. Pierre's son Pascal, a physician with no interest in politics whatsoever, spent a few evenings in his parents' sitting room, observing those who were plotting for gain, financial and social:

On his first visit he was stupefied at the degree of imbecility to which sane men can sink.... He looked, with the fascination of a naturalist, at their grimacing faces, in which he discerned traces of their occupations and appetites; and he listened to their inane chatter as he might have tried to divine the meaning of a cat's miaow or a dog's bark. At his time he was greatly preoccupied with comparative natural history... He noted the similarities between the grotesque creatures he saw and the animals he knew.

There were idealists in Plassans too. Even here though, Zola sets them under his microscope. The young apprentice Silvère, Pierre's nephew, who was caught up in the peasant resistance to Bonaparte's forces, is portrayed as having a nervous disturbance, "Hysteria or excitement, shameful madness or sublime madness. Always those terrible nerves", when he became inspired by Rousseau's writings and dreamt of a Republic. Silvère and his girlfriend Miette are innocents and their love story is sympathetically detailed, but their naiveté is in itself a shameful taint.

It may have taken some time to get going, but by the end of this first volume, Zola has given us a solid ground for the novels to come, drawn us in with a love story, and left us wondering what the next move will be. A skilled writer indeed.

This is the first novel in Zola's epic Rougon-Macquart cycle of 20 novels about intertwined families in a fictional town during the years of the Second Empire of Napoleon III. I read the deservedly much more famous Germinal back in 2000 without realising it was part of any cycle. This first novel establishes the background to all the main characters against the dramatic backdrop of the coup of December 1851 when democratically elected president Louis Napoleon seized absolute power and aped his uncle by donning an imperial mantle. While it will be useful for understanding later novels in the cycle, in itself it was fairly dull and slow moving in parts and many of the characters came across as rather comedic. 3/5 ( )

The Fortune of the Rougons is the first book of Emile Zola's Rougon-Macquart cycle of novels centering on the Rougons and Macquart family. The book centers around the 1848 revelation in France, and introduces us to a family of characters of varying dispositions, many of whom hope to gain power and privilege through backing one side or the other in the revolution.

The brilliance of this novel is in its ability to show us all types of people and what makes us who we are. Some of us are social climbers who will stop at anything to get by, such as Pierre in the novel. Others of us are true believers who are willing to fight for love or a cause, such as Silvere in the novel. Others are more interested in inward interests such as delving further into our chosen fields of study, such as Pascal in the novel. Yet others, such as Felicite, are not willing to risk much to achieve our goals, but we are more than willing to manipulate others into achieving those goals for us. In portraying this plethora of characters in such a realistic way, Zola manages to show us who we are in a believable and enlightening way. ( )

As the first in Zola's 20-book Rougon-Macquart series, the role of this novel is to set the stage, to introduce the family, to explain the rationale, and to highlight the events that started the Second Empire. Zola has several goals in this series: to show the importance of heredity and its interaction with environment; to depict the particular characteristics of the successful, legitimate, Rougon side of the family and the unsuccessful, illegitimate Macquart side; and to illustrate the social system of the Second Empire.

I am glad I read Germinal and L'Assommoir before I read this book, because they show Zola at his best: the fully developed characters, the intimacy of their lives matched by the breadth of their world, the vivid details of the environment (be it coal mining or the slums), the satire, and the compelling story telling. While these can be found in places in this book, Zola gets a little bogged down in setting the stage for the whole series (lots of background information on the two main lines of the family) and goes a little overboard in showing the development of friendship and love between the teenagers Miette and Silvère, both of whom have had difficult childhoods. Additionally, Zola's view of heredity, as explained in this book, is seriously flawed by modern standards, although perhaps novel for its time.

Nonetheless, I enjoyed this book, which takes place over a week or so during the 1851 coup in which Napoleon's nephew took over the government in Paris fairly bloodlessly while republican resistance took place in the south and elsewhere. The teenagers get wrapped up in the resistance, while Silvère's uncle, Pierre Rougon, and his wife, scheme for greater power, even while fighting their continuing battle against Pierre's half-brother Antoine, one of the founders of the Macquart side of the family. The story of the scheming, and the satiric look at the reactionary cabal, are priceless. I appreciate the understanding I got of the structure of the family (helped by a family tree at the beginning of the edition I read), and I will definitely be reading more Zola.

Zola, basing himself on the works of thinkers of his time, including Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, believed that heredity and environment were the two most important factors in determining the course of a person's life. He set out to demonstrate this theory in the 20-novel Rougon-Macquart series subtitled The Natural and social history of a family during the Second Empire, which examines the lives of five generations of the respectable (and legitimate) Rougon branch and of the dissolute (and illegitimate) Macquarts. As preparation for this huge undertaking, he first charted out an elaborate family tree as depicted below. La Fortune des Rougons, the first novel, establishes the origins of the two clans and presents a vast cast of characters, of which several will figure as leading protagonists in consecutive novels.



The story opens on the clandestine meeting of two virginal young lovers, Miette and Silvère, just outside the fictional Provençal town of Plassans. Relating their love story leading up to this night—the eve of the 1851 coup d'état—during which Napoleon III came into power, the events of the day forming the central motif of the novel. The two idealistic adolescents are about to join a vast gathering of republicans to storm Plassans and nearby towns along the way to Paris, on a doomed journey to oppose the coup. Plassans is also the hometown of Silvère's grandmother Adelaide Fouque, commonly known as Tante Dide, the matriarch of the Rougon-Macquart dynasty. She is an eccentric and a pariah who, after losing her husband, the late Rougon, who fathered her only legitimate child Pierre, then takes up with the notorious alcoholic and trafficker Macquart, a union from which two more illegitimate children are born.

We follow the progress of Pierre Rougon, while he takes his first steps as a young man to secure the family fortune by conning his mother out of her ancestral home and property and taking away his siblings' inheritance. Pierre Rougon and his wife Felicity see their limited fortune spent away on their children and floundering business and all the while, Pierre's half-brother Antoine Macquart continually harangues the Rougons for money as compensation for begin cheated out of his legacy. Much like his father, Antoine is a profoundly lazy man who contrives to marry a hard-working woman and sponge off her and his children while claiming to have republican ideals. The Rougons, after decades of vain struggles, finally seize their opportunity on this night in 1851, putting in place a series of Machiavellian schemes involving Antoine, and putting the lives of men on the line to finally come into wealth and power, all the while playing power games among themselves to determine who will have the upper hand in this old feud. A fascinating read and a very promising start to a great literary saga. ( )

French Classic

The first book in Zola's famed Rougon-Macquart 20 book series--The fortune of the Rougons is also pretty good. Adelaide Fouque (Aunt Dide)--the mother of Pierre Rougon and his two illegitimate siblings Antoine and Ursule (nee Mouret) Macquart comes into focus before being sent off to an insane asylum. It is really Pierre Rougon and Antoine Macquart and their greed, ambition and treachery which is most center stage here which sets up the rest of the novels in the series. The unfortunate Silvere Mouret who meets his unglorious end--being executed by a policeman kind of epitomizes a Zola type of tragic hero--an inexeperienced youth who dreams of social justice and is absolutely devastated by the death of his girlfreind Miette in a battle during the republican revolution circa 1850. The Rougon's come to power in the aftermath having constructed a farce proving their loyalty to the Napoleon the III regime and its forthcoming reactionary government which is also coming into power. Macquart is the great betrayer of his republican brethren.

Well written and well plotted--this is a good place for anyone interested in the French novel or French history in the form of the novel to start. ( )