Émile-Édouard-Charles-Antoine Zola (1840 – 1902) was a French author who is best known for his novels. He was active in politics and was influential in the development of the French novel. He is known for his theories of naturalism, which explain his many novels about the Rougon-Macquart family, and for his letter “J’accuse.” protesting the injustice of the Dreyfus Affair.
Zola was not able to pass the baccalauréat exam, which meant he wasn’t able to continue his education at the Lycée Saint-Louis. So, in 1859, he had to find a job to support himself. Zola spent a lot of time unemployed, and then lived in very poor conditions for a while.
In 1862, Zola was hired as a clerk at a publishing company, and over the next few years he worked his way up the ranks. Zola wrote articles for magazines about current topics, and he also wrote fiction. He liked writing fiction because it was a way of expressing himself. Zola wrote his first novel, “La Confession de Claude”, in 1865. The novel is a sordid, semiautobiographical tale that drew the attention of the public and the police. However, Zola’s employer disapproved of the novel, and he was fired from his job. Zola was a writer who had already made a name for himself, so he left his job at a publishing company to focus on his writing. He was able to support himself and his mother with this work, although it was only a modest amount.
Zola continued writing articles and novels during these years. He wrote the novel, “Thérèse Raquin” (1867) and “Madeleine Férat” (1868). Zola was also interested in science, and this led him to think of writing a series of novels like “La Comédie humaine”, which had been written earlier in the 1800s. Zola started a project where he would write 10 novels about different members of the same family. But over time, he decided to continue the project and write 20 novels about the Rougon-Macquart family. The Rougon Family Fortune began to be published in serial form in 1870, but was interrupted by the start of the Franco-German War in July. The novel was finally published in book form in October 1871. Zola wrote 20 novels during the course of the 1890s. Most of these are quite long, and he completed the series in 1893.
Zola – renowned and celebrated as a naturalist – wrote a few books about his ideas. These include “The Experimental Novel,” and “The Naturalist Novelists.”
In the 1890s, Zola became involved in the Dreyfus Affair—a controversy involving a Jewish French army officer, Alfred Dreyfus, who was wrongly accused of treason. This divided French society deeply and lasted for over a dozen years. Zola was convinced from the beginning that Dreyfus was innocent. On January 13, 1898, in the newspaper L’Aurore, Zola published an open letter in which he accused the French general staff of many wrongdoings. He accused high-ranking military officers and the War Office of hiding the truth about Dreyfus’s wrongful conviction. Zola was accused of libel and found guilty. In July 1899, when it appeared that his appeal would not be successful, he fled to England.
He returned to France the following June when he learned that the Dreyfus case was to be reopened with a possible reversal of the original verdict. Zola’s intervention helped to stop anti-Semitism and militarism from becoming widespread in France. Zola’s last series of novels were the “Les Trois Villes” and “Les Quatre Évangiles.”
In 1902, Zola unceremoniously died from coal gas asphyxiation, which happened when a chimney flue got blocked. Some people believe that someone deliberately destroyed the chimney on purpose, in order to injure Dreyfus. But the official investigation found this to be a tragic accident.
