Inspirational Quotes by Emile Zola (French Novelist)

Émile Zola (1840–1902,) fully Émile Édouard Charles Antoine Zola, was a French novelist, critic, and political activist who was the most prominent French novelist of the late 19th century. He is celebrated for his 20-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart, which is “the natural and social history of a family under the Second Empire.”

Though born in Paris, Zola did not become a French citizen until age 22. He attended school in Aix-en-Provence, where he befriended the future artist Paul Cezanne.

Zola led the life of a destitute until he took a shipping job at the publishers Hachette et Cie. This job provided him with the literary connections to begin his writing career. His first book was a collection of short stories, Contes a ninon (1864,) which preceded his first novel, La Confession de Claude (1865,) and several potboilers that helped him earn a decent living.

Zola invented a new style of fiction writing that he called Naturalism or “nature seen through a temperament.” Inspired by Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1839,) Zola tried an untried method of applying scientific principles of observation to the practice of writing fiction. The result was a 20-novel saga called Les Rougon-Macquart (1871–93.) This literary masterpiece made Zola rival Honoré de Balzac in sheer volume and comprehensiveness. Like Balzac, Zola used recurring characters, but also traced the influence of heredity as well as the environment on his characters through several generations. This ambitious and unprecedented plan took Zola 25 years to accomplish.

L’Assommoir (1877,) part of the Les Rougon-Macquart series, made Zola’s reputation as one of the literary giants of the 19th century. It made him a rich man too. Many of his other novels in the series succeeded with Zola introducing attributes of contemporary life and events never treated as sincerely before: prostitution in Nana (1880,) miners in Germinal (1885,) country life in La Terre (1887,) the Paris Commune in La Debacle (1892.)

In 1898, Zola intervened in the Dreyfus Affair, a 12-year political controversy that deeply divided French society. He took a one-year exile in London, but upon his return to Paris, died suddenly due to coal gas asphyxiation caused by a blocked chimney flue. Even though his death was formally determined to be a tragic accident, conspiracy theories suggest that somebody opposed to his political activism in the Dreyfus Affair arranged to have the chimney blocked.

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Emile Zola