Zola, Émile Édouard Charles Antoine (1840-1902), French novelist and founder of the Naturalist movement.

Zola was born in Paris on April 2, 1840, the son of an Italian civil engineer. After his father’s early death, he grew up in poverty. His first job was as a clerk in a publishing house. After 1865 he was able to support himself by writing novels, verse, short stories, and literary and art criticism.

Zola’s first important novel, Thérèse Raquin (1867), is a vivid psychological study of murder and passion. Later, inspired by scientific experiments in heredity and environment, and influenced by the determinist philosophy of Hippolyte Adolphe Taine, Zola determined to produce a new type of novel that would probe deeply into every area of human existence, document every social ill, no matter how politically sensitive, and show the interaction of the individual and society. He called his new school of fiction “naturalism“, and he wrote a series of 20 novels under the generic title Les Rougon-Macquart (1871-1893; trans. 1885-1907) to illustrate his theories in terms of the saga of one family. Through painstaking research he produced an arresting and complete picture of French life, particularly of Paris, in the late 19th century. He was, however, criticized for obscenity and for exaggerating the frequent criminality and pathological behaviour of the lower classes. In spite of the “naturalist” label, Zola’s descriptions have a poetic quality that greatly enriches the novels.

Several of the books, dealing with five generations of the Rougon-Macquart family, became famous. Among the novels in the series are L’Assommoir (The Dram Shop, 1877), a study of alcoholism; Nana (1880), on prostitution and the demi-monde; Pot-Bouille (The Stew, 1882), on middle-class pretensions; Germinal (1885), an exposé of mining conditions; La Bête Humaine (The Human Beast, 1890), about homicidal mania; and La Débâcle (The Downfall, 1892), on the collapse of the Second Empire. These books, which Zola characterized as social documents, greatly influenced the later naturalistic development of the novel. His own later novels, written after 1893, are less objective, more evangelistic, and consequently less effective as novels. They include the series Les Trois Villes (3 vols., 1894-1898; trans. 1894-1898), comprising Lourdes (1894), Rome (1896), and Paris (1898). Zola also produced volumes of literary criticism in which he attacked his literary opponents, the Romantics. The best of his critical writing is the essay “Le Roman Expérimental” (1880; trans. 1893), in which he draws close parallels between the experimental scientist and the novelist, and the collection of essays Les Romanciers Naturalistes (The Naturalistic Fiction Writers, 1881).

In January 1898, Zola became involved in the Dreyfus Affair, writing an open letter, published in the Paris newspaper L’Aurore. This was the famous “J’accuse” (“I accuse”) letter, in which Zola attacked French officials for their persecution of the Jewish artillery officer Alfred Dreyfus, who had ostensibly been found guilty of treason—a letter for which he was found guilty of libel and was forced to spend a year in exile in England. Zola died in Paris on September 29, 1902 of carbon monoxide poisoning from a blocked chimney.