Émile Édouard Charles Antoine Zola (2 April 1840 – 29 September 1902) was a French novelist, playwright, and journalist who is one of the central figures of naturalism, a literary movement aiming to employ detachment, scientific objectivism, and social commentary with a deterministic philosophical viewpoint. He was also a militant voucher for the innocence of Alfred Dreyfus during the (in)famous national affair caused by the latter's antisemitism-fuelled trials in the 1890s, even penning the open letter headlined J'Accuse...! (which served to name a trope on this very site).
He was born in Paris, the only child of Francesco Zola, an Italian engineer, and Emilie, the daughter of a glazier. The family moved to Aix-en-Provence when he was three. Four years later, in 1847, his father died, leaving his mother on a meager pension.
Starting from 1852, he went to school at the College Bourbon at Aix, where he became friends with Baptistin Baille and Paul Cézanne, the latter who would grow up to be a major Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painter. Ironically, it was Zola, not Cézanne, who won the school prize for drawing. In 1858, the Zolas moved back to Paris with Cézanne joining him, and he studied at the Lycée Saint-Louis, intending to get a career in law as his mother planned, but he failed his baccalauréat examination twice.
Before achieving success as a writer, he worked for minimal pay as a clerk in a shipping firm, then in the sales department for the publisher Hachette in 1862, where he wrote literary and art reviews for newspapers. Among his early works include Tales for Ninon (1864) and Claude's Confession (1865), the latter which became a succès de scandale thanks to its bedroom scenes. Later, he met Alexandrine-Gabrielle Meley, the illegitimate daughter of teenage parents who separated; Meley would become his wife five years later.
In 1866, Zola left Hachette to take up a more lucrative job as a literary critic for L'Événement, for which he published very scathing articles; the magazine was eventually suppressed by the authorities. In the meantime, he also discovered the works of the historian and philosopher Hippolyte Taine and became profoundly influenced by his work. The following year, Zola published Thérèse Raquin (1867), another success and one that earned him lasting notoriety. He later added a preface to the second edition of his novel, establishing himself as a "Naturalist". He then began working on his Les Rougon-Macquart series of novels while working as a journalist for a number of different newspapers.
On 31 May 1870, Zola married Meley in a registry office, then moved to Marseilles because of the Franco-Prussian War. In March 1871, he returned to Paris and published The Fortune of the Rougons (1871) the following October, the first novel of his Les Rougon-Macquart series. He continued writing for the series, with the seventh novel L'Assommoir (1877) bringing him wealth and fame. The last novel, Doctor Pascal, was published in 1893. During that time, he took Jeanne Rozerot as his mistress in 1888; the couple had a daughter, Denise, in 1889, and a son, Jacques, in 1891.
After finishing the Rougon-Macquart novels, he began working on Three Cities (1894-8), a trilogy of novels consisting of Lourdes (1894), Rome (1896), and Paris (1898) that all violently attacked the Catholic Church. On 22 December 1894, while Zola was working on the Three Cities trilogy, the Jewish captain Alfred Dreyfus was found guilty by a court martial for trumped-up charges of treason. In response, he wrote the article J'Accuse...! in the newspaper L'Aurore in 1898, vouching for the innocence of Dreyfus. He was found guilty of libeling the Minister of War and struck with a year in prison and a fine of 3000 francs. He appealed for retrial on a technicality, but the retrial was delayed; he fled to the UK instead of going to court on 18 July. He returned to France a year later to work on his Four Gospels, a tetralogy intending to illustrate the principles of human life: Fecundity (1899), Toil (1901), Truth (1903), and Justice (he did not live to complete it).
On 29 December 1902, Zola dropped dead from the fumes of his bedroom fire; the chimney was capped either by accident or deliberately by an anti-Dreyfusard; he had a public funeral on 5 October and was initially buried in the Cimetière de Montmartre, but his remains were transferred to the Panthéon on 4 June 1908. He was survived by his wife, with whom he had no children.
Zola works on TV Tropes:
- Thérèse Raquin (1867)
- Les Rougon-Macquart (20 novels, 1870-1893)
- Germinal (1885, 13th novel)
Adaptations of Zola's works on TV Tropes:
- La Bête Humaine (1938)
- Human Desire (1954) — Based off La Bête Humaine.
- Gervaise (1956) — Based off L'Assommoir.
- Thirst (2009) — Based off Thérèse Raquin.
Zola's work is associated with the following tropes:
- Chekhov's Gunman: He loved to use this trope in Les Rougon-Macquart. A character mentioned in passing in book one and described by his father as a forgettable good-for-nothing shows up as the main character in books 10 and 11. Another one mentioned in passing in book 3 is the main character of book 14. The pattern repeats itself throughout the books. Things get even more confusing when you find out that the books do not follow in chronological order and that the timelines of most of them intersect in one way or the other. Trying to keep up with who is doing what and is important in which book can become a nightmare.
- Generational Saga: His cycle of Les Rougon-Macquart is the quintessential French example of a whole literary saga about different generations of the same family.
- Strongly Worded Letter: J'Accuse...!, an open letter he wrote to Félix Faure, the President of France, accusing the government of antisemitism and Dreyfus' unlawful sentencing. Also, as one might guess, the Trope Namer of J'accuse!.
- Write Who You Know: Lourdes has an unflattering example in the form of Elise Rouquet and La Grivotte. They were respectively based on Marie Lemarchand, a young pilgrim girl afflicted with tuberculosis, lupus, and skin ulcerations, and Marie Lebranchu, another pilgrim afflicted with the final stages of tuberculosis. Zola, a staunch atheist, came to Lourdes in 1892, intending to discredit the miraculous healings that were said to occur there. He attached himself to these women and saw them wash themselves with the water of Lourdes and emerge cured. Refusing to believe that their cures were real, he incorporated these experiences into Lourdes and rewrote them to align with his naturalistic beliefs. In the work, Elise Rouquet washes her face in the waters of Lourdes, but the doctors, upon examining her, were unable to determine whether she really has lupus, an illness that responds well to washing, or if the cure is psychosomatic. La Grivotte is a manic woman whose "curing" of tuberculosis is attributed to her neurosis, and she has a fatal relapse on the train ride back home (for the record, Lebranchu and Lemarchand remained in perfect health and died many years after their pilgrimage to Lourdes).
Media portrayals of Zola:
Film:
- The Life of Émile Zola (1937), actually focuses on his role in the Dreyfus Affair. Portrayed by Paul Muni.
- I Accuse! (1958), about the Dreyfus Affair. Portrayed by Emlyn Williams.
- Prisoner of Honor (1991), also about the Dreyfus Affair. Portrayed by Ami Martin.
- Cézanne and I (2016), about Zola's friendship with painter Paul Cézanne. Portrayed by Guillaume Canet.
- An Officer and a Spy (2019). The Dreyfus Affair again. Portrayed by André Marcon.
Television:
- The Dreyfus Affair (1995), miniseries. Portrayed by Jean-Claude Drouot.
Literature:
- An Officer and a Spy (2013), novel about the Dreyfus Affair.
