Zola was born in Paris in 1840 to François Zola (originally Francesco Zolla) and Émilie Aubert. His father was an Italian engineer with some Greek ancestry,[9] who was born in Venice in 1795, and engineered the Zola Dam in Aix-en-Provence; his mother was French.[10] The family moved to Aix-en-Provence in the southeast when Émile was three years old. In 1845, five-year-old Zola was sexually molested by an older boy.[11] Two years later, in 1847, his father died, leaving his mother on a meager pension. In 1852, Zola entered the Collège Bourbon as a boarding student. Those were hard years for young Zola: he would later complain about poor nutrition and bullying in school.[12]
In 1858, the Zolas moved to Paris, where Émile's childhood friend Paul Cézanne soon joined him. Zola started to write in the romantic style. His widowed mother had planned a law career for Émile, but he failed his baccalauréat examination twice.[13][14]
Before his breakthrough as a writer, Zola worked for minimal pay as a clerk in a shipping firm and then in the sales department for the publisher Hachette.[14] He also wrote literary and art reviews for newspapers. As a political journalist, Zola did not hide his dislike of Napoleon III, who had successfully run for the office of president under the constitution of the French Second Republic, only to use this position as a springboard for the coup d'état that made him emperor.
