Zola's Rougon-Macquart novels are a panoramic account of the Second French Empire. They tell the story of a family approximately between the years 1851 and 1871. These twenty novels contain over 300 characters, who descend from the two family lines of the Rougons and Macquarts. In Zola's words, which are the subtitle of the Rougon-Macquart series, they are "L'Histoire naturelle et sociale d'une famille sous le Second Empire" ("The natural and social history of a family under the Second Empire").[45][46]
Most of the Rougon-Macquart novels were written during the French Third Republic. To an extent, attitudes and value judgments may have been superimposed on that picture with the wisdom of hindsight. Some critics classify Zola's work, and naturalism more broadly, as a particular strain of decadent literature, which emphasized the fallen, corrupted state of modern civilization.[47] Nowhere is the doom-laden image of the Second Empire so clearly seen as in Nana, which culminates in echoes of the Franco-Prussian War (and hence by implication of the French defeat).[48] Even in novels dealing with earlier periods of Napoleon III's reign the picture of the Second Empire is sometimes overlaid with the imagery of catastrophe.
Poster by Léon Choubrac advertising the publication of Zola's novel Germinal in Gil Blas, 25 November 1884In the Rougon-Macquart novels, provincial life can seem to be overshadowed by Zola's preoccupation with the capital. However, the following novels (see the individual titles in the Livre de poche series) scarcely touch on life in Paris: La Terre (peasant life in Beauce), Le Rêve (an unnamed cathedral city), Germinal (collieries in the northeast of France), La Joie de vivre (the Atlantic coast), and the four novels set in and around Plassans (modelled on his childhood home, Aix-en-Provence), (La Fortune des Rougon, La Conquête de Plassans, La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret and Le Docteur Pascal). La Débâcle, the military novel, is set for the most part in country districts of eastern France; its dénouement takes place in the capital during the civil war leading to the suppression of the Paris Commune. Though Paris has its role in La Bête humaine the most striking incidents (notably the train crash) take place elsewhere. Even the Paris-centred novels tend to set some scenes outside, if not very far from, the capital. In the political novel Son Excellence Eugène Rougon, the eponymous minister's interventions on behalf of his so-called friends, have their consequences elsewhere, and the reader is witness to some of them. Even Nana, one of Zola's characters most strongly associated with Paris, makes a brief and typically disastrous trip to the country.[49]
