The Fortune of the Rougons
AUTHOR'S PREFACE
I wish to explain how a family, a small group of human beings, conducts
itself in a given social system after blossoming forth and giving birth to ten
or twenty members, who, though they may appear, at the first glance, profoundly
dissimilar one from the other, are, as analysis demonstrates, most closely
linked together from the point of view of affinity. Heredity, like gravity, has
its laws.
By resolving the duplex question of temperament and environment, I shall
endeavour to discover and follow the thread of connection which leads
mathematically from one man to another. And when I have possession of every
thread, and hold a complete social group in my hands, I shall show this group at
work, participating in an historical period; I shall depict it in action, with
all its varied energies, and I shall analyse both the will power of each member,
and the general tendency of the whole.
The great characteristic of the Rougon-Macquarts, the group or family which I
propose to study, is their ravenous appetite, the great outburst of our age
which rushes upon enjoyment. Physiologically the Rougon-Macquarts represent the
slow succession of accidents pertaining to the nerves or the blood, which befall
a race after the first organic lesion, and, according to environment, determine
in each individual member of the race those feelings, desires and
passions—briefly, all the natural and instinctive manifestations peculiar to
humanity—whose outcome assumes the conventional name of virtue or vice.
Historically the Rougon-Macquarts proceed from the masses, radiate throughout
the whole of contemporary society, and ascend to all sorts of positions by the
force of that impulsion of essentially modern origin, which sets the lower
classes marching through the social system. And thus the dramas of their
individual lives recount the story of the Second Empire, from the ambuscade of
the Coup d'Etat to the treachery of Sedan.
For three years I had been collecting the necessary documents for this long
work, and the present volume was even written, when the fall of the Bonapartes,
which I needed artistically, and with, as if by fate, I ever found at the end of
the drama, without daring to hope that it would prove so near at hand, suddenly
occurred and furnished me with the terrible but necessary denouement for my
work. My scheme is, at this date, completed; the circle in which my characters
will revolve is perfected; and my work becomes a picture of a departed reign, of
a strange period of human madness and shame.
This work, which will comprise several episodes, is therefore, in my mind,
the natural and social history of a family under the Second Empire. And the
first episode, here called "The Fortune of the Rougons," should scientifically
be entitled "The Origin."
EMILE ZOLA PARIS, July 1, 1871.