ZOLA, EMILE

ZOLA, ÉMILE. - French writer, b. in Paris on 2 Apr. 1840 to a French mother and an Italian father, d. there on 29 Sept. 1902.
He revealed himself to the general public in 1877 with the novel *L'Assommoir*, and from then on his reputation as theorist and leader of naturalism grew. During the Dreyfus Affair he took a lively part in the proceedings in defence of the accused, adding to literary controversies those of a political and social nature. Z. is essentially a polemical writer, for whom art is directed towards giving life to scientific and social theories. He began his career with a moderate realism (*Contes à Ninon*, 1864; *Les mystères de Marseille*, 1867); then, under the influence of Taine, Claude Bernard and Lucas, he conceived the novel as a demonstration of scientific laws explaining man’s relationship with his environment and his biological antecedents. This premise, still vague in *Thérèse Raquin* and in *Madeleine Férat*, becomes programmatic in the long series of the Rougon-Macquart, *histoire naturelle et sociale d'une famille* under the Second Empire, twenty novels published between 1871 and 1888. J. Lemaître rightly called it «a pessimistic epic of human animality». This exhausting search for so-called «positive» ideals built upon sensible reality remains a useless and inhuman test of distrust in humanity, which cannot be deprived of the action of Providence, nor of any genuine spirituality and religiosity. Immoral is the whole perspective from which Z. proceeds, regardless of the art he employs, which is often rich in fantasy and imagination. At the centre of the action there is always something inanimate that comes to life with an inhuman and terrible vitality, personifying natural and social force, apart from any influence not only divine, but also moral and spiritual. Z.’s *Opera omnia* were placed on the Index (*decr.* 19 Sept. 1894; 25 Jan. 1895; 21 Aug. 1896; 1 Sept. 1898).