Collection: Émile Zola

Émile Zola was born in Paris in 1840 and grew up in Aix-en-Provence, where he became friends with Paul Cézanne. Returning to Paris without his baccalaureate, he joined the publisher Hachette, first in packaging and then in advertising, where he learned about the book trade and the business of ideas. Journalism and art criticism revealed his talent: he championed Manet and the painters who would later become the Impressionists.

His grand project occupied him for twenty years. From 1871 onwards, Zola published Les Rougon-Macquart, “the natural and social history of a family under the Second Empire,”twenty volumes that followed a lineage through all strata of French society.L'Assommoir(1877) brought him fame and caused a scandal with its depiction of working-class destitution. Nana (1880), Germinal (1885), and La Terre(1887) established a method: documented observation, the determinism of environment and heredity, and the rejection of idealization. This was naturalism, of which Zola was both the theoretician and the practitioner.
In January 1898, Zola published an open letter to the President of the Republic in L'Aurore, “J'accuse…!”, denouncing the miscarriage of justice and antisemitism in the Dreyfus Affair. Condemned for libel, he temporarily exiled himself to England. This intervention marked the writer’s entry into political struggle and remains a model of intellectual engagement. Zola died in Paris in 1902, asphyxiated under circumstances never elucidated. His ashes were transferred to the Panthéon in 1908.
About the Work.Les Rougon-Macquart form the core of his work, but Zola also wrote short stories, plays, extensive art and literary criticism, and later the late cycles of Les Trois Villes(The Three Cities) and Les Quatre Évangiles(The Four Gospels). His writing was expansive and well-structured, transforming documentation into novelistic material and the novel into an investigation of society.
Original editions and deluxe paper copies by Émile Zola are available in the catalogue of the KOEGUI bookstore in Bayonne.

Also discover: original editions by André Gide, a contemporary and major figure of French prose, and by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, heir to this brutal and innovative language. Browse all our 19th-century original editions or our 19th-century literature.