Émile Zola

Émile Zola wrote twenty novels tracing one family through the Second Empire and then risked everything on a newspaper article. Born in Paris in 1840 to an Italian engineer who died when he was seven, he grew up poor in Aix-en-Provence, where Paul Cézanne was his schoolfriend, failed his baccalauréat twice, and worked in the publicity department of a publisher. He developed naturalism, applying what he took to be scientific method to fiction: heredity and environment determine character, and the novelist should observe and document like an experimenter. He researched by immersion — going down mines, into markets, onto locomotives — and filled notebooks. The Rougon-Macquart cycle, twenty novels published from 1871 to 1893, follows the descendants of one woman across French society. Germinal describes a mining strike, L'Assommoir alcoholism among the Paris poor, Nana prostitution, and La Bête humaine the railways. They sold in enormous numbers and were attacked as filth. In January 1898 he published J'Accuse…! on the front page of L'Aurore, an open letter to the president naming the officers who had framed Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish artillery captain convicted of treason on forged evidence, and who had covered it up. Three hundred thousand copies sold in a day. He was tried for criminal libel, convicted, and fled to England for eleven months to avoid prison and to keep the case alive. Dreyfus was eventually exonerated in 1906. Zola died in Paris in September 1902 of carbon monoxide poisoning from a blocked chimney. A roofer later claimed to have blocked it deliberately. He was moved to the Panthéon in 1908.

• Lived: 1840 CE – 1902 CE
• Nationality: French
• Roles: writer