Emile Zola

Zola married his lover of 5 years, Gabrielle-Alexandrine Meley, in 1870. Both of them took care of Zola’s mother.

They lived in Zola home in Medan, on the Seine River near Paris, which was also known to be a famous gathering place for his disciples like Guy de Maupassant and Joris-Karl Huysmans.

He was married to Alexandrine until his death but he was also in affair with their housemaid Jeanne Rozerot for 14 years. After his death, Alexandrine recognized Jeanne and Zola’s children Denise and Jacques.

Born in Paris in 1840, Emile Zola spent most of his youth in Aix-en-Provence in south of France. His father was a civil engineer there, working in the construction of a municipal water system.

Zola did his schooling from Lycee Saint-Louis, Paris. He failed the Baccalaureat exam twice, which was a must to get an opportunity to pursue further studies.

In 1862, Zola got a job as a clerk in the publishing firm called L.-C.-F. Hachette and was promoted to the advertising department in no time.

Along with his job as a clerk in a publishing firm, Zola started writing articles on current affairs for numerous periodicals.

In 1865, he came up with his first novella called ‘La Confession de Claude’ (also known in English as Claude’s Confession). It was a controversial piece of work with grim, semiautobiographical details from his life. It drew the unnecessary attention of the public, police and his employers also disapproved of it.

After leaving his job at the publishing firm, Zola worked as a freelancer while working on his individual work. This is the time when he got two of his novels published. ‘Therese Raquin’ was published in 1867, it was a gruesome story of a murder and its repercussions and ‘Madeleine Ferat’ was published in 1868.

During the 1860s and 70s, Zola used to constantly attend the meetings of painters where art and its interrelationship with the other theories and ideologies was enthusiastically discussed. He supported the art of Cezanne Manet, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir in his newspaper articles.

His interest in science led him to make an attempt to write large-scale series of novellas. His project comprised 20 volumes of the Rougon-Macquart series.’ La Fortune des Rougon’ was first published in series but then took the form of a book in the year of 1871. He published one novel each year from there on, completing the series of 20 novels in 1893.

He is known for the publication of his open letter ‘J’accuse’ (I accuse) in the newspaper L’Aurore, in which he accused the French general staff for the wrongful conviction of a Jewish French army officer, Alfred Dreyfus, for subversion in 1894. In his letter, he accused many high ranking military officers and the War Office for obscuring the truth about Dreyfus’s surveillance.