Recommendations
Books Like La Conquête de Plassans
Best books to read after La Conquête de Plassans by Zola
Readers who respond to La Conquête de Plassans's portrait of clerical power, the Abbé Faujas's systematic conquest of provincial society, and Zola's anti-clerical Naturalism will find the wider tradition of the French anti-clerical novel.
- 1Buy
La Fortune des Rougon
by Émile Zola
La Fortune des Rougon provides the Plassans setting and the Rougon family background that La Conquête de Plassans develops: the same provincial city appears in both novels, showing the political and the clerical conquest as two aspects of the same Second Empire consolidation.
- 2Buy
Son Excellence Eugène Rougon
by Émile Zola
Son Excellence Eugène Rougon (1876) is the political parallel to La Conquête de Plassans's clerical study: Eugène Rougon and the Abbé Faujas use analogous methods — patronage, manipulation of dependency, exploitation of others' weakness — in the political and clerical spheres respectively.
- 3Buy
The Red and the Black
by Stendhal
Stendhal's great novel features Julien Sorel's brief seminary period (Books I and II) as the most penetrating study of clerical institutional life before Zola: the combination of religious performance and secular ambition that characterizes the seminary in Le Rouge et le Noir anticipates the Abbé Faujas's combination of clerical method and worldly power in La Conquête de Plassans.
- 4Buy
Barchester Towers
by Anthony Trollope
Trollope's great ecclesiastical novel (1857) analyzes the politics of the Church of England with the same precision that Zola applies to French Catholicism in La Conquête de Plassans: the conquest of Barchester by the Proudie party parallels Faujas's conquest of Plassans, and both novels show that ecclesiastical institutions operate by the same rules as all other political institutions.
- 5Buy
L'Assommoir
by Émile Zola
L'Assommoir (1877) shows the same environment of working-class religion and poverty that La Conquête de Plassans shows from the other side: where La Conquête de Plassans shows how clerical power operates among the bourgeoisie, L'Assommoir shows what religion means — and doesn't mean — to the working class.
- 6Buy
The Power and the Glory
by Graham Greene
Greene's 1940 novel about a priest who maintains his faith and his priesthood under persecution is the twentieth-century Catholic response to the kind of clerical cynicism that Zola diagnoses in La Conquête de Plassans: reading both novels together shows the full range of what the institution of the Catholic priesthood can produce.
- 7Buy
Germinal
by Émile Zola
Germinal (1885) shows the anti-clerical working-class culture that is the social counterpart to the clerical bourgeois world of La Conquête de Plassans: the miners of Germinal have little use for the Church, which is a bourgeois institution in Zola's analysis, and their secular collective solidarity is the alternative to the clerical social order that La Conquête de Plassans anatomizes.
- 8Buy
À Rebours
by Joris-Karl Huysmans
Huysmans's 1884 Decadent novel, whose protagonist Des Esseintes engages at length with Catholicism as an aesthetic rather than a spiritual institution, is the contemporaneous French treatment of Catholicism that most sharply contrasts with Zola's anti-clerical Naturalism: where Zola sees the Church as a power structure, Huysmans sees it as a source of aesthetic experience.
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