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Books Like La Fortune des Rougon
Best books to read after La Fortune des Rougon by Zola
If the founding political drama of La Fortune des Rougon — the Rougon family's opportunism turning a Republican uprising into a Bonapartist triumph in Plassans — engaged you, these eight novels share its territory: the political-historical novel of the Second Republic and Second Empire, hereditary family sagas, and the Naturalist cycle that grows from this origin.
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Buy on AmazonLa Conquête de Plassans
by Émile Zola
Volume 4 and the immediate return to the Plassans setting, twenty years later: the Mouret family (Macquart line) in the same provincial town, now under the Bonapartist order that La Fortune des Rougon shows being established.
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Buy on AmazonSon Excellence Eugène Rougon
by Émile Zola
Volume 6 and Eugène Rougon's own story: the son whose political ambition La Fortune des Rougon introduces, followed through the ministerial career of the Second Empire's apex.
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Buy on AmazonL'Assommoir
by Émile Zola
Volume 7 and the novel that made Zola famous — the Macquart branch's story in Paris working-class life, the hereditary consequences of the alcoholism and poverty that La Fortune des Rougon established as the other side of the family tree.
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Buy on AmazonNana
by Émile Zola
Volume 9 and the most famous Rougon-Macquart novel after Germinal — the next generation's story, in the form that the social ambitions La Fortune des Rougon establishes take when they pass through the demimonde.
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Buy on AmazonGerminal
by Émile Zola
Volume 13 and the most celebrated novel in the cycle — the fullest expression of the social analysis that La Fortune des Rougon sets up, applied to the industrial working class rather than the provincial bourgeoisie.
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Buy on AmazonL'Histoire d'un crime
by Victor Hugo
Hugo's account of Napoleon III's 1851 coup d'état is the essential non-fiction companion to La Fortune des Rougon, which is set in the same historical event — Hugo witnessed it and wrote about it with the fury of a victim where Zola analyzes it with the detachment of a naturalist.
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Buy on AmazonBuddenbrooks
by Thomas Mann
Mann's great German dynastic novel of a merchant family's four-generation decline is the most important European parallel to the Rougon-Macquart project: a family whose hereditary characteristics are followed through multiple generations in the same social world.
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Buy on AmazonThe Forsyte Saga
by John Galsworthy
Galsworthy's English dynastic novel of a bourgeois family across three generations uses the same method as Zola's cycle: the hereditary transmission of social character through a family that represents a class at a historical turning point.
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