Recommendations
Books Like Le Nabab
Best books to read after Le Nabab by Daudet
Readers who respond to Le Nabab's panorama of Second Empire Paris, its portrait of the financier-parvenu as social type, and Daudet's insider account of the imperial political machinery will find the wider tradition of French Naturalist political fiction.
- 1Buy
Les Rois en exil
by Alphonse Daudet
Les Rois en exil (1879) is the immediate successor to Le Nabab in Daudet's social series and shows what became of the human material of the Second Empire when the Empire fell: the deposed royal families that the Nabab's world had accommodated become the Third Republic's expensive guests, and the comparison between the two novels shows the social transformation of the 1870s.
- 2Buy
Nana
by Émile Zola
Zola's 1880 portrait of the Second Empire's corruption seen through the career of a demi-mondaine is the most powerful companion to Le Nabab: where Daudet's novel shows the corruption from the top (the financial and political world), Zola's shows it from below (the theatrical and sexual world), and together they constitute the most complete portrait of the imperial era in French Naturalism.
- 3Buy
Son Excellence Eugène Rougon
by Émile Zola
Zola's 1876 portrait of a Second Empire political career is the most direct Naturalist parallel to Le Nabab: both novels show the machinery of imperial power (the ministry, the chamber, the court) from the inside, though Zola's method is more systematic and Daudet's more personal.
- 4Buy
Lost Illusions
by Honoré de Balzac
Balzac's great novel of the Parisian literary and financial world (1837-43) is the essential predecessor of Le Nabab: Lucien de Rubempré's attempt to conquer Paris with talent is the predecessor of Jansoulet's attempt to conquer it with money, and the same machinery of journalism, patronage, and corruption that Balzac anatomized under the July Monarchy is the machinery Daudet shows under the Second Empire.
- 5Buy
Fromont et Risler
by Alphonse Daudet
Fromont et Risler (1874) is the essential foundation of Le Nabab: the bourgeois Parisian social world that Le Nabab expands into the financial and political world was the world Fromont et Risler established as Daudet's territory, and reading both novels shows the logic of his social series.
- 6Buy
Numa Roumestan
by Alphonse Daudet
Numa Roumestan (1881) is Le Nabab's political successor in the Third Republic: where the Nabab shows the Second Empire's political machinery, Numa Roumestan shows the Third Republic's — the comparison between the two regimes' different mechanisms of corruption is one of the great themes of Daudet's social series.
- 7Buy
The Way We Live Now
by Anthony Trollope
Trollope's 1875 portrait of the London financial world and the speculator Melmotte is the closest English contemporary parallel to Le Nabab: both novels use the figure of the financial parvenu as a lens for examining the corruption of an entire social system, and both were read on publication as roman à clefs about identifiable originals.
- 8Buy
Cousin Bette
by Honoré de Balzac
Balzac's 1846 portrait of the July Monarchy bourgeoisie and its discontents is the essential Balzacian predecessor of Le Nabab as a novel of social destruction through money and desire: Baron Hulot's financial ruin parallels the Nabab's political ruin, and both novels show the same machinery of Parisian social life operating to destroy its most successful participants.
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