Recommendations
Books Like Numa Roumestan
Best books to read after Numa Roumestan by Daudet
If the tragic comedy of Numa Roumestan — the Provençal politician whose southern exuberance and cheerful mendacity devastate his literal-minded Norman wife Hortense — engaged you, these eight novels share its territory: the political novel of the Third Republic, the cultural contrast between north and south, and the French social novel of the 1870s-1890s.
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Le Nabab
by Alphonse Daudet
The essential companion political novel by Daudet: the portrait of the parvenu financier who buys his way into Third Republic politics, published four years before Numa Roumestan and covering the same political world from the financial rather than the oratorical angle.
- 2Buy
Fromont et Risler
by Alphonse Daudet
Daudet's 1874 social novel of Parisian bourgeois life, which established him as a major novelist, is the companion social novel that shows the same powers of observation and sympathy that Numa Roumestan applies to the political world.
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Tartarin de Tarascon
by Alphonse Daudet
The comic version of the Midi type that Numa Roumestan treats seriously: Tartarin's boastful self-deception is the same cultural formation as Numa's, but reduced to pure comedy without the domestic tragedy.
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Son Excellence Eugène Rougon
by Émile Zola
Zola's portrait of the Second Empire minister is the companion political novel: where Numa Roumestan studies the provincial politician's charm and its domestic consequences, Son Excellence Rougon studies the ministerial politician's intelligence and its political consequences.
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L'Histoire contemporaine
by Anatole France
France's four-volume Dreyfus-era political satire is the most sustained companion to Numa Roumestan in the political novel of the Third Republic — both novels observe the mechanics of republican politics through the ironic intelligence of the narrator.
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Bel-Ami
by Guy de Maupassant
Maupassant's portrait of a journalist's calculated political and social ascent shows the same Third Republic political world from the perspective of the ambitious outsider who succeeds — the complement to Numa's portrait of the insider whose success contains its own destruction.
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The Bostonians
by Henry James
James's 1886 novel of a southern American orator's relationship with a Boston reformer is the closest American parallel to the Midi-Nord contrast of Numa Roumestan: the same analysis of two cultural types (southern oratorical charisma vs northern earnest reform) in an intimate domestic conflict.
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Nana
by Émile Zola
Zola's portrait of Second Empire social corruption shows the same political world's underside that Numa Roumestan's surface documents — the politicians and journalists who attend Nana's theater are the same class of men whom Numa represents in the Assembly.
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