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Books Like Son Excellence Eugène Rougon
Best books to read after Son Excellence Eugène Rougon by Zola
Readers who respond to the novel's anatomy of political cynicism, its portrait of Second Empire ministerial power, and Zola's most direct treatment of politics as a Naturalist phenomenon will find the wider tradition of the French political novel.
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La Fortune des Rougon
by Émile Zola
La Fortune des Rougon shows the Rougon family's origins in the 1851 coup that made Eugène Rougon's ministerial career possible: reading the first Rougon-Macquart novel provides the essential backstory for Son Excellence Eugène Rougon's portrait of the mature Second Empire political machine.
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La Curée
by Émile Zola
La Curée (1871) is the economic parallel to Son Excellence Eugène Rougon's political study: where Saccard uses property speculation as the instrument of the same Second Empire cynicism, Eugène Rougon uses political patronage — both novels show the same moral emptiness operating in different spheres.
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The Prince
by Niccolò Machiavelli
Machiavelli's analysis of political power — the separation of political effectiveness from conventional morality, the description of power as a technique — is the philosophical ancestor of Eugène Rougon's political practice: reading The Prince alongside Son Excellence reveals the Renaissance origins of the Naturalist political analysis.
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Les Misérables
by Victor Hugo
Hugo's great novel treats the same Second Empire political world that Son Excellence Eugène Rougon anatomizes, but from the perspective of those whom the political machine excludes: the contrast between Hugo's political idealism and Zola's political cynicism is the difference between Romantic and Naturalist political fiction.
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The Charterhouse of Parma
by Stendhal
Stendhal's great political novel is the most immediate predecessor of Son Excellence Eugène Rougon in the French tradition: both Mosca and Eugène Rougon are brilliant political operators without illusions, and Stendhal's analysis of Italian court politics anticipates Zola's analysis of French Second Empire politics.
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Democracy
by Henry Adams
Adams's 1880 American novel about Washington political life is the closest English-language parallel to Son Excellence Eugène Rougon: both novels analyze the mechanics of political power in a modern democratic republic through the eyes of a woman who is intelligent enough to see through the performance to the cynicism beneath.
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L'Assommoir
by Émile Zola
L'Assommoir (1877) provides the social underside of the political world that Son Excellence Eugène Rougon describes from the top: the working-class Paris of Gervaise Macquart's destruction is the social consequence of the political arrangements that Eugène Rougon manages from his ministerial office.
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Nana
by Émile Zola
Nana (1880) is the social world in which Son Excellence Eugène Rougon's ministerial class spends its leisure: the men who consume Nana are the same men who sustain Eugène Rougon's political power, and the two novels together anatomize the Second Empire's ruling class from its public performance and its private dissolution.
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