La Conquête de Plassans Reading Order

La Conquête de Plassans (1874) by Émile Zola is the fourth volume of Les Rougon-Macquart, a Balzacian study of clerical ambition and political manipulation set in the Provençal town of Plassans (first encountered in La Fortune des Rougon). The abbé Faujas, sent by Napoleon III's government to bring the unstable southern town into the Bonapartist orbit, systematically insinuates himself into the household of François Mouret and his wife Marthe — the Macquart hereditary line's characteristic neuroticism, which Zola traces through Marthe's progressive religious mania, provides the psychological mechanism through which the priest's manipulation works. La Conquête de Plassans is both a political novel about the mechanisms of clerical influence in French provincial life and a psychological study of how religious fanaticism is cultivated by those who benefit from it — and it is the most directly Balzacian volume in the Rougon-Macquart, bearing a structural and thematic relationship to Balzac's Le Curé de Tours and Le Lys dans la vallée that suggests the acknowledged influence.