La Conquête de Plassans Reading Order

How does Zola portray the Catholic Church in La Conquête de Plassans?

La Conquête de Plassans (1874) is Zola's most focused treatment of the Catholic Church as a social and political institution, and his portrait is deeply hostile: the Abbé Faujas is not a priest who believes in the religion he administers but an operator who uses Catholic institutions — confession, spiritual direction, the mobilization of religious women's associations — as instruments for the conquest of political and social power in the provincial city. Zola was an anti-clerical Republican in the tradition of Voltaire and Michelet, and his anti-clericalism shapes the novel's basic premises: the Church, in La Conquête de Plassans, is a power structure that operates through the manipulation of female religiosity and bourgeois social anxiety, not through the genuine cultivation of spiritual life. Marthe Mouret's religious mania, which develops under the Abbé's spiritual direction, is presented as a pathological condition with the same Naturalist determinism that Zola applies to alcoholism in L'Assommoir or sexual obsession in Nana: it is a hereditary predisposition (the Rougon-Macquart family's hereditary instability expressing itself through religious rather than sexual or economic channels) activated by an environment (the Abbé's systematic manipulation) in exactly the way that Naturalist theory predicts. The novel's implicit argument is that clerical power is most destructive precisely where it is most successful — where it finds a genuinely susceptible temperament to work on.