Reading Order
La Curée Reading Order
La Curée (The Kill, 1871) by Émile Zola is the second novel in the Rougon-Macquart cycle and the first great novel about the Second Empire — a savage portrait of the speculative frenzy of the Haussmann transformation of Paris, seen through the rise of the property developer Aristide Saccard and the destruction of his wife Renée, who begins an incestuous affair with her stepson Maxime. La Curée is one of Zola's most formally accomplished novels: the structure mirrors the speculative cycle of investment and ruin that Saccard's career embodies, and the incest plot (Renée and Maxime) is an explicit metaphor for the moral bankruptcy of the Second Empire — a society that devours its own children in its hunger for money and pleasure. The title refers to the portion of the kill given to the hounds in a hunt, and the novel uses hunting and feast imagery throughout to describe the Second Empire as a society of predators feeding on the city and each other. La Curée is also important for its treatment of the Haussmann transformation: Zola shows the demolition of old Paris and the construction of the new boulevards from the perspective of those who profited from it, and the landscape of rubble and construction that appears throughout the novel is one of the most powerful images of capitalist urbanism in nineteenth-century fiction.
Where to start
La Curée (1871) — the novel is moderate length (about 350 pages) and accessible; the Brian Nelson Oxford World's Classics translation is the best English version. Read after La Fortune des Rougon (the first Rougon-Macquart novel) to understand Saccard's background, but it can also be read independently as a self-contained study of the Second Empire.
Complete La Curée Book List
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La Curée
Émile Zola·1871·Second novel in the Rougon-Macquart cycle. The title refers to the portion of a hunted animal given to the hounds — the 'kill' — and frames the Second Empire as a society of predators hunting each other. The novel was suppressed by the imperial censors when it began appearing in La Cloche newspaper in 1871, before publication as a book.
La Curée — Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Haussmann transformation in La Curée?
The Haussmann transformation is the massive urban renewal project undertaken by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, Prefect of the Seine under Napoleon III, between 1853 and 1870: the demolition of large areas of medieval Paris and their replacement with the wide boulevards, uniform apartment buildings, parks, and public works that define modern Paris. La Curée (1871) is the first major French novel to take this transformation as its central subject, and Zola's analysis is devastating: he shows the transformation as a speculative opportunity that made enormous fortunes for connected insiders (like Saccard, who buys land before the demolition routes are announced and sells it to the city at vastly inflated prices), while destroying the communities and landscapes it displaced. The rubble of demolished buildings, the dust of construction, and the new apartments rising over the ruins appear throughout La Curée as images of the moral and physical devastation that the Second Empire's modernization inflicted on the city. Zola was influenced by his friend and mentor Hippolyte Taine's analysis of environmental determinism — the idea that the physical environment shapes its inhabitants — and La Curée shows the new Second Empire Paris as a physical environment designed to produce exactly the kind of speculative, pleasure-seeking, morally hollow human being that Saccard and Renée represent.
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