La Fortune des Rougon Reading Order

La Fortune des Rougon (1871) by Émile Zola is the first volume of Les Rougon-Macquart — the founding novel of the cycle and the indispensable context for understanding all that follows. Set in the Provençal town of Plassans in December 1851, during Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte's coup d'état against the Second Republic, it tells the origin story of the two branches of the family that the twenty-novel cycle will follow: the Rougons, whose political opportunism and bourgeois ambition turn them into enthusiastic Bonapartists, and the Macquarts, the illegitimate branch whose poverty and alcoholism represent heredity's darker gifts. Pierre Rougon's manipulation of the local political situation to ensure his family's advancement, while the legitimate Republican resistance is massacred, is the founding event of the entire cycle — the original act of opportunism whose rewards the subsequent nineteen novels will show being reaped and squandered. La Fortune des Rougon is also notable for its subplot about two young lovers, Silvère and Miette, who join the Republican insurgents and are destroyed by the same historical event that makes the Rougons' fortune — Zola's first sustained portrayal of revolutionary idealism and its defeat. The novel establishes the genetic-hereditary framework (the 'fissure' in Adelaïde Fouque's nervous system that the cycle traces through five generations) and the geographical world of Plassans that several subsequent volumes will return to.