Le Ventre de Paris Reading Order

What is the significance of 'les gras' and 'les maigres' in Le Ventre de Paris?

The distinction between les gras (the fat ones) and les maigres (the thin ones) is the central symbolic system of Le Ventre de Paris (1873) and one of Zola's most original contributions to the tradition of the political novel. Les gras are those who prosper under the Second Empire: the market traders, the cheese-sellers, the comfortable bourgeois who fill their stomachs and do not ask questions about the political regime that provides their prosperity. They include Florent's brother Quenu and his wife Lisa, the charcutier and charcutière who represent the Second Empire's comfortable, apolitical majority. Les maigres are those who resist — who are thin because they have not compromised with the regime, because they were deported or imprisoned or excluded from the prosperity that political compliance provides. Florent is the exemplary maigre: he returned from deportation in Cayenne as thin as he was when he left, and his thinness is a physical sign of his refusal to fatten himself on the Empire's comfort. The symbolic system is simple but powerful, and Zola uses it with great consistency: every character in the novel can be located on the spectrum between fat and thin, and their position on that spectrum is both their physical reality (Zola describes their bodies with Naturalist precision) and their political and moral reality. The conclusion — in which Florent is betrayed to the police by Lisa, the most completely fat of the characters — is the system's most devastating application: comfort betrays resistance, and the fat devour the thin.