Reading Order
La TerreThe Earth Reading Order
The Earth (La Terre, 1887) by Émile Zola is the fifteenth novel in the Rougon-Macquart cycle and the one that most shocked Zola's contemporaries — a brutal, unsparing portrait of French peasant life in the Beauce grain-growing region southwest of Paris, following Jean Macquart (previously a secondary character in The Fortune of the Rougons) as he arrives in the Beauce and becomes entangled in the violent family struggle over old Fouan's land. Where Germinal exposed the exploitation of the working class with moral outrage, The Earth exposes the peasantry with something closer to horror: Zola's peasants are ferocious, greedy, lustful, and completely absorbed by their struggle for the land, which Zola presents as a biological necessity as powerful as any other. Five younger colleagues of Zola's published a protest — the 'Manifesto of the Five' — calling The Earth a work of pornography and depravity, which helped make it a succès de scandale and ensured its survival.
Where to start
The Earth (La Terre, 1887) — the complete novel; Jean Macquart's earlier appearance in The Fortune of the Rougons is minor and not required
Complete La Terre Book List
La Terre — Frequently Asked Questions
Is The Earth by Zola really as shocking as its reputation suggests?
Yes, by the standards of its time and still today in places. The Earth contains explicit sexual scenes, graphically rendered violence (including murders within a family), and a sustained portrait of peasant sexuality and coarseness that Zola presented as scientifically accurate naturalism. The 1887 'Manifesto of the Five' — a protest by five younger writers associated with Zola's naturalist school — described the novel as a descent into filth and accused Zola of betraying naturalism's moral purpose. Zola responded that he had simply written what he saw, that the peasantry's relationship to the land was biological and not to be prettified. Modern readers may find the frank sexuality less shocking than Victorian readers did but the novel's violence and nihilism still land hard.
Who is Jean Macquart in The Earth?
Jean Macquart is the youngest son of Gervaise Macquart's father — making him the half-brother of Gervaise (L'Assommoir), Nana's grandfather-figure, and the uncle of Étienne Lantier (Germinal) and Jacques Lantier (La Bête Humaine). In The Earth he arrives in the Beauce region as a former soldier and carpenter seeking a new life, and becomes a farmhand on the Mouche property, eventually marrying Françoise Mouche. He is unusual among Zola's protagonists in being morally steady rather than destroyed by his heredity — he is from the Macquart branch but has escaped its worst tendencies. He later appears in Zola's Defeat (La Débâcle, 1892) as a soldier in the Franco-Prussian War.
How does The Earth fit into the Rougon-Macquart cycle?
The Earth is the fifteenth of the twenty novels and represents Zola's study of the peasantry — one of the social groups he had specifically planned to cover from the beginning of the cycle. Where L'Assommoir covered the urban working class and Germinal covered the mining proletariat, The Earth covers agricultural laboring life: the Beauce peasants and their relationship to the land they farm and hunger to own. The Fouan family's struggle over the inheritance of old Fouan's property — a conflict that ends in murder — is Zola's demonstration that the peasant's relationship to land is as violent and absolute as any other passion in the cycle.
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