The Conquest of Plassans (Les Rougon-Macquart Book 4) Read Free

machine, and he too, as we discover, is expendable. Félicité is the power behind the Rougon throne, ready to sacrifice her family to regain control of Plassans. It is she who arranges for Faujas to lodge with her daughter and son-in-law, Marthe Rougon and François Mouret, and she who takes him in hand as he extends his influence across town. She is doing the bidding of the Bonapartist faction in Paris, but she is also trying to regain her own lost position in the town. She tells Faujas that she has already conquered Plassans once and will do it again, with or without him. Zola shifts the balance of power in the novel quite unexpectedly: where, to start with, Faujas is inscrutable and efficient and Félicité appears to be falling in line with his schemes, the tables are turned. Faujas is the instrument of the downfall of the Mouret family, but he becomes the instrument of his own. It is Félicité who is still standing at the end: the town is hers, though at a cost she could not anticipate.
    Plassans is a fictional town closely based on Aix-en-Provence,where Zola lived for fifteen years as a child and young man. 2 It is the cradle of the Rougon-Macquarts, their power base. The Rougon-Macquart dynasty begins with Adélaïde Fouque, the woman we know, in
The Conquest of Plassans
, as Aunt Dide, now resident of the lunatic asylum in Les Tulettes. Though Dide does not appear in person in this book, she looms over it, a figure from the family’s history but also an omen of what is to come: madness, alienation, internment. Zola has Adélaïde live from 1768 to 1873, spanning a hundred years of history and all twenty of the Rougon-Macquart novels, dying in the last novel in the series,
Doctor Pascal
, at the age of 105. It is with Adélaïde Fouque that the Rougon-Macquarts begin, both the legitimate strand she produces from her marriage to Rougon, with whom she has a child, Pierre Rougon, in 1787, and the illegitimate strand she engenders with her lover, the drunkard and smuggler Macquart, which produces two children, Antoine and Ursule.
    The Conquest of Plassans
follows the lives of Aunt Dide’s children and grandchildren and their families: Félicité and Pierre Rougon, their daughter Marthe, her husband François Mouret (son of Ursule Macquart and thus also Marthe’s cousin), and Antoine Macquart, a wily drunkard who lives comfortably near Les Tulettes on a pension granted to him by Pierre Rougon for having betrayed his Republican comrades in the
coup d’état
. While Zola may be fascinated by the Rougons’ and the Macquarts’ energy and resourcefulness, it is clear that they are not a sympathetic crew. We admire them as we might admire rats or cockroaches: for being ruthless, tenacious, parasitical, tough, and indestructible. But however efficient the Rougon-Macquarts are as a collective, the individuals within that collective carry, to a greater or lesser extent, the hereditary defects that will determine their lives here and in the novels to come. As Zola writes in his preface to
The Fortune of the Rougons
:
    The great characteristic of the Rougon-Macquarts, the group or family I propose to study, is their ravenous appetites, the great upsurge of our age as it rushes to satisfy those appetites. Physiologically the Rougon-Macquarts illustrate the gradual sequence of nervous and sanguine accidents thatbefall a race after a first organic lesion and, according to environment, determine in each individual member of the race those feelings, desires, and passions—in sum, all the natural and instinctive manifestations of humanity—whose outcomes are conventionally described in terms of ‘virtue’ or ‘vice’.
    Zola is being deliberately clinical here, treating his human protagonists as biological organisms to be described medically, while the provocative placing of ‘virtue’ and ‘vice’ in quotation marks further adds to the image of the experimental scientist objectively noting and classifying his data. The