La Fortune des Rougon French Edition Emile Zola 9781520277264 Books
Download As PDF : La Fortune des Rougon French Edition Emile Zola 9781520277264 Books
«À ce moment, le gendarme Rengade écarta brusquement la foule des curieux. Dès qu'il avait appris que la troupe revenait avec plusieurs centaines d'insurgés, il s'était levé. Dehors, sa blessure se rouvrit, le bandeau qui cachait son orbite vide se tacha de sang. Sa tête pâle enveloppée d'un linge ensanglanté, il courut regarder chaque prisonnier au visage, longuement. Et, tout d'un coup "Ah ! le bandit, je le tiens !" cria-t-il.Il venait de mettre la main sur l'épaule de Silvère.Rengade se tourna vers l'officier, qui n'avait pu trouver parmi les soldats les hommes nécessaires à une exécution."Ce gredin m'a crevé l'œil, lui dit-il en montrant Silvère. Donnez-le-moi... Ce sera autant de fait pour vous."»
La Fortune des Rougon French Edition Emile Zola 9781520277264 Books
Un tres beau livre, un qui traite d'une periode de conflit de politique un peu semblable a la notre.Product details
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Tags : La Fortune des Rougon (French Edition) [Emile Zola] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. «À ce moment, le gendarme Rengade écarta brusquement la foule des curieux. Dès qu'il avait appris que la troupe revenait avec plusieurs centaines d'insurgés,Emile Zola,La Fortune des Rougon (French Edition),Independently published,1520277261,Literary Collections General,Non-Classifiable
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La Fortune des Rougon French Edition Emile Zola 9781520277264 Books Reviews
Trying to revive my dormant French by reading, I chose Zola's Rougon Macquart series for a starter. That will keep me busy for a while. Here we go with volume number 1 how the basis for the fortune of the Rougon line was laid during the Bonapartiste Coup d'Etat of 1851.
The story begins in the Provence in 1851, with an insurgency by Republicans against the new Monarchy of Napoleon III in Paris. We follow a young couple who join the insurgents. Then we move to the introduction of the main protagonists of the family saga we learn the usual, i.e. fortunes are founded, often, on greed, luck, lies, forgeries, theft, murder, or political patronage...
We follow the head of the family in his attempts to get rich, starting early in the century when he steals his way out of total obscurity to some status as an olive oil merchant. During the transition period from the short lived Republic of 48 to 51 to the next monarchy, he becomes something of a conservative, i.e. anti-republican leader. (The political discussions among the `conservative' opponents of the republic sound eerily modern, though they did not seem to drink tea.)
This volume 1 is interesting enough, but it is a little like a sales prospectus for a TV series project. We learn about many sinister things and expect more of those later. We also learn about Zola's believes in science his preface tells us that he will show us, in the course of the project, with mathematical precision, how things and people relate to each other. He believes in a very mechanical approach to sociology and psychology. One of his hobbies was tracing inheritance of character and physical traits. We know today that things are not all that simple and deterministic. I can take aged views into account and `discount' them, but still, it dampens the enthusiasm a bit. There is just a little too much description of people's looks and theorizing about types of inheritance.
The story is a tragicomedy the tales of political intrigues and opportunism are interesting and even funny, while the tragic story of the young couple is a little too melodramatic for my taste, including a slightly overstretched 'blue lagoon' love story of the 17 y old boy with the 13 y old girl. There is too much kitsch coming in here.
What remains fresh and stimulating is Zola's political emotion, the hatred for the 2nd empire robbers, the enemies of the Republic. I know little about that aspect of French history and look forward to the following volumes of the series.
... of this novel if I'd read it without being aware of what came after. "La Fortune des Rougon" is the first of Emile Zola's twenty (20!) novels chronicling the history of French society through the middle decades of the 19th Century by tracing the fortunes of a single family - the Rougon-Macquart kindred - through several generations. I had read several of the most esteemed volumes previously, some in English and some in French, some recently and some decades ago. From that approach, "La Fortune des Rougon" might seem laboriously contrived as a retrospective attempt to tie up all the evolutionary threads of the chronicle; minor characters pop up insistently, who will become major figures in later novels, and the editor 'helpfully' footnotes their future significance. But in fact, this really WAS the first of the series, so it makes slightly more sense to perceive it as an outline of things to come, and it makes Zola's assiduous tenacity of purpose all the more remarkable, as if he truly had a clear conception of the whole monumental series from his first paragraph. I'm trying now, by the way, to read the whole series in French and in 'chronological' order, a project that may take me almost as many years as it took Zola to write it.
[If you've never read Zola at all, in French of in English, it's quite unlikely that you'll start with "The Fortune of the Rougons". It's not widely considered one of Zola's masterpieces, and it isn't equal to Germinal, The Debacle, or the Human Beast, to name a few. That's why I've rated it at only four stars, since the most I can award is five to such a masterpiece as "The Masterpiece", Zola's portrayal of the lives of painters and writers in the Paris of the Impressionists. And I don't recommend starting your readership of Zola here, unless you are willing to commit yourself to the whole series just on my encouragement.]
But let's take a look at "La Fortune des Rougon" in and of itself, as if Zola had never written another book. It's a hefty novel, a broad 19th Century novel, ample, explicit, and at times unnecessarily discursive. Started in 1869 and published in '71, it is therefore contemporary with classics of English Victorian fiction by Dickens, Eliot and Trollope. I point that out because there's an odd 'dissonance' about reading Zola; the social and psychological perceptions he expresses seem far more modern - more 20th C - than the style and structure of his works. He is unabashedly the "omniscient narrator" of his era, so soon to be jostled out of fashion by writers like Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford. He IS discursive and at times verbose. They all were, in his day. People must have either read faster than we do, or else wanted to get their money's worth out of a book, savoring its verbosity over leisurely weeks. It won't help anyone to appreciate Zola's accomplishment to expect him to be as terse as Joseph Roth or as playfully self-observant as Nabokov. Despite the boldness of his themes, Zola is not a modernist.
He is also not a hack, despite his literary abundance. Yes, he wanted to earn a living at writing, but his ambitions were not to cultivate an audience with facile entertainments. In fact, he intended to be didactic, to expound a theory of human behavior based on evolutionary sociology. Here's something from his preface to "La Fortune des Rougons", translated to English
""By resolving the double question of temperament and environment, I will try to expose and trace the thread of connection which leads mathematically from one person to another. When I have hold of every thread, and have possession of a complete social group in my hands, I shall show this group in operation, participating in its historical period."
Something of a 'determinist" was our Monsieur Zola? Yes, at times, and especially when referring to social caste. But in fact, the development of characters in Zola's novels usually plays out as a conflict of "nurture versus nature", still an unresolved dichotomy among sociologists today. Even the most fleetingly useful minor personage in Zola's novels is flesh-and-blood. The major characters in "The Fortune", the founding generation of the Rougon-Macquarts, are hateful, greedy, smug, callous opportunists, people of small souls and talents who grind through years of resentful mediocrity until an opportunity opens their path to fortune by trampling the hopes and the corpses of others. The opportunity is the coup d'état that replaced the Republic with the Empire of Louis Napoleon III, perhaps the first modern dictator. Zola's contempt for the victors in that upheaval flares like phosphorus in every sentence of "La Fortune." The essential message of the novel is that the crises of society often favor the least scrupulous scoundrels.
The novel is set in Plassans, a provincial bastion of class-bound conservatism in Provence. Class 'warfare' is one of the themes of Zola's work that seems prescient of more modern fiction. The town has three quarters - the shabby mansions of the moribund aristocracy, the old town of peasants and small merchants, and the new town of the up-and-coming professionals. Characters from each quarter cram their selfish interests into the narrative. Reading the novel as History, one can get quite a dynamic sense of social conflicts and change in mid-19th C France. Zola also excels at pure description. One can visualize Plassans as it was; in fact, it looks very much like one of the "plus belles villages" so relished by tourists of our times. Some readers may feel that Zola lavishes too many words on his descriptions of the settings of scenes, but I wouldn't agree. Good descriptive writing has a worth of its own.
There is a love story in "La Fortune des Rougon". The lovers are as childish as Romeo and Juliet, and just as apparently ill-fated. The boy is the idealistic Silvere, a grandson of Pierre Rougon for whom that monster of self-promotion cares not at all. The girl is truly a child, 13-year-old Miette, the abused daughter of a convict in the galleys. Their romance is the stuff of grand opera, a melodrama quite comparable to any of Verdi's or Puccini's. Once again, I suggest that the reader remember Zola's era; melodrama was high art in 1871. Their poignant love affair is something like a gilded frame around the sordid portrayal of the coup and the triumph of venality. The novel begins and ends with them, and the longest single episode is the pastoral depiction of their discovery of sexuality beyond mere childhood companionship. It's true that this depiction does not advance the central narrative of the novel. It's true that Zola may have loved his own flow of language too much ever to have edited his novel to modern satisfaction. But the romance of Miette and Silvere has a blushing, operatic charm that balances and sweetens the asperity of the novel as a whole. I wouldn't cut it too much.
Reading Zola in French isn't as formidable as it seems... (says one who writes his review in English out of fear of botching anything in French!). Like all writers, Zola has his characteristic vocabulary; an anglophone reader with modest knowledge of French will probably need to open a dictionary every paragraph for the first thirty or forty pages, but then will find that Zola's particular vocabulary is not infinite, and key words recur. If you have no French at all, however, there are several translations of this and of all the other Rougon-Macquart novels. I'd recommend going to the library or the biggest bookstore in your community, and comparing the naturalness of the English.
The one that starts it all! Once you start reading it, you will not put it down the characters, the places and the whole atmosphere, everything is so real, so true that it's a delight!
Over a century later, thank you Zola!
Un tres beau livre, un qui traite d'une periode de conflit de politique un peu semblable a la notre.
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