His Excellency Eugene Rougon

Emile Zola is a classic of French literature, writer and playwright, founder and theorist of “naturalism” in France, one of the most influential movements in literature of the second half of the 19th century. Zola's main work is the epoch-making... twenty-volume cycle "Rougon-Macquart", which opens up to the reader an impressive panorama of human destinies during the Second Empire. This is an encyclopedia of the life of Paris and the French province based on several generations of one family - an epic dizzying in its detail and scale, where there is everything: greed and selflessness, love for one's neighbor and bestial passion, lofty aspirations and everyday routine, the ups and downs of the strong and weak of the world this. His Excellency Eugene Rougon (1876) is the second volume of the series, if you follow the internal chronology and recommended reading order that the author himself gave in the final novel of his grandiose work.