[6] He was a major figure in the political liberalization of France and in the exoneration of the falsely accused and convicted army officer Alfred Dreyfus, which is encapsulated in his renowned newspaper opinion headlined J'Accuse...!

[13][14] Before his breakthrough as a writer, Zola worked for minimal pay as a clerk in a shipping firm and then in the sales department for the publisher Hachette.

As a political journalist, Zola did not hide his dislike of Napoleon III, who had successfully run for the office of president under the constitution of the French Second Republic, only to use this position as a springboard for the coup d'état that made him emperor.

[citation needed] The discord was partially healed, which allowed Zola to take an increasingly active role in the lives of the children.

[9] With the publication of his sordid autobiographical novel La Confession de Claude (1865) attracting police attention, Hachette fired Zola.

More than half of Zola's novels were part of the twenty-volume Les Rougon-Macquart cycle, which details the history of a single family under the reign of Napoléon III.

Unlike Balzac, who in the midst of his literary career resynthesized his work into La Comédie Humaine, Zola from the start, at the age of 28, had thought of the complete layout of the series.

[citation needed] Set in France's Second Empire, in the context of Baron Haussmann's changing Paris, the series traces the environmental and hereditary influences of violence, alcohol, and prostitution which became more prevalent during the second wave of the Industrial Revolution.

In the preface to the first novel of the series, Zola states, "I want to explain how a family, a small group of regular people, behaves in society, while expanding through the birth of ten, twenty individuals, who seem at first glance profoundly dissimilar, but who are shown through analysis to be intimately linked to one another.

[21] Because L'Assommoir was such a success, Zola was able to renegotiate his contract with his publisher Georges Charpentier to receive more than 14% royalties and the exclusive rights to serial publication in the press.

[9] He became a figurehead among the literary bourgeoisie and organised cultural dinners with Guy de Maupassant, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and other writers at his luxurious villa (worth 300,000 francs)[23] in Médan, near Paris, after 1880.

[26] He is considered to be a significant influence on those writers that are credited with the creation of the so-called new journalism: Wolfe, Capote, Thompson, Mailer, Didion, Talese and others.

Tom Wolfe wrote that his goal in writing fiction was to document contemporary society in the tradition of John Steinbeck, Charles Dickens, and Émile Zola.

The newspaper was run by Ernest Vaughan and Georges Clemenceau, who decided that the controversial story would be in the form of an open letter to the president, Félix Faure.

accused the highest levels of the French Army of obstruction of justice and antisemitism by having wrongfully convicted Alfred Dreyfus to life imprisonment on Devil's Island.

[28] The case, known as the Dreyfus affair, deeply divided France between the reactionary army and Catholic Church on one hand, and the more liberal commercial society on the other.

The ramifications continued for many years; on the 100th anniversary of Zola's article, France's Catholic daily paper, La Croix, apologised for its antisemitic editorials during the Dreyfus affair.

The fact of Major Henry's forgery was discovered and admitted to in August 1898, and the Government referred Dreyfus's original court-martial to the Supreme Court for review the following month, over the objections of the General Staff.

"[27] Zola's 1898 article is widely viewed in France as the most prominent manifestation of the new power of the intellectuals (writers, artists, academicians) in shaping public opinion, the media and the state.

The manifesto accused Zola of having "lowered the standard of Naturalism, of catering to large sales by deliberate obscenities, of being a morbid and impotent hypochondriac, incapable of taking a sane and healthy view of mankind.

Expressions of sympathy arrived from everywhere in France; for a week the vestibule of his house was crowded with notable writers, scientists, artists, and politicians who came to inscribe their names in the registers.

Zola was initially buried in the Cimetière de Montmartre in Paris, but on 4 June 1908, just five years and nine months after his death, his remains were relocated to the Panthéon, where he shares a crypt with Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas.

[42] It is based on the revelation by Norman pharmacist Pierre Hacquin, who was told by chimney-sweep Henri Buronfosse that he intentionally blocked the chimney of Zola's apartment in Paris.

Some critics classify Zola's work, and naturalism more broadly, as a particular strain of decadent literature, which emphasized the fallen, corrupted state of modern civilization.

[citation needed] La Débâcle, the military novel, is set for the most part in country districts of eastern France; its dénouement takes place in the capital during the civil war leading to the suppression of the Paris Commune.

In the political novel Son Excellence Eugène Rougon, the eponymous minister's interventions on behalf of his so-called friends, have their consequences elsewhere, and the reader is witness to some of them.

[13] Balzac, Zola claimed, had already investigated the psychology of lechery in an experimental manner, in the figure of Hector Hulot in La Cousine Bette.

[citation needed] Considering this claim, many critics, such as György Lukács,[51] find Zola strangely poor at creating lifelike and memorable characters in the manner of Honoré de Balzac or Charles Dickens, despite his ability to evoke powerful crowd scenes.

[citation needed] The great natural processes of seedtime and harvest, death and renewal in La Terre are instinct with a vitality which is not human but is the elemental energy of life.

[citation needed] Zola bases his optimism on innéité and on the supposed capacity of the human race to make progress in a moral sense.