No. 15 · 1887
La Terre
The Earth
La Terre is the most unsparing of the twenty novels — the one that caused the most scandal at its publication, and the one that Zola's young disciples protested against in the 'Manifeste des Cinq', accusing him of wallowing in filth. Its subject is the French peasantry of the Beauce, the great wheat plain south of Paris, and Zola's portrait of it is without idealism: the peasants of La Terre are consumed by land-hunger, by lust, by a kind of geological attachment to the soil that is both admirable and monstrous. Jean Macquart, carpenter and former soldier, arrives in the Beauce and takes work as a farm labourer with the Fouan family. Old Père Fouan — like King Lear, though Zola probably had the parallel in mind only dimly — divides his small farm among his three children: Buteau (brutal, cunning, avid), Fanny (married and calculating), and Hyacinthe known as Jésus-Christ (a feckless good-for-nothing who provides the novel's rare comedy). Having given away his land, Fouan progressively loses everything: his authority, his lodging, his dignity, his pension payments, which his children find ways to reduce or stop. Jean Macquart falls in love with Françoise, Buteau's sister-in-law — a girl of fifteen growing into a fierce, independent young woman. Buteau rapes her; Jean marries her to protect her; Buteau, with his wife Lise (Françoise's own sister), kills Françoise in a struggle over the land she has inherited. Old Fouan witnesses the murder; Buteau and Lise smother him in his sleep to silence him. Jean, understanding what has happened and what it would cost him to prove it in this closed world, leaves the Beauce. He walks away from the soil — which, in the novel's final pages, is already being ploughed again, indifferent, eternal, regenerating for the next season of human violence. It will connect in La Débâcle: Jean goes to war.
Le plus impitoyable des vingt romans. Jean Macquart travaille pour la famille Fouan en Beauce. Le vieux Fouan — figure de Lear — divise sa terre entre ses enfants : Buteau brutal et cupide, Fanny calculatrice, Jésus-Christ débonnaire. Ayant donné sa terre, Fouan est progressivement dépouillé de tout. Buteau viole Françoise, belle-sœur de sa femme ; Jean Macquart l'épouse pour la protéger. Buteau et Lise tuent Françoise lors d'une querelle de succession. Fouan, témoin, est étouffé dans son sommeil. Jean quitte la Beauce. La terre, indifférente, est déjà de nouveau labourée.
Setting: Beauce — wheat country