14 h 30 minAudiobook6 minSummaryRead it, hear it, the 15-minute summary, and print and large print at cost
Audiobook edition · 14 h 30 minPaperback · 6 × 9 in · printing soonHardcover · 6 × 9 in · printing soonAbout this book
What does it take to build a dynasty—and what does ambition leave behind?
In The Fortune of the Rougons, Émile Zola brings ambition and betrayal into the story of a dynasty’s beginnings. Set in Second Empire France, this classic novel opens the Rougon-Macquart saga with a question that draws you close: how does a family rise?
The promise of fortune gives this beginning its pull. Zola places the birth of a dynasty alongside betrayal, inviting you to consider the distance between gaining power and deserving it. This is the opening of a family saga, with ambition at its heart.
What you’ll discover
- A dynasty takes shape Enter a family saga at its beginning, where the prospect of fortune carries real weight.
- Ambition at the center Explore the hunger to rise through a story built around ambition and a dynasty’s birth.
- The pull of betrayal Consider what betrayal means when a family’s rise becomes the focus of the story.
- Second Empire France Step into the French setting that frames Zola’s tale of ambition, betrayal, and fortune.
- A saga begins here Discover the first novel of the Rougon-Macquart saga and the questions its beginning opens.
Who will love it
For readers who like a sweeping family saga with sharp social satire, a love story set against a real uprising, and a close look at how greed and ambition work in a small town.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- An old cemetery becomes a timber yard
- Two lovers meet the insurgent column
- The Fouques’ land and a strange inheritance
- Félicité and the Rougons wait for their moment
- Macquart's envy and a nephew's dreams
- The love story of Silvère and Miette
- The town seizes up between two fears
- The march, the kiss and the battlefield
- What the book is really about, and how Zola tells it
Who’s who
- Pierre RougonA heavy, calculating oil dealer who cheated his own mother of her land and now hopes the coup will make him tax collector.
- Félicité RougonPierre's small, quick, ambitious wife, who reads her husband's letters in secret and steers him toward fortune.
- SilvèreA shy young wheelwright who dreams of a perfect Republic and cares for his grandmother, Aunt Dide, while loving Miette.
- MietteA strong, bold girl called Chantegreil after her poacher father, shunned by the town and devoted to Silvère.
- Antoine MacquartPierre's idle half brother, who drinks and rails against the rich and wants revenge on the Rougons for his missing inheritance.
- Adélaïde FouqueCalled Aunt Dide, a frail, silent old woman with nervous fits, who started the family and shelters her grandson Silvère.
- Aristide RougonThe youngest Rougon son, a petty clerk and journalist who hungers for money and bets only on the winning side.
- Pascal RougonA gentle doctor who studies heredity and looks at his own family with a scientist's curiosity.
Formats and delivery
- eBook
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- Large-print eBook
- The same book in bigger, clearer type, from the first page.
- Audiobook
- 14 h 30 min, complete, read by Lucas Linden.
- 15-minute summary
- The key ideas in about 6 minutes, to read or to hear.
- Paperback
- 6 × 9 in. Printing soon: leave your email under Paperback or Hardcover above.
- Hardcover
- 6 × 9 in. Printing soon: leave your email under Paperback or Hardcover above.
- Large print paperback
- 8.5 × 11 in. Printing soon: leave your email under Paperback or Hardcover above.
- Large print hardcover
- 8.5 × 11 in. Printing soon: leave your email under Paperback or Hardcover above.
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La fortuna de los Rougon
by Émile Zola · 1871
In a Provençal town in 1851, a scheming family bets on a coup while two lovers march with the rebels.
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In short
A cemetery turned timber yard, a gun in a boy's hand, and a family ready to profit from a coup. That is how Émile Zola opens The Fortune of the Rougons, the first novel in his twenty-book cycle about the Rougon-Macquart family.
From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
An old cemetery becomes a timber yard
The novel opens at the Aire Saint-Mittre, a patch of ground outside Plassans. It was once a graveyard, and now it is a timber yard. Behind the stacks of planks runs a hidden green path, where an old tombstone lies on its side, with a half-erased inscription that reads Here lies Marie.
On a cold December night, a young man slips along that path with a gun. He is Silvère, a seventeen-year-old wheelwright, shy and full of dreams about the Republic. He waits for Miette, a bold thirteen-year-old whose father was sent to the galleys.
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What is The Fortune of the Rougons about?
It follows a scheming family in the Provençal town of Plassans during the coup of 1851. The Rougons use the crisis to climb socially, while two young lovers, Silvère and Miette, join a Republican uprising.
Why is it called The Fortune of the Rougons?
The title refers to the wealth, rank and fortune the family gains from the coup. It also hints at how the family began, since Zola wrote it as the origin of the whole Rougon-Macquart cycle.
Who are the Rougons and the Macquarts?
They are two branches of one family. Both descend from Adélaïde Fouque, the Rougons through her legitimate son Pierre and the Macquarts through her children by the smuggler Macquart. Zola follows both through twenty novels.
The author
Émile Zola
1840–1902 · French novelist
Émile Zola (1840–1902) was a French novelist, journalist, playwright, and poet. He was born in Paris, grew up in Aix-en-Provence, and later lived in Paris and Médan. He wrote Thérèse Raquin (1867), Nana (1880), and Germinal (1885). His twenty-novel series, Les Rougon-Macquart, appeared between 1871 and 1893.
More by Émile Zola
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