Page "Émile Zola" Paragraph 24

Most of the Rougon-Macquart novels were written during the French Third Republic.

To an extent, attitudes and value judgments may have been superimposed on that picture with the wisdom of hindsight.

The débâcle in which the reign of Napoleon III of France culminated may have imparted a note of decadence to certain of the novels about France in the years before that disastrous defeat.

Nowhere is the doom laden image of the Second Empire so clearly seen as in Nana, which culminates in echoes of the Franco-Prussian War ( and hence by implication of the French defeat ).

Even in novels dealing with earlier periods of Napoleon III ’ s reign the picture of the Second Empire is sometimes overlaid with the imagery of catastrophe.