User:UncleCliffy

Hi.

I am attempting to clean up and expand all the pages on Emile Zola's Rougon-Macquart novels. I am trying to make a family tree.

The Rougon and the Macquart families are fictional families in the Rougon-Macquart series of 20 novels by Émile Zola.

The family trees below illustrate the members of the family. (The first generation — the family ancestress Adelaïde Fouque — is in yellow. The second generation is in tan. The third generation is in green. The fourth generation is in blue. The fifth generation is in purple.)

Macquart
Note: The children of Octave Mouret and Denise Baudu, Jean Macquart and Melanie Vial, and Étienne Lantier and his wife are mentioned briefly in Le docteur Pascal. The son of Pascal Rougon and Clotilde Rougon has not been born by the end of the series.

Adelaïde Fouque
Adelaïde Fouque, the family ancestress, is the last of her line, descendent from gentlemen farmers in Plassans, the fictional town (based on Aix-en-Provence) where the family originates. Her father commits suicide when she is 18. Instead of choosing someone of her own background to marry, Adelaïde shocks the town by marrying Rougon, one of her father’s laborers. He leaves her a widow and the mother of a son (Pierre) after 15 months.

She then takes a lover, Macquart, a poacher and smuggler, bearing him two children (Antoine and Ursule). She abandons the family estate to live with Macquart in what Zola calls a hovel adjoining her ancestral property.

From a young age, Adelaïde suffers from seizures that affect her brain. She also witnesses two events that unhinge her mind: the assassination of Macquart by gendarmes for smuggling, and the execution of her grandson Silvère for taking part in a revolt against the government during the French coup of 1851. (See La fortune des Rougon.) She is placed in an asylum where she lives for the rest of her life, dying at the age of 105. By the time she has died, Adelaïde — called "Tante Dide" by the family — has outlived most of her descendents.

The Family Neuroses
Zola's plan for the Rougon-Macquart novels was to show how heredity and environment worked on members of one family over the course of the French Second Empire. The implication is that the environment of the period, variously manifested in different milieus, allowed the family's chief characteristics to flourish.

From Adelaïde, the Rougons and the Macquarts inherit what today might be called obsessive-compulsive disorder, which Zola called neurosis. Most members of the family have a singular driving characteristic that informs their actions and controls their destinies to a certain extent. See the individual novels of the series for notes on how the family neurosis manifests itself in various members of the family. (See Les Rougon-Macquart for a list.)

Various members of the family also suffer from seizures, mental instability, and blood disorders. The penultimate descendent, Charles Rougon, encapsulates all that is wrong with the family line. Semi-retarded, semi-invalid, and possibly hemophiliac, Zola (somewhat symbolically) has Charles bleed to death. Tante Dide (Adelaïde) witnesses the death and dies herself the next day. (See Le docteur Pascal.)

Much hope is placed on the impending birth of the son of Pascal Rougon and his niece Clotilde at the end of Le docteur Pascal. Both Pascal and Clotilde are relatively normal, and they hope their son will be the saving grace of the family.

Zola's Hereditary Theories
In Le docteur Pascal (trans. Vizetelly), the last novel of the series, Zola details his hereditary theories and catalogs each member of the family. Heredity is classified as:


 * The predominance of the mother in the child, as manifested in Silvère Mouret, Lisa Macquart, Desirée Mouret, Jacques Lantier, Louis Coupeau (Louiset), and Clotilde Rougon
 * The predominance of the father in the child, as manifested in Sidonie Rougon, François Mouret, Gervaise Macquart, Octave Mouret, and Jacques-Louis Lantier
 * The predominance of self (the commingling of mother, father, and child), as manifested in Pierre Rougon and Pauline Quenu
 * Three forms of adjection (adjunction) (mélange): simple (Ursule Macquart, Aristide Rougon/Saccard, Anna Coupeau (Nana), and Victor Rougon/Saccard), dissemination (Maxime Rougon/Saccard, Serge Mouret, and Étienne Lantier), and fusion (Antoine Macquart, Eugène Rougon, and Claude Lantier)

Also, he identifies:


 * Indirect or collateral heredity, or the resemblance between two family members not in direct line, as seen in the striking physical resemblance between Octave Mouret and his uncle Eugène Rougon
 * Influencive heredity, or the resemblance of a person to another person to whom they are not at all related, as seen in Anna Coupeau's resemblance to Lantier, her mother's lover
 * Reverting heredity, or the resemblance of two family members in direct line that has skipped a generation or more, as manifested in the resemblance of Marthe Rougon, Jeanne Grandjean, and Charles Rougon/Saccard to their ancestress Tante Dide
 * Innateness, a chemical blending such that the moral and physical natures of the parents are so amalgamated that nothing of them appear in the offspring, resulting in Pascal Rougon, Hélène Mouret, Jean Macquart, and Angélique Marie

The Novels
Each novel focuses on one member of the family in a particular milieu and explores what happens given the characteristics particularized above and any other environmental influences occurring in youth or other circumstances. Zola considered this a realist experiment, though he is not above the charge of pairing specific characters with the 'right' milieu. On the other hand, there are implications that, given the right circumstances, good characters (Pauline Quenu, Angélique Marie) could easily have turned to the bad.


 * La fortune des Rougon
 * La curée
 * Le ventre de Paris
 * La conquête de Plassans
 * La faute de l'abbé Mouret
 * Son Excellence Eugène Rougon
 * L'assommoir
 * ''Une page d'amour'
 * Nana
 * Pot-Bouille
 * Au Bonheur des Dames
 * La joie de vivre
 * Germinal
 * L'œuvre
 * La terre
 * Le rêve
 * La bête humaine
 * L'argent
 * La débâcle
 * Le docteur Pascal