Emile Zola 
Abbe Mouret’s Transgression 

Abbe Mouret’s Transgression Emile Zola – ‘Abbé Mouret’s Transgression’ (La Faute de l’Abbé Mouret), written in 1874, is perhaps the most powerful and poetic of all Zola’s tales; it is that in which fantasy bears the greatest part, and in which ‘naturalisme’ for a while disappears. The opening chapters describe a profligate and almost pagan village in Provence, and here ‘naturalisme’ is at home, and in its proper place. The fifth novel in Zola’s ‘Rougon-Macquart’ series, ‘Abbé Mouret’s Transgression’ is the sequel to ‘The Conquest of Plassans, ‘ in which we are first introduced to the main character, the neurotic young priest Serge Mouret. He becomes the parish priest for the village of Artauds, where the villagers have no interest in religion. This test to his faith brings the priest to a nervous breakdown. As he begins to recover he finds that he has lost all memory of who or where he is. This novel pits the faith of religion against the universal desires of love and sexuality. Presented here in this edition is the ‘Suppressed English Edition’ originally published in France in the late 19th century.

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More than half of Zola’s novels were part of a set of 20 books collectively known as Les Rougon-Macquart. 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. Set in France’s Second Empire, the series traces the ‘environmental’ influences of violence, alcohol and prostitution which became more prevalent during the second wave of the Industrial Revolution. The series examines two branches of a family: the respectable (that is, legitimate) Rougons and the disreputable (illegitimate) Macquarts for five generations.As he described his plans for the series, ‘I want to portray, at the outset of a century of liberty and truth, a family that cannot restrain itself in its rush to possess all the good things that progress is making available and is derailed by its own momentum, the fatal convulsions that accompany the birth of a new world.’Although Zola and Cézanne were friends from childhood, they broke in later life over Zola’s fictionalized depiction of Cézanne and the Bohemian life of painters in his novel L’uvre (The Masterpiece, 1886).From 1877 with the publication of L’Assommoir, Émile Zola became wealthy, he was better paid than Victor Hugo, for example. He became a figurehead among the literary bourgeoisie and organized cultural dinners with Guy de Maupassant, Joris-Karl Huysmans and other writers at his luxurious villa in Medan near Paris after 1880. Germinal in 1885, then the three ‘cities’, Lourdes in 1894, Rome in 1896 and Paris in 1897, established Zola as a successful author.The self-proclaimed leader of French naturalism, Zola’s works inspired operas such as those of Gustave Charpentier, notably Louise in the 1890s. His works, inspired by the concepts of heredity (Claude Bernard), social manichaeism and idealistic socialism, resonate with those of Nadar, Manet and subsequently Flaubert.