Germinal - Emile Zola [1]
1847 Francesco Zola dies, leaving the family nearly destitute.
1848 The rule of King Louis-Philippe (the July Monarchy, which came to power in 1830) is overthrown and the Second Republic declared. Zola starts school. Karl Marx publishes Manifesto of the Communist Party.
1851 The Republic is dissolved after the coup d’état of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte who in the following year proclaims himself emperor as Napoleon III. Start of the Second Empire, the period that will provide the background for Zola’s novels in the Rougon-Macquart cycle.
1852 Zola is enrolled at the Collège Bourbon, in Aix, where he starts a close friendship with the painter Paul Cézanne.
1858 The family moves back to Paris and Zola is sent to the Lycée Saint-Louis. His school career is undistinguished and he twice fails the baccalauréat.
1860 The start of a period of hardship as Zola tries to scrape a living by various kinds of work, while engaging in his first serious literary endeavours, mainly as a poet. These years saw the height of the rebuilding programme undertaken by Baron Haussmann, Prefect of Paris from 1853 to 1869, which is reflected in several of Zola’s novels.
1862 Zola joins the publisher Hachette, and in a few months becomes the firm’s head of publicity.
1863 Makes his début as a journalist.
1864 Zola’s first literary work, the collection of short stories, Contes à Ninon, appears. Founding of the First International.
1865 Publishes his first novel, La Confession de Claude. Meets his future wife, Gabrielle-Alexandrine Meley; they marry in 1870.
1866 Leaves Hachette. From now on, he lives by his writing.
1867 Publication of Thérèse Raquin, the story of how a working-class woman and her lover kill her husband, but are afterwards consumed by guilt. In the Preface to the second edition (1868), Zola declares that he belongs to the literary school of ‘Naturalism’.
1868–9 Zola develops the outline of his great novel-cycle, Les Rougon-Macquart, which he subtitles ‘The Natural and Social History of a Family under the Second Empire’. It is founded on the latest theories of heredity. He signs a contract for the work with the publisher Lacroix.
1870 The outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War leads in September to the fall of the Second Empire. Napoleon III and Empress Eugénie go into exile in England and the Third Republic is declared. Paris is besieged by Prussian forces. La Fortune des Rougon starts to appear in serial form.
1871 Publication in book form of La Fortune des Rougon, the first novel in the Rougon-Macquart cycle. After the armistice with Prussia, a popular uprising in March threatens the overthrow of the government of Adolphe Thiers, which flees to Versailles. The radical Paris Commune takes power until its bloody repression by Thiers in May; the events would have great importance for the Socialist Left. Zola was shocked both by the anarchy of the Commune and by the savagery with which it was repressed. He begins to think of writing a novel about radical politics, which would later become Germinal.
1872 Publication of La Curée, the second of the Rougon-Macquart novels. Part of it had appeared in serialized form (September–November 1871), but publication had been suspended by the censorship authorities.
1873 Publication of Le Ventre de Paris, the third of the cycle, set in and around the market of Les Halles. Mikhail Bakunin publishes Statehood and Anarchy.
1874 Publication of La Conquête de Plassans.
1875 Publication of La Faute de l’ Abbé Mouret.
1876 Son Excellence Eugène Rougon follows the career of a minister under the Second Empire. Later in the same year, the seventh of the Rougon-Macquart novels, L’Assommoir (The Drinking Den), begins to appear in serial form and immediately causes a sensation with its grim depiction of the ravages of alcoholism and life in the Parisian slums.
1877 L’Assommoir is published in book form and becomes a bestseller. Zola’s fortune is made and he is recognized as the leading figure in the Naturalist movement.
1878 Zola follows the harsh realism of L’Assommoir with a gentler tale of domestic