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’s immediate imitators included the brothers Edmond and Jules Goncourt, now remembered chiefly as the authors of a literary journal. In 1864, they published their fifth novel, Germinie Lacerteux, the story of a servant girl’s descent into alcoholism, degradation and hysteria. The writers’ brief Preface — ‘the public likes false novels, this is a true one’ — became a manifesto of Naturalism. They began by proclaiming that, in a democratic age, the ‘lower orders’ deserved to be the subject of a novel, and that the novel, as a genre, was now ‘the great, serious, passionate and vital form of literary study and social inquiry’, having taken upon itself ‘the studies and duties of science’. The Goncourts were aware of the influence of their method and subject matter on Zola, their younger contemporary, whom they referred to in a rather proprietorial manner as ‘our admirer and our pupil’.9

Even when literary and artistic Romanticism was at its height in France, in the 1820s and 1830s, there had been critics who saw it as a futile reaction against an age that was becoming increasingly scientific and utilitarian. ‘The idea of beauty presided over the civilization of Antiquity; modern society is increasingly dominated by those of truth, justice and utility,’ one wrote in the Revue encyclopédique in 1828,10 and this argument helped to explain the social alienation of the Byronic outsider. Zola was to use a similar contrast between the novel in Antiquity (‘a pleasant lie, a tissue of wonderful adventures’) and the modern novel, adapted to the ‘scientific and methodical tendencies of the modern world’.11 Balzac, in his Preface to the Comédie humaine, had put forward the idea of the novelist as a kind of natural scientist, classifying society in much the same way as Buffon12 had classified the natural world: ‘there will always be social species as there are zoological species’.

The image that Zola uses most frequently is not the Balzacian one of the Naturalist, but that of the surgeon. In the Preface to the second edition of Thérèse Raquin,13 in which he defends the novel against its critics, he writes of having performed ‘on two living bodies the analytical work that surgeons carry out on dead ones’; and he sees himself as ‘a mere analyst, who may have turned his attention to human corruption, but in the same way as a doctor becomes absorbed in an operating theatre’. The writer, he insists, is describing, analysing, representing with the detachment of an artist looking at his nude model or a doctor examining a patient.

It is not surprising, therefore, that he finds the ultimate philosophical underpinning of what he is doing not in art or literature, but in science. The title of his theoretical work Le Roman experimental (1880) should not be read in what would almost certainly be its modern meaning, referring to fiction that experiments with literary form. What Zola means is the novel as experiment, in the scientific sense, adopting a title that deliberately echoes the doctor and scientist Claude Bernard’s Introduction à l’étude de la médecine expérimentale (1865) and La Science expérimentale (1878). The first of these was among the works that most influenced Zola’s intellectual development in the years leading up to the writing of Thérèse Raquin, with its description of the application of scientific method to medicine and the need for systematic observation and verification.

The underpinning of Bernard’s ideas came from the Positivist philosophy of Auguste Comte, whose Cours de philosophie positive had been published between 1830 and 1842. With the anti-Romantic critics of the 1830s, Comte believed that humankind had entered a stage of development dominated by positive, scientific understanding, which could be applied not only to the natural world, but also to society; it was to be based on observation of material phenomena and on experience, rejecting theoretical or metaphysical propositions that could not be verified by experiment or observation.

Comte’s philosophy was to influence Zola particularly through the writings of the