Émile Zola - Oxford World’s Classics

Readers who do not wish to learn details of the plot may prefer to read the Introduction as an Afterword

The Sin of Abb Mouret is the fifth of Zolas twenty Rougon-Macquart novels. It is less tied in to the history of the time than the other nineteen, being focused on one individual, a priest in love, torn between the biddings of Nature and the forbiddings of the Church. Zola had the idea of writing a priest-novel, as he called it, even at the start of the Rougon-Macquart series, and this developed into two novels. One, The Conquest of Plassans, is the fourth and perhaps the most obviously anticlerical novel in the cycle. It exposes, through the machinations of the iniquitous Abb Faujas, the political and social dimensions of the authority-charged role of the priest. The other was The Sin of Abb Mouret, an almost direct, though free-standing, sequel to the previous novel.

The Sin of Abb Mouret was published in Paris on 27 March 1875, and ran to four editions that same yearthe first of Zolas novels to meet with such early success. Zola was no doubt becoming known to the public and the title had enough of a sensational flavour to make it very saleable. novel and saw it as a long and magnificent love poem.

The subtitle of the Rougon-Macquart cycle is The Natural and Social History of a Family in the Second Empire. Zola had dubbed his brand of realism naturalism and styled himself a naturalist. As a naturalist, Zola would base his natural history on genetic and physiological characteristics, while the social history, though focused on one family, would, like Balzacs Comdie humaine, encompass a vast range of French society. Starting in the fictional town of Plassans, based on Aix-en-Provence where Zola spent the early years of his life, the Rougon-Macquart novels follow the family from Louis-Napoleons coup dtat in December 1851, which founded the Second Empire, right through to the ignominious end of the Empire at Sedan in 1870, related in The Dbacle. Influenced by the work of the philosopher and critic Hippolyte Taine, whom he had dubbed the naturalist of the moral world, Zola based his treatment of the family on three factors emphasized by Taine: race, the genetic and cultural heritage; milieu, the political and social environment; and moment, the contemporary historical background.

The 1871 preface to The Fortune of the Rougons (La Fortune des Rougons), the first volume in the Rougon-Macquart cycle, effectively launched Zolas naturalism. His interest in the scientific discoveries and theories of the age led him to stress the scientific character of his work, presenting the evolution of the Rougon-Macquart family in quasi-Darwinian terms, and emphasizing observation, scientific documentation, and realist representation. This led to a misleading image of the novelist as an unimaginative note-taker and compiler of documents. Later, The Experimental Novel (1880), in which Zola applied the experimental methodology of Claude Bernards