Rise and fall

Naturalism was a literary movement of particular social urgency that flourished during the first decades of the Third Republic, its outstanding gift being the twenty novels of the Rougon-Macquart cycle (1871–93) by Émile Zola (1840–1902), though its ramifications can also be traced by reference to those writers referred to, both affectionately and disparagingly, as les petits naturalistes. Its lineaments were already visible in Second Empire fiction, not least in responses to the ambivalent realism of Madame Bovary, which are legible in three texts of the 1860s: first, Germinie Lacerteux (1864) by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt; second, Zola's Thérèse Raquin (1867); and third, Flaubert's own L'Éducation sentimentale (1869). Indeed, it was in the 1860s that Zola first borrowed the term ‘naturalism’ to denote a longer realist literary heritage typified by that rival modern epic, Balzac's La Comédie humaine.

Naturalist fiction is characterised by two plot shapes: first, the rise and fall of modern tragedy, in which ignoble protagonists are pushed down the slope towards their nemesis by supra-individual forces, explained in materialist rather than theological terms (naturalism seeing myth itself as a social fact); and, second, the pessimistic anti-plot which is in a double sense platitudinous, given its flat narrative trajectory and listless characters. The first of these forms is exemplified by Zola's study of physiology, Thérèse Raquin, which follows the path from wifely adultery via the murder of Thérèse's husband, Camille, at the hands of her bull-like lover, Laurent, to the lovers' eventual suicide.