The Fortune of the Rougons

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The Fortune of the Rougons

The Fortune of the Rougons (French: La Fortune des Rougon), originally published in 1871, is the first novel in Émile Zola's monumental twenty-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart. The novel is partly an origin story, with a huge cast of characters swarming around - many of whom become the central figures of later novels in the series - and partly an account of the December 1851 coup d'état that created the French Second Empire under Napoleon III as experienced in a large provincial town in southern France.
The novel was translated by Brian Nelson in 2012 under the Oxford Worlds Classics imprint.