La Terre

La Terre ("The Earth") is a novel by Émile Zola, published in 1887. It is the fifteenth novel in Zola's "Rougon-Macquart" series. The action takes place in a rural community in the Beauce, an area in central France west of Paris. The novel is connected to others in the series by the protagonist, Jean Macquart, whose childhood in the south of France was recounted in "La Fortune des Rougon", and who goes on to feature prominently in the later novel "La Débâcle".
Plot introduction.
"La Terre" describes the steady disintegration of a family of agricultural workers in Second Empire France, in the years immediately before the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. It offers a vivid description of the hardships and brutality of rural life in the late nineteenth century.
Plot summary.
The novel takes place in the final years of the Second Empire. Jean Macquart, an itinerant farm worker, has come to Rognes, a small village in La Beauce, where he works as a day labourer. He had been a corporal in the French Army, a veteran of the Battle of Solferino. He begins to court a local girl, Françoise Mouche, who lives in the village with her sister Lise. Lise is married to Buteau, a young man from the village, who is attracted to both sisters.
Buteau's father, the elderly farmer Fouan, has decided to sign a contract known as a "donation entre vifs" (literally: "gift between living people"), whereby his three children, Fanny Delhomme (married to a hard-working and respected farmer), Hyacinthe (aka "Jesus Christ", a poacher and layabout), and Buteau will inherit their father's estate early; they agree to pay their parents a pension in return. The property is painstakingly measured and divided up between the three children, as the Civil Code of 1804 dictated. As stated by the French Civil Code of 1804 under the section "Donations and Testaments," any one may donate their land to persons older than the age of sixteen, especially between family members, without penalty. Women could allocate land or property in this way, as long as she was granted the permission by her husband. Almost as soon as the contract is signed, Buteau begins to resent the pension, and quickly refuses to pay it. In the house Lise shares with her sister (the property having been shared between them on the death of their late father), Buteau begins a campaign of sexual advances towards his sister-in-law, which she attempts to repel.
Midway through the novel, Fouan's wife dies and, since it seems wasteful for Fouan to retain their marital home, the property is sold, and Fouan goes to live with Fanny and her husband. While Fanny is scrupulously respectful of the conditions of the "donations entre vifs", she nevertheless make it clear that she resents his presence. Fouan eventually moves to live with his son "Jesus Christ" who shares a shack with his daughter "La Trouille", a put-upon dogsbody. Under "Jesus Christ's" influence, Fouan's self-respect dwindles: while previously law-abiding, he now joins his son on poaching expeditions and takes part in Hyacinthe's favourite evening activity, farting contests. Eventually, however, Hyacinthe's abusive drunkenness is directed against Fouan, who leaves to take up residence with Buteau and Lise.
Living with her sister and Buteau, Françoise is the victim of Buteau's sexual overtures. Lise, jealous of Françoise, insists that her sister is behaving in a deliberately provocative way. When Françoise turns 21 years old, she becomes entitled to her inheritance and she decides to leave the family home, demanding that Buteau and Lise buy out her share of the house, which the couple cannot afford to do. Françoise marries Jean and inherits her share of the family lands and home, infuriating her sister and Buteau. 
Françoise is now pregnant with Jean's child, and in a shocking scene, Buteau and Lise set upon Françoise when she is alone in the fields at harvest time. Lise restrains her sister while she is raped by Buteau, then pushes her onto a sickle, wounding her in the belly and killing her unborn child. The two flee the scene. While Françoise is still conscious when she is found, her family pride leads her to refuse to name Lise and Buteau; she claims instead that her injury was the result of an accident, and dies shortly after.
Back in the Buteau home, the greedy couple turn their attention to Fouan, whose obstinacy in remaining alive has become a serious financial drain. One night while Fouan is asleep, they steal into his bedroom and smother him; finding he is still alive, they set fire to him, while arranging the scene to look like an accident (their story is accepted by the local community).
The Buteaus refuse to pay Jean the money for Françoise's share of the family home, which is now rightfully his as her next-of-kin. Horrified by his suspicions regarding both his wife's and Fouan's deaths, and by the heartlessness of those around him, Jean returns to his wandering, and leaves the region for good. As he leaves, he passes the freshly dug burial mounds of Françoise and Fouan, and the ripe corn in the harvest fields.
Characters.
The novels contains about 100 characters. Many have multiple names and extended family connections. The novel centers on the Fouans, a 300-year-old peasant farming family "dynasty", and an itinerant carpenter, Jean Macquart, who also appears in two other Zola novels.
Major characters:
Major themes.
In this novel, Zola attempted to show some of the consequences of the division of rural estates in nineteenth-century France. The laws which provided for this, which were enshrined in the Civil Code of 1804 but owed their initiative to the Revolution, were extremely controversial throughout the 19th century. "La Terre" picks up on a number of contemporaneous obsessions regarding the decline of France under the influence of the Civil Code, including lack of respect for father figures (hence the parricide which concludes the novel) and voluntary sterility to avoid excessive division of estates between numerous heirs (hence the infamous scene of "onanism", in which Françoise and Jean practise coitus interruptus to avoid conceiving a child).
But the novel also deals with more timeless themes: the parallel with the story of Shakespeare's "King Lear" emphasises the horror of aging and the physical and mental reduction which accompanies it. Above all, the story plays upon the cyclical nature of life and death, contrasting the unending passage of the seasons with the trivial strife of mankind, a contrast encapsulated in the novel's final sentence: "Deaths, seed, and the bread grew out of the earth" ("Des morts, des semences, et le pain poussait de la terre").
Literary significance.
Zola's novel is one of the most graphically violent and, to a lesser extent, sexually explicit novels of the nineteenth century, and caused considerable controversy at the time of its publication. In it, Zola's efforts to expose the unpleasant underside of his contemporary society reached its apogee; none of the other "Rougon-Macquart" novels features such sensational material. The publication of an English translation of "La Terre" in 1888 led to the prosecution for obscenity of the publisher, Henry Vizetelly. The definitive critical study of "La Terre" remains Guy Robert's ""La Terre" d'Émile Zola" (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1952); there is surprisingly little anglophone material published on the novel. The translator Ann Lindsay completed a translation of the novel into English in the 1950s shortly before she died.
Adaptations.
"La Terre" has had the following adaptations: