This is the first of Emile Zola’s 20-book series tracing the history of the Rougon-Macquart families during France’s “Second Empire” of Louis-Napoleon, after brutally putting down the Republican movement. The series is meant to apply Zola’s Naturalism to an examination of one extended family through history, exploring the interaction of their genetic tendencies with the particular politics and social environment. In ‘The Fortune of the Rougons,’ the family is off to a rocky start in 1851 as two couples—Pierre and Felicite Rougon and Silvere and Miette—vie for dominance of the novel. Retired oil-dealers, Pierre and Felicite, “these two elderly people eaten up with greed” (250), are determined to ride the tide of counter-revolution to the wealth and dominance they have always believed they deserve. Silvere and Miette, an apprentice wheelwright and his fiancée, are just starting out in life and they are filled with a romantic spirit of social justice. After establishing the beauty of this young couple, almost in a Rousseauian state of nature, Zola traces the manipulations of the Rougons as they try to appear to protect the fictional town of Plassans during the Republican uprising. He describes their machinations and betrayals of the people around them, as they ruthlessly seek their pathetic pay-off from riding Louis-Napoleon’s coattails. (Some of this will sound familiar to anyone who has closely watched the Trump Administration, and reminded me of Marx’s admonition that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, the second time as farce.) Zola’s power of observation and his empathy make all his books moving and insightful; I was fascinated by this moment in history in a small town far from the action in Paris.