La Conquête de Plassans

La Conquête de Plassans (1874) is the fourth novel in Émile Zola's twenty-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart. In many ways a sequel to the first novel in the cycle, La Fortune des Rougon (1871), this novel is again centred on the fictional Provençal town of Plassans and its plot revolves around a sinister cleric's attempt at political intrigue with disastrous consequences for some of the townsfolk.

At the start of the novel, the home life of Francois Mouret and his wife and cousin Marthe (née Rougon) is portrayed as a generally pleasant and relaxed existence. Francois is slightly compulsive in his behaviour and Marthe clearly suffers from some sort of mental illness, which Zola intended to portray as a genetic consequence of the Rougon-Macquart family's tangled ancestry. Their three children include the eldest son Octave, an intelligent but feckless ladies' man (featured as the principal character of two later novels in the cycle, Pot-Bouille (1882) and Au Bonheur des Dames (1883), but here little more than a footnote), as well as the quiet and introverted younger son Serge and the mentally handicapped daughter Desirée. Their home lives are shattered by the arrival of a strange cleric, Abbé Faujas, and his mother, who rent a room in the Mourets' house. Slowly, it transpires that the mysterious stranger has arrived to try and win influence in the town for outside political forces (which never manifest themselves) through a series of Machiavellian intrigues, plots, slanders and insinuations; in the process of doing so, he proceeds to unravel the Mourets' lives to such an extent that the bewildered Francois is unwillingly and unnecessarily committed to a mental institution, while poor Marthe becomes obsessively religious, though whether her devotion is to God or Faujas becomes increasingly unclear. In Mouret's absence, and Marthe's indifference, Faujas unscrupulous sister Olympe and brother in law Trouche take over the Mouret's house, and live high at their expense. The reaction of the townsfolk to Faujas' outside influence is fascinatingly drawn by Zola, and the tactics of the groups who are in "resistance" to Abbé Faujas' clever machinations are very keenly observed. The narrative is kept up at a tremendous pace and builds to a quite astonishing climax of violence and horror as Zola ends the novel in a near-apocalyptic fury.