La Terre

Par Emile Zola

Une édition de référence de La Terre d’Émile Zola, spécialement conçue pour la lecture sur les supports numériques.


« Un attendrissement noyait leurs faces à tous trois ; ils fraternisaient, Jean surtout, sans jalousie, étonné de pousser à ce mariage ; et il fit apporter de la bière, Buteau ayant crié que, nom de Dieu ! on boirait bien encore quelque chose. Les coudes sur la table, Lise entre eux, ils causaient maintenant des dernières pluies, qui avaient versé les blés. » (Chapitre VI, Livre I)

• Langue: Français
• Éditeur: Candide & Cyrano
• Date de sortie: 1 janv. 2012
• ISBN: 9782806247773

Emile Zola

Émile Zola (1840-1902) was a French novelist, journalist, and playwright. Born in Paris to a French mother and Italian father, Zola was raised in Aix-en-Provence. At 18, Zola moved back to Paris, where he befriended Paul Cézanne and began his writing career. During this early period, Zola worked as a clerk for a publisher while writing literary and art reviews as well as political journalism for local newspapers. Following the success of his novel Thérèse Raquin (1867), Zola began a series of twenty novels known as Les Rougon-Macquart, a sprawling collection following the fates of a single family living under the Second Empire of Napoleon III. Zola’s work earned him a reputation as a leading figure in literary naturalism, a style noted for its rejection of Romanticism in favor of detachment, rationalism, and social commentary. Following the infamous Dreyfus affair of 1894, in which a French-Jewish artillery officer was falsely convicted of spying for the German Embassy, Zola wrote a scathing open letter to French President Félix Faure accusing the government and military of antisemitism and obstruction of justice. Having sacrificed his reputation as a writer and intellectual, Zola helped reverse public opinion on the affair, placing pressure on the government that led to Dreyfus’ full exoneration in 1906. Nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1901 and 1902, Zola is considered one of the most influential and talented writers in French history.

Avis sur La Terre

[zolasdisciple · Évaluation : 5 sur 5 étoiles]

I read this book in 2 hours and cried for about an hour after i finished it. It is so moving. So real and expressive.Like all of his books the perefection of La terre makes it hard to explain. What goes on in zolas books is more than a situation Yet a life. and it is impossible to describe someones life. a must read for all of those who appreciate literature and psychology at its finest.

[thorold_1 · Évaluation : 4 sur 5 étoiles]

When you've already pulled out all the stops, as Zola did in both L'Assommoir and Germinal, how is it possible to go further? Fortunately, Camille Saint-Saëns had shown the way with his third symphony the year before Zola wrote La Terre: all you have to do is end with a complete symphony orchestra in the room in addition to an organ playing full-blast...This is a book that passes from a gentle, bucolic opening chapter (a man casts his seed on the ground; a teenage girl manipulates a bull's penis...), via fraud, theft, ingratitude, drunken orgies, incest, casual violence and an entire chapter of Rabelaisian farting, to an epic conclusion where rape and murder are brought together with more agricultural disasters than you would find in a stack of Thomas Hardy novels. Nothing is done by halves, nothing is swept under the carpets (not that anyone in this book has a carpet), everything that you can think of that's nasty and offensive about human beings is out there, vaunting itself. Zola's already shown us numerous times that extreme poverty brings out the worst in human nature: here he's having a go at the way being absolutely dependent on possession of land corrupts human relationships in peasant communities, especially in the light of post-revolutionary inheritance laws that force the division of property. Because everyone wants an equal share of the best land, people can't afford to trust their siblings, or their parents, or their children, and fields are reduced to handkerchief size. No-one can afford to marry someone without a useful parcel of land, and there's every incentive to cheat, murder and rape. Meanwhile, it also turns out that we're living in a world where farmers overseas can produce grain far more cheaply, and where industry in France is putting pressure on the government to keep food prices at a level where domestic farmers can't possibly cover their costs (plus ça change...). Even the progressive "scientific" farmer, Hourdequin, who has a large land-holding acquired cheaply by his father during the dismantling of aristocratic estates, can't make money. And everyone in the village is corrupt in one way or another. The woman with the superb vegetables? Manures her garden with human waste. The little girl with the geese? Check your pockets after she's gone past. That nice, retired middle-class couple? Owners of the most successful brothel in Chartres. The café proprietor? A cellar full of untaxed wine. The priest? Well, there isn't one, the council can't agree to spend money on repairing the presbytery. And so on. A book every town-dweller should read before moving to the country!

[arubabookwoman · Évaluation : 5 sur 5 étoiles]

This continues my 10 year+ saga of reading the Rougon MacQuart series. This is #15 of 20 in the order I am reading them (order of publication). This is also one I had read previously, many years ago (30 or 40 years) at a time when I read several of the more famous novels in the series (in no particular order Germinal, Nana, L'Assimmoir, and Earth), but I found I remembered nothing of the story.In this one Zola takes on the peasants/farmers. The rights of farmers to receive fair compensation for their crops were in constant conflict with the rights of the toiling masses (workers) to eat (buy food). Put simply if the farmers are paid more for the crops, food will become too expensive for workers to buy on the measley wages they are paid by the wealthy business owners and rulers.And this one is "earthy" in a way I don't recall having been so in my face when I read it before (or even compared to the ones I've read more recently). Maybe I've only read the translations that were "toned down," rather than more modern translations. In any case, the book abounds with double entendres, and there's lots of imagery of bulls and studs, not to mention the male peasant/farmers constantly grabbing the women and pulling them for a roll in the hay, even when the women protest.The story focuses on Jean Macquart who has just returned from the Battle of Soferino (so prominent in The Radetzky March), and has hired on as a laborer with the largest and wealthiest famer in the area. The other main characters are members of the Fouan family, who start bickering when the father divides his land among his three children. And the point Zola seems to be making is that for the peasant, land is everything. The characters are brutal and greedy, and will stop at nothing to retain their plots of land. We meet some truly awful characters in this one.Nevertheless, I would say this remains one of the must-reads of the series.5 stars

[kuiperdolin · Évaluation : 3 sur 5 étoiles]

Crimes et cruautés au cœur de la campagne beauceronne. Du Zola noir, âpre et révoltant.