Émile Zola
Abbé Mouret’s Transgression (La Faute de l’Abbé Mouret) (1875) is the fifth novel in Émile Zola’s twenty-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart. Viciously anticlerical in tone, it follows on from the horrific events at the end of La Conquête de Plassans, focussing this time on a remote Provençal backwater village. Unusually for Zola, the novel contains very few characters and locations, and the level of realist observation compared to outright fantasy is most uncharacteristic; however, the novel remains extraordinarily powerful and readable, and is considered one of Zola’s most linguistically inventive and well-crafted works.
