The Fortune of the Rougons : (La Fortune des Rougon)

La Fortune des Rougon, originally published in 1871, is the first novel in Emile Zola's monumental twenty-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart. The novel is partly an origin story, with a huge cast of characters swarming around - many of whom become the central figures of later novels in the series - and partly an account of the December 1851 coup d'état which created the French Second Empire under Napoleon III as experienced in a large provincial town in southern France.

— Excerpted from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.