Émile Zola gave his twenty-novel cycle a subtitle before he wrote a word of it: the natural and social history of a family under the Second Empire. Everything descends from one woman, Adélaïde Fouque (1768–1873), known as Tante Dide, a Plassans peasant girl whose hereditary neurosis Zola tracks through five generations and thirty-odd lives. She marries the gardener Rougon, who dies in 1788; she then takes the smuggler Macquart as her lover. From that one legitimate son and two illegitimate children the whole cycle unfolds, and Adélaïde outlives nearly all of it, shut away in the asylum at Les Tulettes.
The split at the top of the tree is a class fracture. Pierre Rougon (1787–1870), the legitimate son, marries the merchant's daughter Félicité Puech and cheats his half-brother Antoine Macquart out of their mother's property — a grievance that curdles into blackmail and lifelong hatred. The Rougons rise: Eugène becomes a minister to Napoleon III, Aristide renames himself Saccard and speculates his way through La Curée and L'Argent, and Dr Pascal stays in Plassans compiling secret dossiers on his own relatives. Their sister Marthe marries her Mouret cousin, doubling the taint, and dies in the fire her husband François sets in La Conquête de Plassans.
The Macquart line goes down instead of up. Antoine's daughter Gervaise, abandoned by Auguste Lantier and married to the roofer Coupeau, drinks away her laundry and dies destitute in L'Assommoir; her sons carry the strain outward — Claude the painter who hangs himself before his unfinished canvas, Étienne who leads the Voreux strike in Germinal, Jacques the engine-driver of La Bête humaine with his homicidal compulsion. Her daughter Nana becomes the courtesan who ruins Paris and dies of smallpox at eighteen. Against them Zola sets the compensations: Lisa Macquart's prosperous charcuterie, her daughter Pauline's saintly self-sacrifice, and the steady soldier-farmer Jean Macquart of La Terre and La Débâcle.
The tree follows Zola's own genealogical chart, drafted in 1868 and revised repeatedly, published with Une page d'amour in 1878 and again in Le Docteur Pascal in 1893 — the novel in which Pascal and his niece Clotilde become lovers and conceive the child Zola leaves unnamed at the end. Built on Prosper Lucas's theories of heredity, the scheme was pseudoscience even then. What survives is the architecture: a single family used to map an entire regime, from provincial salon to coal seam to department store, still the most ambitious genogram any novelist has attempted. Explore that architecture across five frames — 1795, 1851, 1865, 1871, and 1873 — in the playable timeline above, which traces the Rougon-Macquart branches from Adélaïde's founding split to Pascal's reckoning.
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