The Fortune of the Rougons

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.