His Excellency Eugène Rougon

By: Émile Zola

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

His Excellency Eugène Rougon is the sixth novel in Émile Zola's Rougon-Macquart series. It has only rarely been published in English and this new translation aims to bring this great and almost unknown novel to a new public. His Excellency Eugène Rougon is set in the world of high politics and low characters during the Second Empire. The main protagonist, Eugène Rougon, is an ambitious and ruthless politician surrounded by a cotérie of equally ambitious and greedy hangers-on. In a world where what is said is usually far from what is meant, where all are manouevring against all, where no one can be fully trusted and nothing is really known, intrigues and conspiracies flourish and can lead to brutal passion and explosive terror. Who is the fascinating Italian beauty, Clorinda Balbi, flitting around the embassies, salons and theatres of Paris, looking for a husband and building her own power, influence and following? Helping or hindering whose business interests will give the greatest returns to which politician with the power to ordain the building of railways, the creation or destruction of towns and the exile of opponents? Whose career will be sacrificed for short-term advantage, whose made briefly glorious by the manoeuvrings of plotters? This remarkable novel gives us a view of the world of political power under the Empire: how a crass, reactionary and decadent ruling class, uneasily clustered around the banal and ambivalent figure of the Emperor Louis Napoleon III, created the foundations of modern French society as a by-product of its own bitter in-fighting, ambition and greed. Here Eugène Rougon appears as Zola's central character, a brooding and enigmatic man who lusts after power for power's sake, as his career crashes and soars on the back of events that may or may not have been deliberately manipulated by him, or by enemies jealous of his power. But victory is ever fleeting and success is little more than betrayal delayed in the degenerate milieu of the second Bonapartist Empire. In Clorinda Balbi, Zola presents a strong woman, fighting for her own advancement and causes, developing her own strategies and taking on the male power of society in her own, uninhibited and liberated way.