Novel: La Curée

Overview
La Curée (1871) by Émile Zola unfolds amid the feverish redevelopment of Paris under Baron Haussmann. The novel follows Aristide Rougon, who takes the name Saccard, as he transforms demolition and land speculation into a fortune, while those around him are consumed by luxury, vice and moral collapse. The title, evoking the "spoil" of a hunt, captures the idea that the urban renewal yields a banquet for some and ruin for others.
Zola frames the story as part of the Rougon-Macquart cycle, using heredity and environment to explain behavior. The narrative exposes how wealth born of public upheaval produces not only new boulevards and glittering façades, but also profound social and personal degradation.

Main characters
Aristide Saccard is a brilliant, unscrupulous financier whose energy is bent toward making money by manipulating city projects and property deals. He embodies the entrepreneurial, predatory spirit that profits from the Second Empire's disruptions. Saccard's ambition, cunning and lack of scruple drive the novel's business machinations and moral tone.
Renée, a young woman married to Saccard, embodies refinement turned toxic: beautiful, languid and trained in the fashions of high society, she descends into voluptuous idleness and illicit desire. Maxime, Saccard's son, is handsome, dissipated and self-indulgent; his illicit passion for Renée becomes a central scandal and a symptom of the family's decay.

Plot summary
The story follows Saccard's meteoric rise as Paris is gutted and rebuilt. He orchestrates bold real-estate operations, exploiting inside knowledge of the city's reconfiguration to amass fortune and influence. His palace-like residences and ostentatious displays mirror the excesses of an age that equates value with surface and spectacle.
Parallel to financial conquest is a private drama of eros and emptiness. Renée, bored and isolated in a gilded household, drifts toward an adulterous relationship with her stepson Maxime. Their affair, played out in sumptuous settings and punctuated by conspicuous consumption, crystallizes the moral rot beneath Paris's sparkling new facades. Social climbing, gambling and the pursuit of sensation lead the principal characters to a collapse that is at once personal and emblematic.

Themes and critique
Greed and corruption are central: wealth acquired through speculation is shown to produce a contagious moral sickness rather than genuine social progress. Urban transformation is neither neutral nor benevolent; Haussmann's projects furnish the means for private enrichment and social displacement, turning the city itself into a character complicit in vice.
Zola's naturalist perspective insists that heredity and environment shape destiny. The novel posits that characters inherit inclinations and are molded by the modern city's pressures, so that decadence and passion are as much the product of social architecture as of individual choice. La Curée is also a satire of bourgeois materialism and the hollow sensuality of the newly rich.

Style and legacy
Zola's prose is richly descriptive, notable for its sensory luxuriance when depicting interiors, fashions and the new boulevards; that sensual detail heightens the contrast between surface glamour and inner emptiness. The novel's clinical attention to social detail and its blunt moral judgments helped establish naturalism as a literary method and provoked controversy for its erotic frankness.
La Curée remains a powerful indictment of speculative capitalism and a vivid document of Paris's transformation. Its portrayal of money as both engine and disease, and of architecture as a stage for human vice, keeps the novel relevant as a critique of urban modernity and the costs of progress.