La Debacle is the penultimate novel in Zola's great Rougon-Macquart cycle. A stirring account of profound friendship between two soldiers from opposite ends of the class divide during the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune of 1870-1.

'My title speaks not merely of war, but also of the crumbling of a regime and the end of a world.' Émile Zola The penultimate novel of the Rougon-Macquart cycle, La Débâcle (1892) takes as its subject the dramatic events of the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune of 1870-1. During Zola's lifetime it was the bestselling of all his novels, praised by contemporaries for its epic sweep as well as for its attention to historical detail. La Débâcle seeks to explain why the Second Empire ended in a crushing military defeat and revolutionary violence. It focuses on ordinary soldiers, showing their bravery and suffering in the midst of circumstances they cannot control, and includes some of the most powerful descriptions Zola ever wrote. Zola skilfully integrates his narrative of events and the fictional lives of his characters to provide the finest account of this tragic chapter in the history of France. Often compared to War and Peace, La Débâcle has been described as a 'seminal' work for all modern depictions of war.

"La Debacle seeks to explain why the Second Empire ended in a crushing military defeat and revolutionary violence. It focuses on ordinary soldiers, showing their bravery and suffering in the midst of circumstances they cannot control, and includes some of the most powerful descriptions Zola ever wrote. Zola skillfully integrates his narrative of events and the fictional lives of his characters to provide the finest account of this tragic chapter in the history of France." --Book Jacket.

In "The Downfall" Zola tells the story of a terrific land-slide which overwhelmed the French Second Empire: It is a story of war, grim and terrible; of a struggle to the death between two great nations. In it the author has put much of his finest work, and the result is one of the masterpieces of literature. The hero is Jean Macquart, son of Antoine Macquart and brother of Gervaise. After the terrible death of his wife, as told in "La Terre" ("The Soil"), Jean enlisted for the second time in the army, and went through the campaign up to the battle of Sedan. After the capitulation he was made prisoner, and in escaping was wounded. When he returned to active service he took part in crushing the excesses of the Commune in Paris... The Downfall has been described as "a prose epic of modern war," and vast though the subject be, it is treated in a manner that is powerful, painful, and pathetic.

A provocative critique of the Obama administration's economic policies and an examination of America's difficult economic future During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama promised "a net spending cut" to make government smaller in order to reduce the deficit. But this huge increase in government spending and debt, and the resulting prospect of higher taxes, will make America a poorer country. Are Americans happier because the government has determined where this money should be spent? According to John Lott and Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist, the answer is no, and in Debacle: Obama's War on Jobs and Growth and What We Can Do Now to Regain Our Future they explain why. Obama's economic policies have raised unemployment, slowed economic growth, dramatically raised the national debt, squandered taxpayer money through poor investments, and damaged the housing market. The book explains why Obama's policies on spending, taxes, and regulation have all worked to harm the recovery, increase unemployment, and depress housing prices. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the deficits that President Obama proposes for the years from 2011 through 2020 come to a staggering $126,000 per family of four, and John Lott and Grover Norquist make clear why the costs outweigh the benefits Explains why Keynesian economics is more a way of transferring wealth to political constituencies than a legitimate economic theory for understanding how the economy operates Posits that Obama's economic policies were more an opportunity "to do big things" than to solve the country's economic problems Arguing that the policies of the Obama administration have created widespread economic chaos, Debacle is a bleak look at American finance from Grover Norquist.

Émile Zola was the most prominent French novelist of the late nineteenth century. He was noted for his theories of naturalism, which permeate his monumental 20-novel series ‘Les Rougon-Macquart’. Recognised in his lifetime as one of the greatest novelists of his era, Zola was also as a man of action, a defender of truth and justice, and a champion of the poor and persecuted. For the first time in publishing history, this eBook presents Zola’s complete works, with numerous illustrations, rare texts, informative introductions and the usual Delphi bonus material. (Version 3) * Beautifully illustrated with images relating to Zola’s life and works * Concise introductions to the novels and other works * The complete Rougon-Macquart cycle, as well as all the other novels and series * Images of how the books were first printed, giving your eReader a taste of the original texts * Excellent formatting of the texts * The complete short stores * Includes Zola's famous 'J'accuse!', with explanatory introduction * Special criticism section, with essays by famous writers such as Henry James and James Joyce, evaluating Zola's contribution to literature * Features two bonus biographies by Zola's English translator * Special resources section, with the detailed listing of the Rougon-Macquart family tree, as well as an index of the main characters and locations in the twenty-novel series * Ordering of texts into chronological order and genres * UPDATED with improved texts and Vizetelly’s seminal biography CONTENTS: The Early Novels Claude’s Confession (1865) The Dead Woman’s Wish (1866) The Mystery of Marseille (1867) Therese Raquin (1867) Madeleine Ferat (1868) The Rougon-Macquart Cycle The Fortune of the Rougons (1871) The Rush for the Spoil (1871) The Fat and the Thin (1873) The Conquest of Plassans (1874) Abbe Mouret’s Transgression (1875) His Excellency Eugene Rougon (1876) The Dram Shop (1877) A Love Episode (1878) Nana (1880) Piping Hot (1882) The Ladies’ Paradise (1883) The Joy of Life (1884) Germinal (1885) His Masterpiece (1886) The Soil (1887) The Dream (1888) The Monomaniac (1890) Money (1891) The Downfall (1892) Doctor Pascal (1893) The Three Cities Lourdes (1894) Rome (1896) Paris (1898) The Four Gospels Fruitfulness (1899) Work (1901) Truth (1903) The Short Stories Stories for Ninon (1864) New Stories for Ninon (1874) The Attack on the Mill (1880) Miscellaneous Stories J’Accuse ! I Accuse...! (1898) The Criticism M. Zola (1892) by Arthur Quiller-Couch An Extract from ‘My Literary Passions’ (1895) by William Dean Howells Zola (1898) by Henryk Sienkiewicz Émile Zola (1902) by William Dean Howells Borlase and Son (1903) by James Joyce Émile Zola (1903) by Henry James The Zola Controversy (1915) by G. K. Chesterton The Biographies With Zola in England (1899) by Ernest Alfred Vizetelly Émile Zola: Novelist and Reformer (1904) by Ernest Alfred Vizetelly Resources The Rougon-Macquart Family Tree Index of Characters in the Rougon-Macquart Series Index of Locations in the Rougon-Macquart Series

This is an overview of the 'Rougon-Macquart', a collection of twenty novels by French writer Émile Zola. It comprises "biographies" of her fictional characters in this famous series. 'Rougon-Macquart' follows the lives of the members of the two branches of a family living during the Second French Empire. It is one of the most famous works of the French naturalism literary movement.

In nineteenth-century Paris, passionate involvement with revolution turned the city into an engrossing object of cultural speculation. For writers caught between an explosive past and a bewildering future, revolution offered a virtuoso metaphor by which the city could be known and a vital principle through which it could be portrayed. In this engaging book, Priscilla Ferguson locates the originality and modernity of nineteenth-century French literature in the intersection of the city with revolution. A cultural geography, Paris as Revolution "reads" the nineteenth-century city not in literary works alone but across a broad spectrum of urban icons and narratives. Ferguson moves easily between literary and cultural history and between semiotic and sociological analysis to underscore the movement and change that fueled the powerful narratives defining the century, the city, and their literature. In her understanding and reconstruction of the guidebooks of Mercier, Hugo, Vallès, and others, alongside the novels of Flaubert, Hugo, Vallès, and Zola, Ferguson reveals that these works are themselves revolutionary performances, ones that challenged the modernizing city even as they transcribed its emergence. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.