Nana

The Theatre

The novel opens on a first night at the Variety Theatre. Nana, eighteen, making her debut — untrained, barely able to sing — reduces the house to silence when she appears virtually naked in the third act. She is not talented. She is simply, overwhelmingly present. The audience’s response is the novel’s opening argument: male Paris will ruin itself for this girl, and it is not her fault that it will.

Nana is the daughter of Gervaise Macquart, whose story is told in L’Assommoir — a novel about alcoholism and working-class poverty. The Rougon-Macquart cycle follows a family across twenty novels; Nana moves from the working-class ruin of L’Assommoir to the glittering corruption of the Second Empire’s upper strata.

The Structural Parallel

Zola’s narrative strategy is to make Nana and the Second Empire mirror each other. Both are spectacularly brilliant on the surface and rotten beneath. The men who ruin themselves for Nana — aristocrats, financiers, theatre directors — are the same men who sustain a regime built on showmanship and corruption. The Franco-Prussian War that ends the regime also ends the novel.

What Distinguishes This Book

Among the qualities that set Nana apart: The theatrical and social settings — the Variety Theatre, the Longchamp racecourse — are rendered with documentary vividness; Nana is a more complex character than the femme fatale archetype suggests — her power over men is depicted alongside her own vulnerability; and The structural parallel between Nana and the corrupt Second Empire regime is developed with genuine consistency. These strengths are evident from the first pages and sustain across the whole work.

Themes

The thematic concerns of Nana give it weight beyond its surface narrative. Nana is Zola’s symbol of the Second Empire’s decadence — her rise and the regime’s corruption are structurally parallel. The novel opens at the theatre — the world of spectacle and illusion — which is also the world of Nana herself: all surface, all performance. The ending, where Nana dies of smallpox as the crowds outside shout ‘To Berlin!’ on the eve of the Franco-Prussian War, collapses the personal and historical catastrophes into one. These ideas emerge from the texture of the work rather than explicit statement, which is the mark of ambitious fiction done well.

Why It Endures

Nana belongs to the literary canon for reasons that become clear on reading. Émile Zola’s command of the form was exceptional for their era and remains impressive today. The social observation is precise, the characterisation is economical, and the underlying moral intelligence is never heavy-handed. These are the properties that separate enduring literature from period curiosity.

Limitations

The male characters who ruin themselves for Nana are less interesting than she is. Nana’s agency is constrained by the naturalist framework — she is partly a product of heredity and environment, which complicates the ‘powerful woman’ reading. These are worth knowing before starting, though they are unlikely to diminish the experience for the readers the book is written for.

Who This Is For

Readers of Zola’s Rougon-Macquart cycle and European naturalism — best read after Germinal or L’Assommoir for context.

Our rating: 4.1/5 — Zola’s most extravagant novel — Second Empire Paris as spectacle and rot, with Nana at its centre.

Reading Guides

• Where to Start with Emile Zola
• Germinal by Émile Zola — Full Review
• Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert — Full Review

The Ninth Rougon-Macquart Novel

Nana was serialised in Le Voltaire newspaper from October 1879 to February 1880 and published as a book in February 1880. It is the ninth novel in the Rougon-Macquart series, and its protagonist — Anna Coupeau, known as Nana — had appeared briefly as a child in L’Assommoir (1877). Zola researched the novel by attending performances at the Variétés and the Opéra, going backstage, and meeting with women in the demi-monde; he described his method as accumulating observed reality until the novel could write itself. The novel sold 55,000 copies in the first day of book publication, reflecting both Zola’s established reputation and the public’s appetite for a sequel to the enormously successful L’Assommoir.

Nana as Social Argument

The figure of Nana is Zola’s study of how the corrupted lower classes corrupt the upper classes in return — a reversal of the usual direction of moral contamination in Victorian social fiction. Nana, who has no particular intelligence or deliberate wickedness, destroys the men who pursue her through a kind of natural force: her sexuality is the agency through which the Second Empire’s venality undoes itself. The novel ends with the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War (1870) — the historical event that will bring down the Empire — arriving as Nana lies dying of smallpox, her face rotting away while the crowd outside chants “To Berlin!” The juxtaposition, which seems melodramatic in summary, is devastating in execution.

The Rougon-Macquart Series

Nana is the ninth volume of Zola’s planned twenty-novel Rougon-Macquart series, which traced the hereditary and environmental determinants of a single family across the Second Empire. Nana herself — Anna Coupeau — first appears as a child in L’Assommoir (1877); Nana follows her adult career. Zola maintained detailed scientific dossiers on each character’s heredity and documented the social milieu through first-hand observation; the series as a whole is the most ambitious application of naturalist principles to a continuous narrative in French literature.

Nana was the ninth novel in Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series and sold 55,000 copies on its publication day in 1880 — a French publishing record at the time. Zola researched the novel by attending theatrical performances and interviewing performers; the Théâtre des Variétés, where Nana performs, was a real Paris venue whose repertoire and audience Zola documented carefully.