How Zola's portrayal of the lower class differs from Victor Hugo's portrayal of the poor as represented by Jean Valjean" In Emile Zola's novel

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How Zola's portrayal of the lower class differs from Victor Hugo's portrayal of the poor as represented by Jean Valjean" In Emile Zola's novel
Emile Zola portrays the poor in the society as a bunch of hopeless people who are living at the mercy of the rich. In the Emile Zola`s novel, the portrayal of the poor seems to be offensive however, the author, has stood firm to his work amid all sorts of criticisms. This novel was both praised for its portrayal of the peasant life and mentality, and condemned as offensive to the peasant class as a whole. Zola spent many months travelling and interviewing subjects in preparation for writing it, and stood by his work against all criticism. His critique of the status of the peasantry has echoes today, French agricultural protection of inefficient small tenure having preserved to the present day certain elements of the lifestyle Zola described about 120 years ago. Zola managed to explain the milieu of the lower classes, and explain lower-class behavior through this milieu' ['Montrer le milieu peuple et expliquer par ce milieu les moeurs peuple' (RM ii 1544)]. The key words of that celebrated focal statement are 'explain' and 'milieu'. Zola's fiction makes the social milieu an active force instead of an inert setting, an explanatory background that interacts with everyone and everything in the foreground. In L'Assommoir, the milieu explains why workers act, look and smell like workers. In other novels, other milieus explain why the rich act and smell rich, why the members of the bourgeoisie act and look bourgeois. No matter what their socioeconomic status, Zola's individual characters are always part of a collectivity wielding monumental influence on their personality and biography. One consequence is that Les Rougon-Macquart's delineation of characters is, invariably and imperatively, representation of society. Conversely, the cycle's representation of society explains, imperatively and invariably, how its characters become themselves. Zola's people exist in a social setting apart from which they would be someone else. That setting and the individuals within it constitute a whole. Neither is comprehensible without the other. Emile Zola may well owe some of his reputation as one of the first to introduce the working classes into central roles in his fiction to the fact that he shifts from the sentimental, romantic portrayal to one that is essentially ironic and quite pessimistic. This is not to imply that modern readers require a literature of condemnation and hatred of the people but that happy endings in the slums and saintly workers are less acceptable. Whatever his attitude toward the peuple—which seems to have been a cautious, critical sympathy—Zola implicitly attacks the traditions of the populist romance throughout the Les Rougon-Macquart series. In both its visionary, transcendental aspects as well...