Émile-Édouard-Charles-Antoine Zola (1840 – 1902) was a French novelist, critic, and political activist who was the most prominent French novelist of the late 19th century. Among his most famous novels are Thérèse Raquin (1867), Madeleine Ferat (1868), and his Rougon-Macquart series, which over the course of 20 novellas follows the lives of two branches of a fictional family living during the Second French Empire (1852 – 1870). The Rougon-Maquart series is considered a masterpiece of the French naturalism movement, which used realism to suggest that social conditions, heredity, and environment had inescapable force in shaping human character.