The Soil (La terre)

'The Soil' also known as 'The Earth' is a novel by Émile Zola. It is the fifteenth novel in Zola's Rougon-Macquart series. The story takes place in a rural community in the Beauce, an area in central France west of Paris. The novel describes the steady disintegration of a family of agricultural workers in Second Empire France, in the years immediately before the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. It offers a vivid description of the hardships and brutality of rural life in the late nineteenth century.