La Terre - Major Themes

Major Themes

In this novel, Zola attempted to show some of the consequences of the division of rural estates in nineteenth-century France. The laws which provided for this, which were enshrined in the Civil Code of 1804 but owed their initiative to the Revolution, were extremely controversial throughout the nineteenth-century. La Terre picks up on a number of contemporaneous obsessions regarding the decline of France under the influence of the Civil Code, including lack of respect for father figures (hence the parricide which concludes the novel) and voluntary sterility to avoid excessive division of estates between numerous heirs (hence the infamous scene of "onanism", in which Françoise and Jean practise coitus interruptus to avoid conceiving a child).

But the novel also deals with more timeless themes: the parallel with the story of Shakespeare's King Lear emphasises the horror of aging and the physical and mental reduction which accompanies it. Above all, the story plays upon the cyclical nature of life and death, contrasting the unending passage of the seasons with the trivial strife of mankind, a contrast encapsulated in the novel's final sentence: "Deaths, seed, and the bread grew out of the earth" ("Des morts, des semences, et le pain poussait de la terre").