ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the status of the donation entre vifs as an alternative successional practice. La Terre is the story of two things: a contract, and a parricide. The contract is a donation entre vifs. The parricide is the murder of Louis Fouan, elderly farmer of the village of Rognes in La Beauce and donateur of the donation in question, by his son and daughter-in-law, Buteau and Lise. At stake in Robert's assertion is the reader's understanding of the novel's polemics, and thus of its relationship with history: its position, that is, within the field of contemporaneous social discourse. In his preliminary notes for La Terre, Émile Zola refers to the practice of donations as 'destructive des liens de famille', and it is doubtless in light of this remark, reflecting as it does the arguments of the Réforme sociale school, that Robert goes on to claim that 'le roman se fait l'écho de cette opinion'.
