ABSTRACT
Emile Zola applied his ideas in a series of novels meant to portray the French society of the late nineteenth century. In many ways, the basic structure of French society remained relatively stable in the decades between the consolidation of the Third Republic and the outbreak of the First World War. France remained a fundamentally bourgeois society, in contrast to its European neighbors, such as Britain and Germany, where titled aristocrats continued to enjoy important privileges. The Dutch expatriate Vincent Van Gogh, who lived and worked in France in the last frenzied, creative years of his life, used bright colors and emphatic brushstrokes to communicate a furious emotional intensity in his works. The contrast between the quiet serenity of Claude Monet’s landscapes and the violent tension suggested in the works of Van Gogh shows how strongly the new atmosphere of the fin-de-siecle differed from what preceded it.
