The Belly of Paris

Émile Zola

Zola begins not with monuments or boulevards but with Les Halles, the enormous food market that once fed the city.

Meat, fish, vegetables, cheese, carts, merchants, workers and customers crowd the novel. Paris appears as something almost biological: a vast organism consuming, trading and digesting enormous quantities of food every day.

There is nothing distant about this Paris. Zola takes the reader behind the elegant surface and into the machinery that keeps the city alive.

Les Halles; Food; Markets; Labour; Social class; Paris