This paper examines the “sociological” scope of Zola’s The Fortune of the Rougons. What meaning does the text qua novel give society and “social man” ? According to which paradigms is “the social” grasped ? Zola, in the way he paints urban spaces, seems to proceed as if he were a quasi essentialist sociologist describing environments and the behaviour patterns relevant to them. But the story originates in his work only through the movement of characters whose appetites are unleashed in a “democratic” society perpetually reshaping itself. At the heart of the novel, supreme agent of this movement, are those characters between classes, those “déclassés” characters who testify to a gap between self and self, self and the social world. The importance in the novel of a space apart (the Aire Saint-Mitre) nonetheless produces another vision of society and delivers, in a way, its meaning. Perhaps a particular form of social “vision” thus emerges form the novel : a critical perspective on the social order, which is also sensitive to emerging individualities and to other ways of constituting social order...