Zola, de Schopenhauer à Malthus La Joie de vivre et la naturalisation de la charité

Zola’s reflections on Schopenhauer’s pessimism in the novel La Joie de vivre correspond with the terms of Malthus’s thought in An Essay on the Principle of Population. On the one hand, a naturalism common to both Zola and Malthus exists. On the other, the Schopenhauerian charity staged in La Joie de vivre is directly opposed to Malthus’s recommendations, while pushing the model covered by Malthus’s law to its limits.