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How does Le Docteur Pascal explain the heredity theories behind the Rougon-Macquart cycle?

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Black and white portrait of French novelist Emile Zola with glasses, a full beard, and mustache, wearing a suit and looking to the side. — Émile Zola French novelist Émile Zola.

In the final novel of the Rougon-Macquart cycle, titled Le Docteur Pascal (1893), Émile Zola utilizes the protagonist, Dr. Pascal Rougon, to formally synthesize and explain the theories of heredity that underpin the entire 20-volume series.12

Pascal serves as the mouthpiece for Zola’s naturalist project, which aimed to demonstrate the deterministic influence of biological inheritance on human behavior and social outcomes. To provide a clear, scientific framework for these ideas, the character is depicted as working with a comprehensive genealogical tree of the Rougon-Macquart family, which was published alongside the novel. Through this document, Pascal maps the transmission of traits across the family's three branches, illustrating how hereditary predispositions—such as the urge to kill or tendencies toward alcoholism—interact with the specific social and environmental conditions of the Second Empire. By centering the narrative on this genealogical analysis, Zola provides a structural conclusion to his "natural and social history" of the family.132