L'Argent (Money) is the eighteenth novel in Émile Zola's Rougon-Macquart cycle and follows the financier Aristide Saccard as he claws his way back to power through the stock market of Second Empire Paris. Ruined and hungry for a second fortune, Saccard founds the Universal Bank, wrapping wild speculation in the language of grand ambition — colonial ventures in the Near East, the promise of civilization and profit — and ignites a frenzy of investment that sweeps up rich and poor alike.
As shares soar to dizzying heights, Zola dissects the machinery of finance with forensic detail: the trading floor of the Bourse, the manipulation of rumor, the intoxication of easy wealth, and the human wreckage left when the bubble inevitably bursts. Around Saccard move the idealistic Caroline Hamelin, her engineer brother Georges, and the coldly rational rival banker Gundermann, whose patience is the counterweight to Saccard's recklessness.
Written in 1891, L'Argent is a strikingly modern portrait of capitalism's booms and crashes, greed dressed as progress, and the moral cost of speculation — as relevant to any era of financial mania as to the Paris it depicts. (Readers should note the novel reflects the antisemitic attitudes of its time in its depiction of rival financiers.)