The lengthy series of realist novels, Les Rougon-Macquart (1871–93), published by the popular writer Émile Zola (1840–1902), charted the influence of hereditary weakness on a bourgeois family. Moral hypocrisy forms the core of Professor Unrat (1905) by Thomas Mann’s elder brother Heinrich (1871–1950), which satirizes the double standards of the outwardly respectable German professoriate. The middle classes, in all their variety, were still socially and in many ways also politically dominant at the beginning of the century, but increasingly they had to share their power with competitors lower
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Other novels about the bourgeois at the end of the 19th century.
