This project is built upon the association of three member institutions: the Université de la Sorbonne nouvelle-Paris 3, the Institut des Textes et Manuscrits modernes (CNRS), and the Département des Manuscrits de la Bibliothèque nationale de France. Its primary objective is to present and to reinterpret the archival material relating to the works of Emile Zola that are available at the present time. This will involve undertaking a genetic reading of these archives, which will provide answers to the essential problems raised by their classification and new perspectives on the author of the Rougon-Macquart series and of “J’accuse”. Three categories of archives will be subjected to scrutiny: a printed archive (the writer’s works and critical commentaries on them); a manuscript archive (the manuscripts and preparatory dossiers of the novels, from the BnF collections); and an iconographic archive (the iconography relating to the novels and to the Dreyfus Affair). This collective research programme, conducted in collaboration with the BnF, will bring together researchers of the “équipe Zola” working at the ITEM and at the Université de Paris 3. During the course of the four years in question, the evolving research activities will be supported by the organisation of a seminar and of three study days. At the end of the process, there will be a colloquium, which will make it possible to take stock of the achievements made. All of these activities will result in publications. From an academic perspective, this project seeks to apply the theories and methods of genetic criticism to the full range of the Zola archives: on the basis of the manuscript archive, it will aim to elaborate a “genetics of the series”, capable of analysing the internal dynamics of the preparatory dossiers of the Rougon-Macquart; furthermore, in a parallel procedure, by means of a thorough analysis of the printed and iconographic archives in all their diversity, it will seek to arrive at a “genetics of reception”, whose aim will be to link up the problematics of both genetic and reception studies. There will be particular emphasis on an approach to Zola’s works which would not be purely philological, but which would open up a “cultural genetics”, exploring, within the content of the preparatory dossiers, the traces of the presuppositions of a collective discourse, the associative and derivative links between this discourse and the initial soliloquy of the writer. Similarly, in the area of reception, the research will involve bringing to the fore, within its historical evolution, the full range and diversity of the relevant literary criticism to reveal how this criticism had an impact on Zola’s writing practices, thereby leading the novelist to rethink the bases of his aesthetic. These scientific hypotheses will be validated in three ways : by developing and ordering the various relevant corpuses of archives; by producing critical editions which will favour a better appreciation and understanding of the texts subjected to theoretical scrutiny; and , lastly, in the final stage of the project, by the construction of an internet site which will bring together in electronic form the full range of the archives that will have been classified and the editions that will have been produced. A pedagogical feature will complete the undertaking in order to open up this wealth of scientific data to the broadest possible audience.