page_title: Médan
section_title: Émile Zola’s House
hierarchical_section_title: Médan / History and Culture / Émile Zola’s House
caption_attribution_description: Maison d'Émile Zola à Médan - Yvelines (France).
context_page_description: Médan is a village in the Yvelines department, Île-de-France region, in the northwestern suburbs of Paris, France, about 25 km from the capital. Inhabitants of Médan are called Médanais.
context_section_description: Thanks to the success of L’Assommoir, French writer Émile Zola acquired a house in Médan in May 1878 that he referred to as a “rabbit hutch”.  Over three years, he transformed it into a manor house where he led a relaxed lifestyle, with his garden and farm. He designed the park of which he always dreamed.
  During the summer in Médan, Zola hosted Cézanne, his childhood friend, and other artists such as Édouard Manet and Camille Pissarro, and naturalist writers such as Alphonse Daudet, Guy de Maupassant and J.K. Huysmans. The writers combined their efforts in a literary collection entitled Les soirées de Médan (Médan Evenings) (1880) named after the amusing evenings they had spent in Zola’s home. Zola split his time between Médan and Paris, where he died on 28 September 1902.
  In 1905, Alexandrine Zola, his widow, donated the house to a newly created Zola Foundation. It served as a convalescent home for children and eventually a nursing school before being turned into a museum in 1985.  The property was taken in hand by the Association pour la Rayonnement de l’Oeuvre d’Émile Zola (Association for the Promulgation of the Works of Émile Zola) in 1998. The Association, led by financier Pierre Bergé and his partner, fashion designer Yves St. Laurent, spearheaded efforts to restore the house, develop the museum, and add a wing dedicated to Alfred Dreyfus. Some 10,000 people visited the house and garden annually in the 2000s.
  The Zola-Dreyfus Project construction led to closing the house to visits in 2011 for an anticipated four years. The project includes renovation of Émile Zola’s house and the creation of the Dreyfus Museum, which will be a place for exhibiting and teaching, for debates and reflection, for memory and vigilance.
caption: Émile Zola’s House
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