Abbé Mouret's Transgression (La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret) (1875) is the fifth novel in Émile Zola's twenty-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart. Viciously anticlerical in tone, it follows on from the horrific events at the end of La Conquête de Plassans, focussing this time on a remote Provençal backwater village. Unusually for Zola, the novel contains very few characters and locations, and the level of realist observation compared to outright fantasy is most uncharacteristic, however, the novel remains extraordinarily powerful and readable, and is considered one of Zola's most linguistically inventive and well-crafted works.