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The public’s image of Eugène Rouher, one of Napoleon III’s leading ministers, is still strongly influenced by its spontaneous identification with Zola’s hero Eugène Rougon. However, while certain aspects of his personality and character helped to shape the novelist’s character, he is far from being his only model, or even the main one. A careful analysis of the work and its comparison with historical reality leads us to conclude that Rougon is not so much, as has often been said, a composite of several imperial ministers, as the successive incarnation of each of them, so that, in most of Zola’s narrative, Rougon is nothing like Rouher.