Germinal by Emile Zola is the thirteenth novel in Émile Zola’s twenty-volume series
Les Rougon-Macquart. Often considered Zola’s masterpiece and one of the most significant novels in the French tradition, the novel – an uncompromisingly harsh and realistic story of a coalminers’ strike in northern France in the 1860s – has been published and translated in over one hundred countries. It has also inspired five film adaptations and two television productions.
Germinal was written between April 1884 and January 1885. It was first serialized between November 1884 and February 1885 in the periodical
Gil Blas, then in March 1885 published as a book.
The novel’s central character is Étienne Lantier, previously seen in
L’Assommoir (1877), and originally to have been the central character in Zola’s ‘murder on the trains’ thriller
La Bête humaine (1890) before the overwhelmingly positive reaction to
Germinal persuaded him otherwise.
The young migrant worker arrives at the forbidding coal mining town of Montsou in the bleak area of the far north of France to earn a living as a miner. Sacked from his previous job on the railways for assaulting a superior, Étienne befriends the veteran miner Maheu, who finds him somewhere to stay and gets him a job pushing the carts down the pit.
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