Maheu’s teenaged daughter Catherine helps him navigate the roadways and shares her meager lunch with him. Étienne receives a job on a team led by Bonnemort’s son Maheu and is appalled by the working conditions in the mine. He comes across the coal pit Le Voreux and meets Bonnemort, a driver who has worked there for 50 years, following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather. The region is amid an industrial crisis that has closed factories and slowed production, leading to the loss of jobs and prevalent hunger. Étienne Lantier, a young mechanic recently fired from his railway job after hitting his boss, walks along the highway one night in his quest for work.
By offering examples of greed and selflessness, bravery and ambition, the cost of love and of justice, and the tragedy of human suffering, the novel creates a picture of the indomitable human spirit. Throughout Germinal, Zola uses the metaphor of spring and growth to represent the increasing awareness of the people. Although some contemporary critics criticized the novel for what they saw as an unflattering depiction of the poor, Zola argued that he sought to demonstrate how generations of subordination dehumanizes workers. Étienne is a young coal miner leading his “comrades” in a strike against the oppressive “Company,” whose shareholders’ luxurious lifestyle is made possible by the backbreaking work of the poor. The novel takes place in a fictional town in northern France-Montsou, meaning “many sous,” a form of French currency-and follows the journey of Étienne Lantier. Written in the naturalist tradition, the book studies how people are the product of both inner forces and their environments.
Considered one of Zola’s best novels, Germinal takes its name from a spring month in the French Republican Calendar.
The novel is the 13th of 20 in Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart series, which focuses on the influence of heredity in two branches of a family during the Second French Empire. Germinal, written by French author Émile Zola, was originally published as a serial novel from November 1884 until February 1885.
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