A retelling of Émile Zola · 1885
Germinal
“A jobless mechanic walks into a northern French coalfield in the dead of winter, goes down the Voreux pit beside the Maheu family, and becomes the leader of a strike that hunger, troops and the mine itself will try to crush.”
Germinal is the thirteenth novel in Zola's Rougon-Macquart cycle, the "natural and social history of a family under the Second Empire." Étienne Lantier is the son of Gervaise, heroine of L'Assommoir. The story is set in the coalfield of northern France in 1866–67. Its title is the name of the spring month of the French Revolutionary calendar, the month of seeds breaking through the soil.