The son of an Italian engineer, Zola was born in Paris and began his career as a journalist. As a novelist, he became the leading figure in French naturalism and embarked on a massive survey of late 19th century life in his Rougon-Macquart novels, so-called because of the names of the two families whose varying fortunes are at the heart of the sequence. Germinal, the thirteenth novel in the Rougon-Macquart series, is set in the coalfields of northern France and its central character is Etienne Lantier, a young worker forced to take a job in the pits. Radicalized by his experience of the suffering and exploitation of the miners, Etienne becomes a socialist and a fiery advocate of the workers' rights. When the miners are threatened with wage cuts he becomes one of the leaders of the strike called in protest. As the strike drags on, the workers become increasingly desperate and hungry and eventually rioting breaks out which is savagely repressed by the authorities. Etienne watches in despair as his fellow-miners are eventually forced to return to work but Souvarine, one of the more violent of the strikers, has plans to sabotage the mine. Germinal is unrelenting and uncompromising in revealing the hellish conditions in which the miners work and in depicting the ruthless suppression of their attempts to improve them. There are few better portraits in literature of the brutal realities of class conflict. However, Zola was a novelist not a social scientist, and his emphasis is as much on the individuals caught up in the strike (the idealistic, fierce-tempered Etienne, his friend, the ageing miner Maheu, Maheu's daughter Catherine) as it is on the abstract social forces that shape their lives. More than a century after the book was published its characters and their desperate struggles to survive can still touch and move readers profoundly.

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