Germinal

Étienne Lantier, an unemployed mechanic, arrives on a freezing night at a coal mine in northern France and takes work underground beside the Maheu family. He sees the hunger, the danger and the long hours of the miners and their children, and when the company cuts wages he leads a strike that grows desperate as the winter goes on.

Published in 1885 after Zola went down the mines himself to research it, Germinal is the most powerful novel of his Rougon-Macquart cycle. Its title comes from the spring month of the revolutionary calendar, the season of seeds, and at Zola's funeral in 1902 miners walked behind the coffin chanting it.

Émile Zola (1840–1902) grew up in Aix-en-Provence, where his best friend was the future painter Cézanne, and worked as a clerk for a Paris publisher before becoming a journalist and novelist. He planned and wrote a cycle of twenty novels following one family under the Second Empire, including Germinal and Nana.

In 1898 his open letter 'J'accuse...!' defended the wrongly convicted Captain Dreyfus and forced him into exile in England. He died in 1902, poisoned by fumes from a blocked chimney, and his remains were later moved to the Panthéon. Thérèse Raquin was his first success.