Essay on Germinal: Zola's treatment of the family's economy and daily life in the expanding industrial society.

Nothing has so clearly defined the modern world and produced such a revolutionary break with the past as the Industrial Revolution. Beginning in Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century, it spread throughout Europe and North America during the nineteenth century and has had an impact on the whole world in the twentieth. Ideology in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries revolved around interpretations of the social effects of the Industrial Revolution. Socialist …

…lives of 19th century French coal miners. Forced to endure hellish conditions, risk death and dismemberment, and work from before dawn until after dusk, these men and women had only one alternative to mining: starvation. Germinal is not a happy novel, but it is impossible not to sense the realism that pervades the piece. This work is an example of Zola's technique of "naturalism" attempted through scrupulous research to depict the lives of ordinary people.