Émile Zola’s Germinal illustrates the harsh lives of coalminers in northern France in the 1860s with her idealist and industrious protagonist Étienne Lantier as he arrives in Montsou to find work in the harsh condition of the mines. Étienne while involved in a complicated lover’s triangle finds himself at the apex of a miner’s strike that ends in violent rioting in reaction to ever worsening plight of the workers.
Emile Zola is one of the most important nineteenth-century French novelists, along with Stendhal, Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, and Gustave Flaubert. Les Rougon-Macquart (1871-1893; translate...
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The French novelist Émile Zola (1840-1902) was the foremost proponent of the doctrine of naturalism in literature. He illustrated this doctrine chiefly in a series of 20 novels published betwee...
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Emile (Edouard Charles Antoine) Zola
Émile Zola