When Zola died in 1902, crowds of workers hailed his funeral cortège with cries of « Germinal », the best-selling novel which is probably his most famous work. This was based on the meticulous research conducted in 1884 when, formally dressed in frock coat, high collar and top hat, pen and notebook in hand, he descended into a coalmine belonging to the Anzin company in the Pas-de-Calais region of France, in order to assess the working conditions which led to a prolonged and unsuccessful strike.

A journalist before achieving sufficient success to support himself as an author, Zola had known great poverty as a child, after his father’s premature death, and as an unemployed young man who had twice failed his baccalauréat. Perhaps the experience of inequality triggered his strong social conscience. This was combined with a firm conviction that people’s lives are determined by a mixture of heredity and their environment. We see this in the principal character in Germinal, Étienne, the idealistic but naive newcomer who is carried away by his inherited impulsive, addictive personality to become the leader of a doomed strike. While conveying vividly the hardship and injustice suffered by the mining families, Zola continually shows how they have been brutalised by this: casually promiscuous, quick to take advantage of each other and capable of cruel acts of vengeance.

The novel opens with a dramatic description of the mine at night as first seen by Étienne. Zola portrays it as a kind of monster, literally swallowing up the miners as they descend for their shift. The descriptions of the working conditions are truly appalling : long, dangerous trudges and climbs deep underground to the coal seams, drenched with water as they hew the coal, risk of fire damp explosions, unfair pay cuts when they fail to meet impossible targets to both install the pit props to protect themselves and bring enough truckloads of coal to the pithead. The food is so scanty and poor, the exhaustion so intense, the patronising support available so inadequate and unreliable, hardships and misfortunes for some pile up to such a weight that one wonders how the mining community can survive at all. The comparisons with the pampered lives of the families of the mines shareholders and senior staff are shocking.

There is a powerful metaphor in the huge percheron, the draught horse brought down as a foal to drag containers filled with coal along tunnels to the pithead, which becomes blind through lack of light, can only dream of the sunlight, and eventually dies underground, to be buried there.

Events often seem exaggerated or far-fetched, and many characters, particularly the wealthy, highly stereotyped. The frequent detailed descriptions filled with technical terms for the mining operations are hard to follow, especially in the original French if not one’s first language. So reading all five hundred and forty odd pages of it (or even more in some editions) requires a marathon effort. One can grow inured to so much intense suffering, and the touches of ironic humour cannot compensate for this.

Produced originally in instalments for a magazine over a period of about four months, now the novel seems too long, at times repetitive, and in need of a firm edit, reflecting the lack of alternative media at the time to distract people from reading it. Yet, it is the kind of classic novel which lingers in the mind, provoking thought. If possible, it is best to read the novel in its original langage to experience the full impact.

The novel ends on the optimistic note, that the miners, forced back to work but their spirits unbroken, will, like seeds, produce future generations who are able to rise up and claim their rights – a belief , yet to be realised, which has inspired the causes of socialism and reform. Hence the title, for Germinal was the seventh month of the French Revolution’s revised calendar, intended to evoke the idea of seeds of equality growing in fertile ground.