Germinal is set during a tumultuous time in French history when the country was in the throes of short-lived regimes and a series of revolutions. It is also during the height of the Industrial Revolution, which began in France later than it did in neighboring Great Britain—largely because of France’s sparsely populated cities and relatively slow urbanization. Despite multiple revolutions and unstable governments, industrialization picked up quickly by the middle of the nineteenth century, as did the popularity of Marxist doctrine.
Though by no means a Marxist, Zola’s plot focus on class struggle is largely Marxist in nature: there is a class struggle vis-a-vis a historical dialectic...
