acquart. The novels revolve around the natural and social history of one family during the Second Empire. All of the novels display the minute details of the family members’ lives, while providing an experimental field for Zola to plow his theories of naturalism which included the social class ideology of Marx and the biological theories of Charles Darwin. In Germinal, we are privy to the bitter sufferings of the workers in the French mines, a situation which makes us sympathize with the dire need for social reforms. Among the workers, there is no hope, “Then the man recognized a pit. His despair returned. What was the good? There were be no work” (Zola 10). We can see the principle of naturalism at work here in that a man’s existence is determined by forces that are too large to oppose and often hostile and indifferent to his comfort.
Zola’s Germinal is a variation of the realism adopted by Flaubert, but it is even more painstaki
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