Despite this, Zola's novel is no dry treatise on revolutionary or socialist theory. Zola was in Paris during the suppression of the Paris Commune his sympathies were republican and the miners' strikes of 1869 (in La Ricamarie and Aubin) and 1884 (in Aubin) inspired him to focus Germinal on revolutionary action. Much later, mindful of its revolutionary heritage, the Paris Commune of 1871 reverted to the revolutionary calendar for 18 days, and found itself in Germinal, Year LXXIX.

From the beginning, Germinal was a dramatic month: two revolutionary factions (the Hébertists and Dantonists) were guillotined in Germinal, Year II starving Parisians stormed the National Convention in Germinal, Year III. Fabre, together with André Thouin, chief botanist at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, drew their inspiration for the new calendar from the natural world. Every page of the old calendar was soiled by the prejudices and falsehoods of the throne and the church,' the former actor and dramatist Fabre d'Eglantine explained to the National Convention as the terror swept over France in 1793. 'We could not go on reckoning the years during which we were oppressed by kings as part of our lifetime. Germen is the Latin for sprout or bud, and Germinal was the seventh month (late March to late April) in the revolutionary calendar that France adopted from 1793 to 1805. The finished work appeared that spring in a single volume and was sensationally received. After extensive research and a trip down the working mine at Denain in Valenciennes, Zola wrote Germinal in 10 frenzied months from 2 April 1884 to 23 January 1885. Germinal broke free from the series as a timeless cry of protest against oppression and the misery of the poor who never inherit the Earth. Each of the novels is discrete, but there are blood-ties between the protagonists, and Zola intended them, laid side by side, to provide a panoramic view of life under Napoleon III.

It was the 13th novel in Zola's 20-volume Rougon-Macquart series, which he subtitled: 'A Natural and Social History of a Family under the Second Empire'. Psychologically, socially and politically, Germinal was a trailblazing fiction, set in the 1860s in a mining community in northern France. E mile Zola's monumental Germinal was published in 1885: the year Freud arrived in Paris to study hysteria, and the year the miner's son, DH Lawrence, was born.

Germinal by Émile Zola