A brick had just broken the peak of his cap and blood was trickling down his forehead. What was to be done? For a moment the captain considered retreating into the buildings, but the very thought of showing his back to the mob made his pale face flush – and in any case it was no longer practicable, for if they made the slightest movement they would be lynched. Fortunately they landed too high and merely pitted the wall above. The little squad was nearly lost to sight under the hail of stones. Zola – whose sympathies throughout this novel are with the miners and their cause – shows that things are never as simple as they seem afterwards in the cold light of day: A small contingent of soldiers are guarding Belgian scabs in the pit and the strikers are attacking them with stones and bricks. In this Sensational Snippet, the strike has got out of control. The realism of this story of a miners’ strike in the 1860s in northern France is stunning. Germinal, (1885) by Emile Zola, is the thirteenth novel in his twenty-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart, but it’s the first that I have read by this great French writer.
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