Germinal

In the coal country of northern France in the 1860s, a drifter takes work at a pit and is drawn into a doomed miners' strike, told across the pit head, the terraced coron and the slag heap of a whole company town.

Étienne Lantier

The road from Marchiennes

Part 1, ch. 1

The book begins on the open road out of Marchiennes, where the jobless Étienne Lantier tramps through a freezing night toward the glow of a coal pit. Marchiennes is the real northern town that fixes the fictional Montsou in a genuine landscape. His arrival on foot, cold and broke, is the door into the whole underground world of the mine.

Part 1, ch. 1

explicit The novel opens with Étienne walking through the night along the road from Marchiennes to the fictional Montsou. Marchiennes is a real town near Douai, named in the book; the pin marks it at the western edge of the coal district.

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