France’s Communists Hold Back the Far Right, For Now
The setting of Émile Zola’s 1885 novel, Germinal, is nothing if not bleak. In the northern French mining settlement where the book takes place, the roads were “black like mourning trim,” the village “dead . . . draped in its shroud.” “The wide streets, divided into small terraced gardens, remained deserted between four large uniform buildings,” Zola writes. It’s a kind of social realism that has long shaped the collective idea of what the old industrial north is like.
Visiting Méricourt, one of the many former mining villages that dot northern France, that image feels far from present reality.