Emile Zola is said to the first ever investigative journalist and a great realist writer. It could be argued that realism was started by Charles Dickens. Again realism is where journalism becomes an art,; it is highly realistic writing that paints a picture like a photograph, but before photographs were invented.
Germinal is a women driven narrative and describes the social inequality that miner's used to suffer through portraying experiences through realism, for example the mining disasters where miners were crushed under land. Germinal takes its name from this, the miners are crushed into the ground like seeds then they germinate in a new world.
Zola has been described a the greatest realistic writer ever and in Germinal there is a very long description of one of the miners trying to climb out of a mine but the only way out is climbing up an iron razor blade ladder. This descriptive sections spans pages and creates a fantastic sense of atmosphere. In other work by Zola, Therese Raquin has a part when an autopsy is described for about four pages, it is extremely detailed and this type of realism could be compared to a fly on the TV show.
Germinal explores the politics of anarchism and this links to Nietzche who said that violence is always good. Social inequalities as described in Germinal aren't allowed to happen now but as has been seen in the past when there is a social inequality is almost always results in violence. For example the French revolution, there was a social uprising and the poor people beheaded members of the French aristocracy in 1789.
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