"Germinal" By Emile Zola

During the Industrial Revolution, it’s safe to say that times were extremely hard for most people in the working class. Everything from wages to job openings were hindering in the eyes of the masses. Germinal by Émile Zola does a tremendous job at providing an inside look at some of the struggle caused by the Industrial Revolution in France. Economists at the time heavily feared that rent would be a huge issue. With the population consistently rising, it was a common scare that food prices would shoot through the roof.

The industrial revolution brought wealth and success to those who pioneered the movement, but it essentially brought despair, poverty, and desperate living conditions for the people who were a part of the work force during this time period.

Urbanization was a huge factor of the industrial revolution. People were flooding cities everywhere! Farming conditions, population growth, and increased demand for workers were among some of the main reasons for such sudden urbanization.

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Cities would start from factories being built in small towns. According to the production rates, demand for workers, and other related factors, factories were essentially the building blocks of the major cities we see today. The wealthy people who benefitted from the industrial revolution were quite content, living in nice neighborhoods and balancing a steady income; meanwhile, the workers of the time were forced to try their hand at surviving in slums and tenements. Tenements were usually tall buildings with small, crowded apartments.

These apartments had no running water, no sewage system, and garbage rotted in the rooms or in the streets.

Diseases that were going around during the time thrived in places like these, with many of the residents either dying or becoming deathly ill due to unsanitary circumstances. Industrial life in rural villages was somewhat of a different scene from the urban places. First, the working hours were incredibly long, ranging anywhere between 12-16 hours. The machines also had no safety devices or settings. This caused many uncareful workers to lose fingers, hands, limbs, or their lives. Most of the time, workers would get fired immediately for being ill or injured. Another unsafe condition in rural working areas was that coal dust was always polluting the lungs of the workers. Imagine working 16 hours in a building and breathing in nothing but coal dust. This is what these workers had to do every day just to stay alive, which wasn’t even promised as it was.

Bosses preferred hiring women over men for a number of reasons. Most importantly, they could pay women significantly less than men and receive no backlash for it. This was a part of the times back then, so it was normal for women to receive less pay than men, even when those same women would have to return home after 12 hours just to clean, cook, and care for their family at home. Child labor was a huge part of this time period as well. Employers would hire fast moving and quick-fingered children for the textile mills in order to get the job done more efficiently. The children that weren’t cut out for this job would usually find themselves in small, dark mine shafts pushing coal carts. In France, industrialization moved particularly slow. Factories in France put loads of pressure on the prices of the goods they produced, driving down wages. Because of all the income made up by food, wages decreased more, sometimes pushing workers to starvation.