French · Advanced
Read Germinal in Frenchwith every sentence explained
Émile Zola · 1885
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About the book
Germinal by Émile Zola was first published in 1885. In Passage you read the full text in the original French, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction. It runs to about 164,500 words.
Underground, the miners starve. Above ground, the anger is rising.
On a freezing March night, Étienne Lantier, a young mechanic who has lost his job, walks into the mining country of northern France. At the Le Voreux pit in Montsou he is hired on the spot and goes down into the dark with the Maheu family, who take him in as a lodger.
Down in the narrow seams, men, women and children work for wages that barely buy bread. Étienne falls for Catherine, the Maheus' daughter, and starts reading about socialism and justice. When the company cuts pay once again, the talk in the cottages turns to something dangerous: a strike.
Germinal is Émile Zola's most powerful novel, a story of hunger, solidarity and hope that still feels urgent. It was famously filmed in 1993 with Gérard Depardieu.
- Author
- Émile Zola
- First published
- 1885
- Language
- French
- Level
- Advanced
- Genre
- Historical Fiction
- Length
- About 164,500 words
How it opens
Dans la plaine rase, sous la nuit sans étoiles, d'une obscurité et d'une épaisseur d'encre, un homme suivait seul la grande route de Marchiennes à Montsou, dix kilomètres de pavé coupant tout droit, à travers les champs de betteraves. Devant lui, il ne voyait même pas le sol noir, et il n'avait la sensation de l'immense horizon plat que par les souffles du vent de mars, des rafales larges comme sur une mer, glacées d'avoir balayé des lieues de marais et de terres nues. Aucune ombre d'arbre ne tachait le ciel, le pavé se déroulait avec la rectitude d'une jetée, au milieu de l'embrun aveuglant des ténèbres.
Reading Germinal in Passage
Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in French. Read at your own pace, and when a sentence stops you, tap it. You get:
- a natural translation of that exact sentence,
- a short note on the grammar, in plain words,
- the key words, which you can save with the sentence they came from,
- all of it in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Turkish or Portuguese, whichever you read best.
It's marked advanced, with richer vocabulary and longer sentences. If it feels heavy, start with an intermediate French book and come back to it. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.
