Written Assignment #2: Essay on Germinal: Zola's treatment of the family's economy and daily life in the expanding industrial society.

In 1907, two miles south of Centralia, Illinois was the Centralia Mine No. 5. The Mine was there to provide coal during World War II. This particular mine employed 250 men and produced 2,000 tons of coal each day. During the next several years there were several complaints made regarding the safety of the mine. On March 25, 1947, the mine exploded, killing 111 miners. (Stillman, 2010)

In addition to long working hours, miners paid for the supplies including open head flame lights and detonators. The miners were more or less like craftsmen using their tools and self-acquired skills to produce the maximum output. Consequently, the explosives led to numerous accidents leaving the miners injured badly and dead in many instances. Numerous workers (about 60 each year) were killed as a result of these explosions. The families of the deceased were rarely compensated. Occupational hazards, deterioration in health overtime, inadequate pay in the form of “strips” resulted in conflicts between the labor and the management.

The miners were forced to live in company-owned shacks and had to trade in company stores at excessive prices. Almost every miner was in debt to the company for rent and food which came out of his wages.

The working conditions in factories were so bad during this time that it often led to sickness, injuries and death. People who worked in mines had to face many dangerous disadvantages every day. The working conditions in mines were very unsafe,

In this essay I plan to analyze the claim by Karl Marx that the bourgeoisie class produces its own "gravediggers". I will first present a definition of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat classes along with what Marx means by his claim. After discussing Marx's claim and his support I will assert that his claim is false and was based on a false assumption. I will argue that Marx does not allow the possibility of an adaptation on behalf of the bourgeoisie. Furthermore, that Marx contradicts his claim with his own ideologies from his critique of capitalism. Finally, Marx adopts historical determinism to support his view which has proven to be flawed. The claim that the bourgeoisie produces its own gravediggers is based on circumstantial

Not only were the workers not treated well, the building was also very unsanitary and unsafe. They worked on top of each other in cramped spaces where there were just lines and lines of sewing machines. The exit doors were locked in order to stop the workers from leaving to go to the bathroom. Only the foreman had the keys to unlock the doors.There were four elevators that had access to the factory floors but only one of them were in working condition. In order to get to the working elevator, the workers had to go down a long narrow hallway. This elevator was only able to hold 12 people at a time. Factory floors had no sprinkler system and the entire building only had one fire escape that was not big enough for all of the people in

With the amount of steel being produced, people were being exposed to very poor work conditions. The workers would not have any protective gear, only around two layer of long johns. A worker once said that a chain could break, a ladle could fall over and the iron could explode. Iron slag could fall on you and boil your insides. People would work 12 hour shifts, with no breaks and little rest. The boss-man once said that efficiency for the steel plant was their main priority, rather than safety.

The Industrial Revolution is the name given to the movement in which machines changed people's way of life as well as their methods of manufacturer. It brought three important changes: inventions of machines that simplify and speed up the work of hand tools, use of steam (and other power) versus human power, adoption of a factory system. Workers were brought together under one roof and were supplied machines. The Industrial Revolution began throughout the world relatively during the same time period, and although it had its beginning in remote times, it is still continuing in some places.

In the modern Paris, society is divided into different classes of people, different jobs, and different features of modern life. The Belly of Paris, written by, Émile Zola is about a man named Florent who was wrongly put in prison from Louis-Napoleon’s coup-d’etat. He escapes from prison and returns from the countryside to find an unrecognizable Paris. The Belly of Paris describes the class differences in the 1870s - there is the bourgeoisie, which is defined as the middle class, typically with reference to its perceived materialistic values or conventional attitudes; the capitalist class who own most of society's wealth and means of production contrasted with the lower working class. By portraying and describing characters as the food

In his book “Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free,” Hector Tobar recounts the story of 33 miners who spent 69 days trapped more than 2000 feet underground in the Chile’s San Jose mines following the collapse of the mine in 2010. According to Tobar (2015), the disaster began on a day shift around noon when miners working deep inside the mountain excavating minerals started feeling vibrations. A sudden massive explosion then followed and the passageways of the mines filled with dust clouds. Upon settling of the dust, the men discovered that the source of the explosion was a single stone that had broken off from the rest of the mountain and caused a chain reaction leading to

Throughout Cultural Perspectives, many influential texts have been read, analyzed, and discussed. One text, Life in the Iron Mills by Rebecca Harding Davis, integrates the thoughts of quite a few authors that have been discussed this semester. Through employing a Marxist view of history—there are always the “haves” and the “have-nots”—one can see that Life in the Iron Mills exemplifies the struggles that face many “have-not” citizens throughout history. One can then see the clear connections to various authors such as Mary Wollstonecraft, W.E.B. DuBois, Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels, and Adam Smith.

Throughout the nineteenth century, the role of women began to change. Slowly the role of women went from strict domestic work, to having their own say in their own reform groups. After the American Revolution, women began to have a say in what went on during their everyday lives or the lives of their children and husbands. A woman having her own say was something new for men to have to deal with, but they were willing to listen. Women do not get the right to vote nationally until the 1920s, but the start of their suffrage and political movement begins in the nineteenth century with the changing times of the Industrial Revolution and life after the American Revolution.

In the 19th century, there were two artists who were famous for their paintings of working class, Jean-François Millet and Gustave Millet. In Millet’s painting The Gleaners, he painted three women bending over to reach out for left-over grains, which showed the combination of women and subservience to create a sense of collective harmony. The action of gleaning, when the wealthier owners have harvested their corps and the poor are entitles to pick up whatever is left over, is a biblical reference-comes from old testament. Although those women were the lowest-class individuals of the society, even in the working class, they were put in the right settings and gestures which suites their working-class identities. Viewers can forget about individual painfulness in favor of collective harmony by showing the dignity of multiple gleaners moving rhythmically together. The Gleaners received tremendous popularity of this painting the 19th century. He painted about the working class to show his sympathy and sentimental approach towards working class, and also to support his opinion of anti-bourgeois. He allowed viewers to take multiple position in relation to his work, wither in natural empathic reaction of sympathy for poverty versus monumental dignity of organized motion, or in dilemma between polite taste and radical opinions. According to the reading The Absolute Bourgeois by T.J. Clark, the author quoted from Rochery, who compare Millet with Courbet to show Millet’s true love of country: “M.Millet’s picture is certainly painted from life, like M. Courbet’s, but one can sense greater spontaneity and depth in the painter’s impressions, a truer love of country life and country people. ” In Courbet’s painting The Stonebreaker, he painted two stonebreakers, who were engaging in the most brutal and

Zola’s novel is set in a Paris that is defined by oppositional economic classes that struggle to gain prosperity and security in the Belly of Paris. The opposing socioeconomic camps in The Belly of Paris distinctly resemble those illustrated by Karl Marx. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx describes a society that splits itself “into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat (Marx & Engels, 220).” Moreover, Marx argues that the capitalist class, or the Bourgeoisie, has “conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway (Marx & Engels, 221).” In Zola’s naturalist observation of nineteenth century France, the reader imagines a distinct struggle between these two classes.

It is fairly apparent that a number of political overtones dominate Emile Zola's novel Germinal, which is the 13th book of nonfiction within the writer's Les Rougon-Macquart, a 20-volume series of novels. The author published this work of literature in 1885, less than 50 years after Marx and Engels unveiled the Communist Manifesto which was still plenty of time for a number of the ideologies propagated in this manuscript to take hold of popular culture and political theorists alike. In fact, one could successfully make a claim that the central theme of Germinal actually revolves around the conceptions of class antagonism that is an inherent part of an exploitative, bourgeois society such as that depicted in the French coal mining town in 1860, the setting for Germinal. A thorough analysis of this literary work illustrates that there are several instances of class antagonism, which are central to the plot of this book and provide its primary theme.