In 2017, far-right politician Marine Le Pen symbolically ended her ultimately unsuccessful presidential campaign in the small town of Ennemain. Nestled between the northern industrial cities of Amiens and Saint-Quentin and surrounded by crop fields, it’s the type of place Le Pen calls “forgotten France.”

Workers from a nearby foundry were present in the crowd that day with blue roses, the symbol of Le Pen’s campaign, tucked into the buttonholes of their work jackets. A local woman told the Guardian that Le Pen “understands our misery. She has come to the heart of real France, she knows our anger when shops and businesses close down, when people can’t find jobs. She is the only one who can save France.”

Not very far from Ennemain is the setting of Émile Zola’s famous 1884 novel Germinal, which depicted the harsh conditions faced by striking French coal miners. Zola was writing at a time of growing militancy among northern French industrial workers, and the novel predicted that they or their children would soon lead a socialist revolution. “Men were springing forth, a black avenging army, germinating slowly in the furrows, growing towards the harvests of the next century, and their germination would soon overturn the earth,” Zola wrote.