The setting of Émile Zola’s 1885 novel, Germinal, is nothing if not bleak. In the northern French mining settlement where the book takes place, the roads were “black like mourning trim,” the village “dead . . . draped in its shroud.” “The wide streets, divided into small terraced gardens, remained deserted between four large uniform buildings,” Zola writes. It’s a kind of social realism that has long shaped the collective idea of what the old industrial north is like.

Visiting Méricourt, one of the many former mining villages that dot northern France, that image feels far from present reality. The corots — uniform brick buildings built by the companies to house workers — remain. So, too, does the terril — a mound of dirt resembling a small hill that forms through the excavation of dirt to clear way for the mining tunnels. But otherwise the town had been utterly transformed. Construction workers spilled out of a fry shop, and the municipal parking lot in front of the town hall was filled with cars. By 1 p.m., every table at the Le Petit Bossu bistrot, recently bought by the city government and rented out to two young locals, had been occupied.

Standing in front of the former train depot, where locomotives once transported raw materials out of the region, Florent Le Demazel pointed to a series of triangular buildings in the distance. “We’re on a former mining site — pit 4-5 South — and it’s been turned into an eco-neighborhood,” Le Demazel, Mericourt’s director of cultural affairs, explained. The main depot had been converted into a library and cultural center where the night before a theater troupe had put on a performance to a sold-out crowd of over a hundred people.