Status Updates From Germinal (Les Rougon-Macqua...

"They beheld before them, as their eyes grew dim with fatigue, the ideal city of their dreams, a city now close at hand and almost real, where the golden age had come to pass, where all men were brothers, living and working in the common cause. Nothing could shake their absolute conviction that now at last they were entering its gates."

"How could anyone say that the workers had had their fair share of the extraordinary increase in wealth and living standards that had taken place over the previous hundred years? People had simply told them that they were free and then washed their hands of them. Free? Yes, free to die of starvation."