# Quote — Emile Zola, Germinal

> It was the red vision of the revolution, which would one day inevitably carry them all away, on some bloody evening at the end of the century. Yes, some evening the people, unbridled at last, would thus gallop along the roads, making the blood of the middle class flow, parading severed heads and sprinkling gold from disembowelled coffers. The women would yell, the men would have those wolf-like jaws open to bite. Yes, the same rags, the same thunder of great sabots, the same terrible troop, with dirty skins and tainted breath, sweeping away the old world beneath an overflowing flood of barbarians.

- Author: [Emile Zola](https://www.leafyquotes.com/emile-zola.md)
- Book: [Germinal](https://www.leafyquotes.com/emile-zola/germinal.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/%C3%89mile_Zola#Germinal_(1885)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Topics: [politics](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/politics.md), [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/emile-zola/germinal/it-was-the

## More from this book

> Yes, that is your idea, all of you French workmen; you want to unearth a treasure in order to devour it alone afterwards in some lazy, selfish corner. You may cry out as much as you like against the rich, you haven't got courage enough to give back to the poor the money that luck brings you. You will never be worthy of happiness as long as you own anything, and your hatred of the bourgeois proceeds solely from an angry desire to be bourgeois yourselves in their place.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/emile-zola/germinal/yes-that-is-your.md)

> There were men so ambitious that they would wipe the masters' behinds to hear them say thank you.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/emile-zola/germinal/there-were-men.md)

> "Bread! is that enough, idiots!"

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/emile-zola/germinal/bread-is-that.md)