by Emile Zola
Fortuitously the Second Empire ended – with the Franco-Prussian War and the disastrous defeat at Sedan on 1 September 1870 – just as Zola was writing the first of these ten novels, so that his new saga at once became the record of a fallen dynasty and a vanished world. At the same time his enthusiasm for the project grew, with the result that within a year or so he was already conceiving of a further seven novels for the series. Perhaps because of his experience of the Commune when republican elements took control of the city of Paris between March and May 1871, he now intended that one of these extra novels should focus on the domain of left-wing politics. In his earlier plan he had envisaged that his novel on the working class – which became L’Assommoir – would depict the appalling conditions in which the new urban proletariat was forced to live and work and how the demands and pressures of such an existence rendered it a prey to the alcohol which was so cheaply available and so injurious to health, resolve and marital harmony. Now he wanted to write another novel about working-class life, which would chart the contemporary manifestations of the revolutionary currents that – in France at least – had sprung to view in 1789, 1830, 1848 and 1871. Germinal would be that novel, the people’s novel.
When L’Assommoir was published in 1877 (as the seventh novel in the series), it earned Zola large royalties and vociferous reviews. Those on the political Right charged him once again with being tasteless and immoral, while – more importantly for someone of his own moderate left-of-centre views – those on the Left condemned him for depicting the working class in such a negative light. Where Zola had thought he was indicting the system by showing how low human beings can be brought by background and circumstance – and often, as in Gervaise’s case, despite their very best efforts – his socialist detractors saw a degrading portrait which would only reinforce bourgeois prejudice. They were unwilling to acknowledge that in so powerfully eliciting the reader’s sympathy for Gervaise as the honourable victim of insuperable and malign forces Zola might have been hoping to make that reader a partisan of social and political reform.
By way of defending the honourableness of his intentions Zola let it be known that he was planning another novel about the working class, and one which would focus on its political aspirations and on the economic and social conditions in which its members lived. But which area of work should he choose? While on holiday at Bénodet in Brittany in 1883, Zola met Alfred Giard (1846–1908), the left-wing député for Valenciennes and a biologist with a particular research interest in the reproductive organs. Since his constituency in northern France was one of the centres of the French coal-mining industry, Giard no doubt saw a golden opportunity to secure the services of a brilliant publicist for the miners’ cause; while Zola, no doubt keen to re-establish his radicalist credentials, could also see the artistic and polemical merits of taking a miners’ strike as his subject. Accordingly, and characteristically, he began to document himself thoroughly, reading book after book about the mining industry, about the topography and geology of the area around Valenciennes and about radical politics: about the history of socialism and about the International Working Men’s Association founded in 1864, better known as the First International. He familiarized himself with the full range of radical political theory: the libertarian socialism of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–65), who had famously declared in 1840 that property is theft (if it means the ability of one man to exploit the labour of another but not if it means the individual’s right to possess his own ‘means of production’, be it land or a workshop full of tools); the ‘Communism’ or ‘centralized socialism’ of Karl Marx (1818–83), who had published his Manifesto of the Communist Party in 1848 and whose Das Kapital (1867) had begun to appear in French translation in 1875; the ideas of Auguste Blanqui (1805–81), the revolutionary socialist and insurrectionary who had been prominently involved in the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 and was elected President of the Commune (1870–71) while in prison, where indeed he spent long periods; and finally the anarchism, or ‘nihilism’, of the Russian revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin (1814–76), author of Statehood and Anarchy (1873).
More particularly, Zola read how Marx had been elected one of the thirty-two members of the First International’s provisional General Council and then assumed its leadership; how the representatives of the national federations would meet at a congress every year in a different city; and how at The Hague in 1872 the clash between supporters of Marx’s socialism and Bakunin’s anarchism led to an irrevocable split in the movement. In order to prevent the Bakunists from gaining control of the Association, the General Council, at Marx’s behest, moved its headquarters to New York before finally disbanding at a conference in Philadelphia in 1876. The Bakunists nevertheless took over the de facto leadership of the International and held their own congresses from 1873 to 1877. At the Socialist World Congress in Ghent in 1877 the Social Democrats broke away because their motion to restore the unity of the First International was rejected by the anarchist majority. But the International now began to wither, and after the Anarchist Congress in London in 1881, it ceased to represent an organized movement. Only later, four years after the publication of Germinal in 1885, was the Second International, the so-called Socialist International, founded at a congress in Paris. This Second International supported parliamentary democracy and finally, at its congress in London in 1896, expelled the anarchists (who opposed it) from its ranks, reaffirming the Marxist doctrine of the class struggle and the unstoppable advent of proletarian rule. Germinal was thus set at a time when the International was in its infancy and yet published after its (temporary) demise, and it must therefore have left its first readers with an overwhelming sense of both the ephemerality and the inevitable recurrence (1789, 1830, 1848, 1870–1…) of revolutionary fervour.
But by way of preparing to write Germinal Zola did not just read books. At first posing as Giard’s secretary (but then, when his cover was blown, being shown round by Giard’s brother Jules), he visited the small mining town of Anzin, near Valenciennes, on 23 February 1884. A strike had begun there four days earlier, and he remained for approximately a week, taking copious notes on what he saw and heard – a document which remains a powerful and accurate account of the realities of colliery life at that time. Zola was aware that there had been a major strike at Anzin in 1866 (as well as several since), and because Les Rougon-Macquart was set during the Second Empire, he chose this as the focus for his imaginative reconstruction of the past. Hence the chronology of Germinal, which begins in March 1866 – a date which is not given in the novel itself but which can be inferred from the reference in the opening chapter to the Emperor waging war in Mexico. But Zola drew on other strikes for his novel, notably on the strike at La Ricamarie in the mining area of Saint-Étienne, where on 16 June 1869 troops fired on the striking workers. Thirteen miners were killed, including two women, and sixty were given a prison sentence. Similarly at Aubin, in the Aveyron, fourteen striking miners were shot dead on 7 October 1869, and twenty were wounded. Working conditions in the mines had changed little in the intervening years, and so Zola could use what he saw at Anzin in 1884 for the fictional recreation of events in 1866–7. But the political situation had evolved considerably. A law passed on 19 May 1874 had made it illegal to employ women to work underground or children under twelve to work anywhere in a mine; and on 21 March 1884 a bill sponsored by René Waldeck-Rousseau (1846–1904) was passed, legalizing trade unions. The next day saw the beginning of what would have been the revolutionary month of Germinal. Twelve days later, on his very own ‘12 Germinal’ – and indeed on the day of his forty-fourth birthday – Zola began to write the first chapter of his novel.
As he wrote in a letter to Georges Montorgueil on 8 March 1885,
Perhaps this time they’ll stop seeing me as someone who insults the people. Is not the true socialist he who describes their poverty and wretchedness and the ways in which they are remorselessly dragged down, who shows the prison-house of hunger in all its horror? Th
ose who extol the blessedness of the people are mere elegists who should be consigned to history along with the humanitarian claptrap of 1848. If the people are so perfect and divine, why try and improve their lot? No, the people are downtrodden, in ignorance and the mire, and it is from that ignorance and that mire that we should endeavour to raise them.2
People and Politics
Germinal is a novel about people and about the people: about particular human beings and about humanity at large. As the account of a miners’ strike it is the story of the 10,000 workers employed by the Mining Company based in the fictional location of Montsou, a town evocatively named as the place where the sous pile up in a mountain of riches for the enjoyment of everyone but the men, women and children who actually produce the coal. And it is the terrible fate of this workforce which is here traced in such well-documented and painful detail. But by extension, and as Zola wrote when he first began to draft the novel, it is the story of ‘the struggle between capital and labour’. Within the context of the 1860s Germinal records (with a small measure of historical licence) how a recession in the United States has led to empty order-books in the French coal-mining industry, where companies which have overinvested in new plant and machinery must now economize by cutting back production and reducing their workers’ pay. Bust threatens to follow boom, and it’s the poor what gets the blame – for drinking, for promiscuity, for having more babies than they need. Meanwhile shareholders feast and demand their dividend, and the nation’s ruler Napoleon III engages in quixotic warfaring in Mexico at great expense to his country’s economy. For Zola this ‘struggle between capital and labour’ would be the ‘most important issue of the twentieth century’, and Germinal was intended as a foretaste of what lay in store. But it was also a picture of what was actually happening: thanks to the wonders of the economic cycle the slump of the 1860s was happening again in the 1880s. And the miners were still striking.
While the novel thus anticipates the politics of the global economy and the global village, its narrative focus is nevertheless much more precise: namely, the inhabitants of Village Two Hundred and Forty, a purpose-built pit-village of no name and no character, serried rows of cheap housing perched on a windy plateau and overlooking a featureless plain where it always seems to rain. At Number 16 in Block 2 lives the Maheu family, who have worked in the mine since its creation exactly 106 years earlier. Grandpa Maheu, known as Bonnemort (literally ‘good death’) because death has spared him so often, is the grandson of Guillaume Maheu, who (he likes to believe) discovered the first coal near Montsou and so led to the first mine being sunk there. And his son and grandsons are now working down the mine at Le Voreux, that ‘voracious’ pit which seems to gobble up the workers’ flesh like some ancient god demanding human sacrifice. His son Toussaint Maheu and his daughter-in-law, La Maheude – so called, like all the miners’ wives, because she is merely an adjunct of her (wedded or common-law) husband – have produced seven children; and the heedlessness with which they have been conceived – at ‘playtime’, after the miner has had his bath – is matched only by the casual cruelty with which heredity and environment snatch their lives away. Already handicapped by the genetic effects of generation after generation of slave labour and malnutrition, they are ugly, anaemic and variously deformed – only then to be starved, crippled or fatally injured. Or shot, if they should dare to protest.
Love is not love but sex; and sex is not making love but screwing, raping, having it off, in the fields, on the roof of a shed, behind the spoil-heap where all the rubble from the mine is piled. Not a mountain of riches nor a bed of roses but a weed-infested dump upon which to sow the seed of yet more wasted, worthless lives. Such human fellowship as exists is the solidarity of ‘comrades’, of the men, women and teenage children who are obliged to live and work cheek by jowl, on an inadequate wage, a prey to illness and a miserable climate. To live is to survive; by stealing a moment’s bodily pleasure and starting another life, or by saving a life, racing to the rescue of a fellow-miner after a rock-fall or sinking new shafts through solid rock to save a comrade from drowning or starving to death hundreds of metres below the ground. Life goes on; it matters little who lives it.
Surrounding the Maheu family are other mining families: the Levaque household next door, where a slattern shares her bed with both husband and lodger, and the Pierrons’, where life is good because man and wife collaborate with the bosses. Violent, predatory males roam the streets and country paths or haunt the innumerable bars, bent on oblivion or a charmless fuck. Meek and powerless girls like Catherine Maheu resign themselves to their fate; others, like La Mouquette, seek out the men themselves, ‘loving’ them and leaving them with hearty insouciance, and baring their buttocks to all who deserve their contempt.
So much for ‘labour’ and the have-nots. What of ‘capital’? The haves are represented by three types: the shareholder, the independent entrepreneur and the company executive. Léon Grégoire has inherited shares in the Mining Company which, in today’s terms, bring him in an annual income of £125,000–£150,000 or around $200,000. Though the capital value of his shares recently topped the £3 million mark, he was never tempted to sell and does not regret the fact that a falling stock market has now reduced this value by nearly a half. Income is income. ‘Capital’ is the God he worships, a sacred treasure to be left buried in the ground and dug up little by little (in his case literally) by those fine fellows who’ve been digging it up for him and his ancestors for over a hundred years. This is the kind of ownership that Proudhon described as ‘theft’, but Grégoire’s defence is that (a) his great-grandfather took enormous risks in creating the Mining Company, and (b) that he and his family live soberly, without extravagance or luxury, and distribute alms to the poor (albeit in kind, for money would merely encourage them to drink). And his parasitic caution proves sadly well founded. Deneulin, his cousin, has sold his shares and invested the money in setting up as a mine-owner himself, beneficially exploiting the natural resources of his country and creating new employment in the region. But his small privately owned company is no match for the competitive muscle of the big public corporations; and when the combination of falling demand and rising costs is exacerbated by worker unrest, he goes under, losing all his capital and reduced to being a mere employee in the company of which he once owned part. ‘Theft’, it seems, pays better than enterprise. And better than subservience. Hennebeau, the manager of the Company’s mines, is the paid lackey, rewarded with a free house and a salary that earns the contempt of his heiress wife. A company executive perhaps, with servants and an entrée to the Grégoires’ drawing-room, but a servant none the less, beholden to a Board of Directors whose grace and favour he must earn with sleepless nights. Emasculated by his adulterous wife, he is also the emasculated representative of a higher power, a mouthpiece for capitalism (we employers take the financial risks; we are subject to market forces and can only pay what we can pay; we are not a charity) while envying the workers what he perceives to be their glorious sexual freedom.
In illustrating ‘the struggle between capital and labour’, Zola is careful above all to nuance his effects and to avoid a crass polarization of goodies and baddies. On the side of ‘labour’, Maheu and his wife may be the models of decency and good sense, but their neighbours the Levaques are their feckless, hot-headed opposites. Chaval is a wife-beater (like Levaque), even if his ‘wife’ is only a girl in her mid teens who has not yet reached puberty. He is without principle, a violent, jealous man, a trimmer ready to call the comrades out to impress his girl and no less ready to send them back to work again at the first hint of promotion. The Pierrons are collaborators, selfish enough to lock their daughter in the cellar and send her grandmother on a fool’s errand while they stuff themselves on rabbit and drink wine before a roaring fire. On the side of ‘capital’, the Grégoires are doting parents and benevolent employers. It is, of course, easy to be both these things when you have the money, but Deneulin manages it in straitene
d circumstances, and his daughters are no less resourceful in their penny-pinching than the beleaguered La Maheude. Mme Hennebeau is the model of the blithe bourgeoise, oblivious to the reality of the miners’ suffering, but her husband is intended to evoke sympathy as the victim of a sexless and unhappy marriage; and the current cause of his cuckoldry, his young nephew Paul Négrel, is not without his merits as an engineer and a leader of men, professionally and genuinely concerned for the miners’ safety and a devoted and courageous participant in their rescue. Maigrat, the shopkeeper – whose name in French suggests the presence of a rat in the midst of fasting and lean times – is the fat and unacceptable face of capitalism, at once a usurer charging exorbitant rates of interest and a man for whom a woman’s body is but part of a universal barter system regulated by the exigencies of supply and demand. But his silent, suffering wife, chained to her ledgers from morning till night, may become the focus of the reader’s compassion and illicit glee as she looks down from a window at the terrible mutilation of her dead husband’s very own means of (re)production.