by Emile Zola
Just as he illustrates the different faces of capitalism, so too Zola takes pains to represent the wide variety of ways in which ‘labour’ reacts politically and practically to the impossibilities of its situation. Clearly the Catholic Church is of no use, be it in the form of cuddly Father Joire who is all things to all men and wants only a quiet life, or in the form of his replacement, Father Ranvier, a skeletal fanatic who exploits the miners’ suffering to try and convert (or return) them to the Catholic faith with false promises of a meritocracy and universal happiness. No, labour must find its own solution; and the options occupy a spectrum which runs from passive – and pacifist – acceptance to the most extreme anarchism. The older ones, like Bonnemort (aged fifty-eight) or his inseparable friend Mouque, have seen it all before. They have fought and protested and struck, but all to no avail. Why bother? Resistance is pointless and always ends in tears – and bullets. But in Germinal the situation becomes so extreme that even Bonnemort is eventually goaded into an act of barbarous ‘revolutionary’ vengeance. Those aged about forty, like Maheu and his wife, have learned from the events of 1848 twenty years earlier that ‘revolution’ can leave the revolutionaries destitute and the political situation unchanged. But these pragmatists are still young enough to feel anger and the longing for justice, and a combination of hunger-induced light-headedness and intoxicating political oratory still has the power to make them substitute aspiration for caution and to render them the most ardent and determined participants in the strike. Such are the bitter lessons of previous resistance that passive acquiescence has become almost a congenital flaw, and a young girl like Catherine is as dutiful in the workplace as she is submissive to the male. But even she ends up wanting to ‘slaughter the world’, much like La Brûlé, another skeletal fanatic, whose husband has been killed in the mine and who has never lost her passionate desire to wreak vengeance on the bosses.
For most of the miners resistance to oppression is an emotional and instinctive response, and few have the ability to articulate their feelings, let alone the social and economic realities of the situation in which they find themselves. Even Maheu, elected as their spokesman, is no orator. Tongue-tied and intimidated by the conventional hierarchy of worker and boss, he represents none the less the voice of genuine grievance, and when the miners’ delegation confronts the management in the person of M. Hennebeau, Maheu is inspired to fluent articulacy by his own, acute experience of the sheer impossibility of supporting a family on the meagre wage which he and its members are paid. Quite simply they are living below subsistence level. But just what this level should rightly be was then known in France – as it is in Germinal – as the ‘social question’: in a society which had only relatively recently been industrialized, what was a fair level of pay, and what sort of living and working conditions was it reasonable to provide for the new working class?
For some, like Rasseneur, the ex-miner and now owner of a public house, it was important (and supposedly feasible) to divorce this ‘social question’ from wider political issues relating to power, governance and representation. For him – as for La Maheude in the earlier part of the novel – strikes only make matters worse for the poverty-stricken workers. Much better to negotiate with the bosses and, little by little, through compromise and persistence, secure gradual improvements in pay and conditions. Political protest or ‘agitation’ is counter-productive in that it alienates the bosses and delays change. But the authenticity of Rasseneur’s position is undermined by his own self-interestedness: by his vanity in seeking to be the miners’ leader and by his commercial motive in stirring up unrest so as to attract miners to his bar. His wife, more radical than he, scorns his moderation, which she sees as muddle-headed cowardice, and opts for the Marxist solutions proposed by Pluchart. No less in love with the sound of his own voice than Rasseneur, Pluchart is a member of the newly founded International and seeks both to propagate its ideas and to raise money through the subscriptions of new members. Opposed to strikes, he nevertheless advocates this one so that the normally placid and politically apathetic miners will have need of the International’s financial support and will, in their frustration, become more receptive to its revolutionary agenda.
From a post-twentieth-century perspective Pluchart’s Marxist programme may seem dated and, in some respects, even uncontroversial. Rather than being powerless and divided within their own workplace, the workers of the world need to unite and rise up against the bourgeois men of property, seizing the means of production – or rather taking them back into their own rightful ownership – and replacing a class-based political system with the rule of the collective. Patriarchal family structures shall be replaced by relationships based on equality, between men and women, between parents and children; marriage shall be abolished, as shall the right to inherit. But even Pluchart’s Marxism is not enough for someone like Souvarine, a young Russian aristocrat who has given up training to be a doctor in order to learn a manual trade – to be more in touch with the people – and who is a convert to the anarchism, or ‘nihilism’, of Bakunin. For the anarchists, the only way forward is to start again from scratch, ex nihilo. All attempts at rationally conceived reform, and even the Marxist overthrow of the bourgeois State, are anathema, for they will not extirpate the underlying canker of inequality and injustice. Only by beginning with an absolutely clean sheet – even if this were to mean wiping out most of the human race – can we hope to establish a just society on a permanent and secure basis. Within the novel Souvarine’s philosophy is the most chilling and, as it turns out, the most destructive. But with characteristic subtlety Zola makes Souvarine, of all the characters in Germinal, the most acute commentator on the situation facing the miners. He sees that in an unregulated capitalist economy the minimum wage is actually determined by capital’s need for labour and that it will fluctuate in such a way as to allow workers to produce more workers (that is, live and raise families) but at the cheapest possible cost. And he sees that during a slump it is financially in the interests of the Montsou Mining Company to provoke a strike rather than to lay off its workers: that way it avoids the odium of a lockout, and it weakens its opponents by exhausting their nascent provident fund.
But Souvarine represents the ultimate paradox: inhumanity in the service of humanity. He has severed all ties of blood and affection, save only for his obsessive stroking of a plump rabbit whom, with Russian wit, he has christened Poland. Just as the Bear looks down on its neighbour as a mere political satellite, so the anarchist cuddles a pet in his lap and dreams of holding the fate of the whole world in his hands. His is the conviction of the religious fanatic or of a Robespierre ushering in the Reign of Terror. But Zola is no terrorist.
Enter the Hero
So where does Zola stand on the issue of people and politics? Is Germinal a blueprint for revolution or reform? Or neither? Is it perhaps a reactionary demonstration of the impossibility of change? Should we read it as a largely impersonal, non-committal documentary which happens to end with the vaguely optimistic prospect that the seeds of a better future lie buried in the mud and muddle of today? Or does it offer the more considered and authentic vision of a Darwinian evolution in which nature nurtured becomes a second nature?
Just as Souvarine dreams of a tabula rasa upon which to start afresh, so Zola begins his novel from scratch: ‘Dans la plaine rase, sous une nuit sans étoiles…’ Out on the open plain, on a starless, ink-dark night…Emerging from this featureless void and into the world of mining strides the figure of Étienne Lantier, a handsome 21-year-old mechanic, intelligent but poorly educated, and bearer of a fatal flaw: a predisposition to murderous, alcoholic rage, which he carries in his blood. And Germinal is the story of Étienne’s refusal to accept what he finds.
Unlike Grandpa Maheu, who has joined many strikes and been shot at by the King’s troops, Étienne scorns the mute acceptance of the ways of the world. Unlike La Maheude, who has known the danger and loss that come from stepping out of line, it will take li
ttle to rouse him to action. For Étienne is by nature rebellious, and the novel traces his education – in the classroom of experience as well as from books – as he struggles for a way of improving the lot of his fellow human beings, his ‘comrades’. His journey begins in his instinctive insubordination, of the sort which has seen him fired from his job as a railway mechanic in nearby Lille; and his untutored mind provides a propitious seedbed where the ideas and opinions of Rasseneur, Pluchart and eventually Souvarine may germinate and grow. At first he is simply intoxicated by the prospect of overthrowing the oppressor, but as yet he has no idea how to achieve this nor what political system to put in the oppressor’s place. As with the commercial opportunist Rasseneur and the political careerist Pluchart, his raised political consciousness stimulates personal ambition, and he becomes as much interested in his own image as a young leader of the people and in becoming the first working man to address the National Assembly in Paris. More insidiously he begins to aspire to some of the refinements of bourgeois living, and the reek of poverty soon nauseates him. Gradually his political ideas become more sophisticated, and he oscillates (healthily) between delirious moments of conviction and gloomy periods of doubt. But the question of what to put in place of the status quo is answered by the collectivism of Pluchart, which he espouses with a new glibness and fanaticism, and his moment of glory comes in the forest of Vandame as he is acclaimed by an assembled throng of some 3,000 people. But when, as Rasseneur bitterly predicts, the people turn on him and blame him for their defeat, his disgust at their poverty increases, and he becomes more and more tempted by the taste for final solutions manifested by Souvarine.
But he is ‘saved’ by reading Charles Darwin (1809–92), whose On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection was first published in 1859 and translated into French in 1865. His reading of Darwin makes him question Souvarine’s tabula rasa: what if the old injustices just spring up again in the vacuum left by the ‘total destruction’ which the Russian anarchists seek? And so Étienne reverts to Pluchart’s collectivism, except that now his disgust at the reek of poverty is exceeded by an even greater hatred of the bourgeois. Blending Marx and Darwin, he comes to see the bourgeoisie as a worn-out and superannuated class which, in the battle for the survival of the fittest, can be replaced by a ‘young’ and vigorous proletariat who will renew the world and its ways for the better. With organized trade unions and bigger provident funds, progress can be made. Above all Étienne steps back from the allure of violence and destruction and comes to place his faith in legality. Though the strike has been defeated, there is a new political awareness among the miners at large, together with a new preparedness to abandon their age-old passivity and a readiness to organize their resistance. And this is what informs the famous image of germination with which the novel ends:
Beneath the blazing rays of the sun, on this morning when the world seemed young, such was the stirring which the land carried in its womb. New men were starting into life, a black army of vengeance slowly germinating in the furrows, growing for the harvests of the century to come; and soon this germination would tear the earth apart.
This is not the trite or spuriously optimistic image which some readers have thought, for in 1885 Zola knew what the future – as seen from 1867 – actually held in store: the legalization of trade unions and, slowly but surely, a better deal for organized labour. But also the Commune. Reform was possible – and urgently needed. For during the Commune and later at Anzin Zola had also witnessed first hand the pent-up anger which might indeed one day tear the earth apart. The Russian Revolution of 1917 would not have surprised him had he lived to see it, nor the Stalinist totalitarianism which later ensued. And nor would the taste for final solutions which brought the Holocaust, although perhaps he could not have predicted the way in which the seeds of that particular whirlwind were sown.
The Truth about Humanity: Nature and Naturalism
For these reasons Germinal bears out some of the claims which Zola made when he was writing his book proposal for Les Rougon-Macquart at the end of 1868. Then he argued that in depicting modern France he would have particular regard to the social upheaval consequent upon the gradual erosion of class barriers. His proposed novels, he noted, ‘would have been impossible before 1789’. In depicting this social upheaval he did not intend to gloss over the baser aspects of human behaviour, and he fully planned to depict the ‘moral monstrosities’ thrown up by the ‘turbulence’ of the contemporary world. While he conceded that there was a perceptible movement in the social and political life of contemporary France towards a fairer and more democratic society, he nevertheless stressed that ‘we are still beginners when it comes to improving our lot’: ‘men will be men, that is to say animals which are good or bad depending on the circumstances’. For Zola progress was less a matter of trying to change human nature than of knowing human nature and, slowly but surely, trying to make the world a better place on the basis of that knowledge. He thought that this move towards a freer and fairer society ‘would take a long time to come to fruition, even supposing that it ever could’. But what he really believed in was ‘the possibility of ongoing progress towards the truth’: ‘a better society can come only from knowing the truth’. And his own novels were intended to shed this light: ‘to tell the truth about humanity, to take the machine apart and show the hidden workings of heredity and the ways in which people are influenced by their surroundings. The law-makers and the moralists will then be free to draw whatever conclusions they wish from my work and to patch the wounds which I shall have revealed.’3
Zola’s preoccupation with heredity began as a way of going one better than Balzac, his major rival as a chronicler of French society, who had focused exclusively on the ways in which human behaviour is determined by habitat. To the modern eye the preoccupation may seem at once prescient and quaint. As the Human Genome Project decodes the formulae by which human beings are physiologically created and governed, the ancient notion of destiny is being given a new lease of life, and it seems appropriate that the health and behaviour of succeeding members of the Rougon and Macquart families should be dictated by their forebears. Moreover, recent research has confirmed that the predisposition to alcoholism evinced by Étienne Lantier can indeed be genetically transmitted. And yet the crude insistence with which Zola depicts the malign effect of gin on his hero, not to mention the wolf-like appearance he develops as he drunkenly measures up to Chaval, can easily remind us more of the world of melodrama and Gothic horror films. But here we see Zola the Naturalist. On the one hand – and this is perhaps his greatest claim to originality in the history of the French novel – he does wish to depict human beings as subject to nature and natural processes. On the other, he wants to take the natural process and lend it a symbolic value which powerfully illustrates the ‘truth about humanity’.
The term ‘naturalist’ was first used in the literary context by the Positivist philosopher and cultural historian Hippolyte Taine (1828–93), who applied it to Balzac as a term of praise for his quasi-scientific appraisal of the human animal kingdom. Zola adopted the term as a label for the newer and more thoroughgoing brand of Realism which he (and, as he saw it, the Impressionists) were evolving. Like Balzac he, too, wanted to enhance the prestige of the novel by conferring on it the intellectual status of scientific inquiry; and he borrowed Taine’s own Positivist categories of race, milieu and moment as his blueprint for the Rougon-Macquart saga. While he compared his novels to experiments (in the essay ‘The Experimental Novel’, first published in 1879), the role of the novelist was as much that of a demonstrator as of a discoverer. He recognized quite explicitly that, unlike the experimental scientist, the novelist cannot let the ingredients in his test-tube take over and react independently of his intervention. Rather, the novelist infers the ‘truth about humanity’ from his observations of the world about him and then creates a story which will demonstrate his conclusions in action. If he considers, for example, that human mental proc
esses are physiologically determined, he will depict the revolutionary zeal of a man like Étienne Lantier as the result of an innate aggression which is exacerbated by the circumstances of arduous labour and sexual rivalry. Even where the evidence of the real world is against him – sexual promiscuity, for example, is not attested in any of the contemporary accounts of mining communities – he may yet posit a phenomenon in order to ‘demonstrate’ a larger truth: here, that cramped living conditions and financial hardship combine to dehumanize and uncivilize, reducing men and women to the level of animals rather than raising them up to a level where ‘finer feelings’ might plausibly exist.
For it is all very well believing that human beings have a soul and that we are complex psychological entities who ‘fall in love’ and enjoy all sorts of intricate emotional and intellectual experiences. But we also eat and drink, wake and sleep, defecate and copulate. And we fear, we hate. How better to highlight these realities than to set your novel in a world of poverty where the most essential and not at all straightforward activity is finding something to eat; where drinking (alcohol) is at once paradise and hell; where sleeping is no antidote to exhaustion; where accommodation is so limited that bodily functions must be performed without privacy; where copulation is the only pleasure that doesn’t cost money (at least initially). All the basic features of human existence which the bourgeois novel so gaily takes for granted are here, quite literally, a matter of life and death. Human beings are animals, in need of warmth and rest and safety; and the opening pages of Germinal offer an arresting portrait of one human being who is completely deprived, on the verge of ending up ‘like a stray dog, a dead carcass lying behind some wall or other’. Homeless, jobless, penniless, friendless, he has nowhere to go and nowhere to hide from the bitterly cold winds blowing across the empty plain. Life itself is a tabula rasa on which we must construct shelter and purpose.