Rereading Zola's Germinal
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Ruth Scurr on one of Zola's greatest novels, a parable of the love-hate relationship that human beings have with the Earth
Ruth Scurr
Sat 19 Jun 2010 09.06 AEST
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Emile Zola's monumental Germinal was published in 1885: the year Freud arrived in Paris to study hysteria, and the year the miner's son, DH Lawrence, was born. Psychologically, socially and politically, Germinal was a trailblazing fiction, set in the 1860s in a mining community in northern France. It was the 13th novel in Zola's 20-volume Rougon-Macquart series, which he subtitled: "A Natural and Social History of a Family under the Second Empire". Each of the novels is discrete, but there are blood-ties between the protagonists, and Zola intended them, laid side by side, to provide a panoramic view of life under Napoleon III. Germinal broke free from the series as a timeless cry of protest against oppression and the misery of the poor who never inherit the Earth. After extensive research and a trip down the working mine at Denain in Valenciennes, Zola wrote Germinal in 10 frenzied months from 2 April 1884 to 23 January 1885. The finished work appeared that spring in a single volume and was sensationally received.
Germen is the Latin for sprout or bud, and Germinal was the seventh month (late March to late April) in the revolutionary calendar that France adopted from 1793 to 1805. "We could not go on reckoning the years during which we were oppressed by kings as part of our lifetime. Every page of the old [Gregorian] calendar was soiled by the prejudices and falsehoods of the throne and the church," the former actor and dramatist Fabre d'Eglantine explained to the National Convention as the terror swept over France in 1793. Fabre, together with André Thouin, chief botanist at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, drew their inspiration for the new calendar from the natural world.
From the beginning, Germinal was a dramatic month: two revolutionary factions (the Hébertists and Dantonists) were guillotined in Germinal, Year II; starving Parisians stormed the National Convention in Germinal, Year III. Much later, mindful of its revolutionary heritage, the Paris Commune of 1871 reverted to the revolutionary calendar for 18 days, and found itself in Germinal, Year LXXIX.
Zola was in Paris during the suppression of the Paris Commune; his sympathies were republican; and the miners' strikes of 1869 (in La Ricamarie and Aubin) and 1884 (in Aubin) inspired him to focus Germinal on revolutionary action.
Zola was in Paris during the suppression of the Paris Commune; his sympathies were republican; and the miners' strikes of 1869 (in La Ricamarie and Aubin) and 1884 (in Aubin) inspired him to focus Germinal on revolutionary action.
Despite this, Zola's novel is no dry treatise on revolutionary or socialist theory.
Instead we follow its protagonist Etienne Lantier on a journey through the working community that brings him face to face with violence and despair, without ever destroying his belief in a better world.
Etienne is the son of Gervaise Macquart, the alcoholic at the centre of L'Assommoir (1877), an earlier novel in the Rougon-Macquart series. He arrives in Montsou looking for work as a mechanic, having lost his job in a railway workshop in Lille after hitting his boss. He finds lodgings with the Maheu family in village number Two Hundred and Forty, purpose-built to house miners from the pit called Le Voreux, which "lay lower and squatter, deep in its den, crouching like a vicious beast of prey, snorting louder and longer, as if choking on its painful digestion of human flesh".
An educated man with a violent streak, fearful of his genetic inheritance and determined to avoid alcohol, Etienne is grateful for the manual labour and new start in life that he is offered underground.
Etienne is the son of Gervaise Macquart, the alcoholic at the centre of L'Assommoir (1877), an earlier novel in the Rougon-Macquart series. He arrives in Montsou looking for work as a mechanic, having lost his job in a railway workshop in Lille after hitting his boss. He finds lodgings with the Maheu family in village number Two Hundred and Forty, purpose-built to house miners from the pit called Le Voreux, which "lay lower and squatter, deep in its den, crouching like a vicious beast of prey, snorting louder and longer, as if choking on its painful digestion of human flesh".
An educated man with a violent streak, fearful of his genetic inheritance and determined to avoid alcohol, Etienne is grateful for the manual labour and new start in life that he is offered underground.
At first Etienne mistakes one of the Maheu children, 15-year-old Catherine, for a boy, because she is so slight and her puberty has been delayed by the physical strain of her job as a tram-cart pusher at the bottom of the pit. When he realises she is both an attractive girl and his friend, helping him learn the ropes, sharing her food with him, he is deeply drawn to her sexually.
She has another admirer, the burly and bullying Chaval, and so begins one of Zola's love triangles: a variant on the disturbing threesome in Thérèse Raquin (1867). Whereas the setting for the earlier novel was one of domestic claustrophobia, in Germinal the tension between Etienne and Catherine as they sleep and wash close to one another without ever touching, then rub up against each other in the dangerous context of their work, is projected on to the backdrop of the slag heap and the cavernous mine with its pockets of bad air and explosive fumes.
The collapse of the Paris Commune split the French left famously between the socialists and anarchists. Before Turgenev's death in 1882, Zola had discussed with him the anarchist challenges to Marx's ideas, and those conversations are echoed in Germinal. The Russian character Souvarine urges the miners to violent action. Souvarine has seen his lover hanged in Moscow after she helped him in a failed attempt to blow up a railway line.
He stood in the crowd and watched her execution, living on afterwards as a political animal unfettered by human ties: "When a man had a woman in his heart, the man was finished, he might as well die." Souvarine is responsible for the destruction of the mine-shaft that leads to Etienne, Catherine and Chaval being trapped together underground in a fight to the death against time, nature and sexual jealousy. "I don't want to die . . . Take me away! Take me away!" Catherine screams: despite all the poverty and suffering she has known, the will to live is still so strong inside her, struggling to break through the fallen rocks and earth surrounding them, like green shoots from a growing seed.
The Earth itself is the most powerful character in Germinal. Larger even than the voracious mine or "evil beast" that monstrously consumes human flesh, the Earth is at once beautiful and terrifying.
The collapse of the Paris Commune split the French left famously between the socialists and anarchists. Before Turgenev's death in 1882, Zola had discussed with him the anarchist challenges to Marx's ideas, and those conversations are echoed in Germinal. The Russian character Souvarine urges the miners to violent action. Souvarine has seen his lover hanged in Moscow after she helped him in a failed attempt to blow up a railway line.
He stood in the crowd and watched her execution, living on afterwards as a political animal unfettered by human ties: "When a man had a woman in his heart, the man was finished, he might as well die." Souvarine is responsible for the destruction of the mine-shaft that leads to Etienne, Catherine and Chaval being trapped together underground in a fight to the death against time, nature and sexual jealousy. "I don't want to die . . . Take me away! Take me away!" Catherine screams: despite all the poverty and suffering she has known, the will to live is still so strong inside her, struggling to break through the fallen rocks and earth surrounding them, like green shoots from a growing seed.
The Earth itself is the most powerful character in Germinal. Larger even than the voracious mine or "evil beast" that monstrously consumes human flesh, the Earth is at once beautiful and terrifying.
Zola describes it variously as "a wicked stepmother who had killed her children at random in a state of crazed and wanton cruelty"; as a shuddering volcano; a landscape despoiled by "blast furnaces and burnt-out coke ovens" that show up tragically on the horizon; as a beautiful forest of lofty beeches "whose regular line of straight trunks made a white colonnade".
Love of the Earth is evoked most powerfully in the memory of the pit pony, Bataille. In a moving anthropomorphic passage, Zola shows Bataille galloping desperately through the narrow bowels of the Earth:
Where was he heading for? Maybe for that far-off vision of his youth, at the mill where he was born, on the banks of the Scarpe, driven by vague memories of sunshine burning in the sky like a great lamp. He wanted to live, his memories of animal life revived, the urge to breathe the air of the plains once more drove him onwards, hoping to discover the hole, the way out into the warm air and the light. And his age-old resignation was swept aside by a wave of revolt, now that he was dying in this pit, after being merely blinded by it.
Bataille's animal revolt is mirrored in the slowly gathering momentum of the miners' strike. There is the same movement from age-old resignation, handed down from father to son and mother to daughter, towards violent protest at the cruel injustice of working conditions. Catherine, who has submitted subserviently to Chaval's beatings and the punishing regime of her job, is carried away by the mob's vehement hopes at the strike's climax:
She couldn't have said why, but she was suffocating, and was overcome with a desire to kill. Surely it would have to stop soon, this life of blasted misery. She had had enough of being beaten and thrown out by her man, of wading like a stray dog through the mud on the road, without even being able to ask her father for a bowl of soup, for he was as starving as she was.
What erupts in the strike is the distant memory of the terror.
Around a thousand ragged women, some carrying babies, others banners or sticks, surge towards the railings of the pit-manager's expensive home.
A mob of men, double in size, joins them and they start to sing the "Marseillaise": the battle hymn of the French revolution that was banned under the Second Empire. Then suddenly, with hideous symbolism, the shadow of the guillotine appears against the sky:
Over their heads, among the spikes of the iron bars that stabbed at the air, they passed an axe, keeping it upright; and this single axe, flaunted like the battle standard of the band, took on the sharp profile of a guillotine blade against the light evening sky.
It is as though the worst extremes of the terror have risen again from the earth and shown the Second Empire as nothing but a fragile attempt to paper over the cracks in a society smashed to pieces. The order of society and the authority of the state are pushed aside as easily as the rosy-lipped portraits of the Emperor and Empress smiling insincerely down from the walls of the mining cottages where no one has enough to eat. "Bread, bread, we want bread!" the people cry as they did in 1789 and had done before.
Over their heads, among the spikes of the iron bars that stabbed at the air, they passed an axe, keeping it upright; and this single axe, flaunted like the battle standard of the band, took on the sharp profile of a guillotine blade against the light evening sky.
It is as though the worst extremes of the terror have risen again from the earth and shown the Second Empire as nothing but a fragile attempt to paper over the cracks in a society smashed to pieces. The order of society and the authority of the state are pushed aside as easily as the rosy-lipped portraits of the Emperor and Empress smiling insincerely down from the walls of the mining cottages where no one has enough to eat. "Bread, bread, we want bread!" the people cry as they did in 1789 and had done before.
In a scene of terrible violence the women castrate the corpse of the shopkeeper who charged them and their daughters in sexual favours when money had run out. "They passed round the bleeding stump, as if they had finally exterminated a wild animal that had been preying on each and every one of them, and saw it there inert and in their power. They bared their teeth, and spat on it."
The gendarmes [ a military force with law enforcement duties ] arrive, and at first, like the National Guard on the Champs de Mars in 1791, they are reluctant to fire on the mob. The rioting miners and women among them are breaking and throwing bricks when the order to fire finally comes from a sergeant tortured by his conflicting beliefs and loyalties as man and soldier.
The gendarmes [ a military force with law enforcement duties ] arrive, and at first, like the National Guard on the Champs de Mars in 1791, they are reluctant to fire on the mob. The rioting miners and women among them are breaking and throwing bricks when the order to fire finally comes from a sergeant tortured by his conflicting beliefs and loyalties as man and soldier.
After the massacre, a priest, on his way back from saying Mass, comes upon the scene of carnage and calls down the wrath of God on the assassins:
"He announced the arrival of the age of justice, and the imminent extermination of the bourgeoisie by fire sent from heaven, since they had brought their crimes to a climax by having the workers and the poor of the earth massacred."
Zola too calls down the wrath of God in Germinal. He does not commit himself politically to future revolutionary action, or predict its likely success or failure. Nor does he choose between seeing revolution as an unfinished struggle continuous with the events of 1789, or as a cycle of oppression and rebellion that will repeat itself endlessly through history for as long as the human race inhabits the Earth.
Zola too calls down the wrath of God in Germinal. He does not commit himself politically to future revolutionary action, or predict its likely success or failure. Nor does he choose between seeing revolution as an unfinished struggle continuous with the events of 1789, or as a cycle of oppression and rebellion that will repeat itself endlessly through history for as long as the human race inhabits the Earth.
For all their specificity, his characters assume mythical status as he projects them against the backdrop of the ravaged Earth.
Germinal, in our own generation, is
- more than a realist (or naturalist) novelistic record of the historical exploitation of miners;
- more than a progress report on the working-class struggle against the psychic and economic effects of capitalism in 19th-century France;
- more than a presage of the ideas that would later differently preoccupy Freud or Lawrence;
- more even than a testament to the revolutionary heritage that continued to disrupt the French nation for many decades after Robespierre had breathed his last beneath the guillotine in 1794 (10 Thermidor, Year II).
Beyond all these substantial claims on our attention, Germinal is
- a parable of the love–hate relationship human beings have with the Earth: the death-rattle rings through it, in counterpoint to the urge we all have, until the moment of our death, to go on living.
A new illustrated edition of Germinal is published this month by the Folio Society. www.foliosociety.com
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