Germinal — Commentary

In brief

In March, before dawn, an unemployed engine-man walks into a coalfield in northern France looking for bread. Thirteen months later he walks out, alive and defeated, while everyone he came to love is dead or back underground. Between those two walks Zola tells the story of a strike: why it starts, what hunger does to it, how it turns into a riot, how the army ends it, and how an anarchist destroys the mine. Germinal is the thirteenth volume of the Rougon-Macquart series and the one that most readers who read only one should choose.

It is a political novel with no clean politics. Zola wrote it from the side of the miners and was frightened of them, and he let both feelings stand. That is why it has lasted longer than the argument it was part of.

The argument

The first page of the mine tells you who the enemy is, and it is not a person. The Voreux squats “at the bottom of its hole, with its posture as of an evil beast”, working through its “painful digestion of human flesh” (1.1). Old Bonnemort, who has given it a lifetime, can point to no owner, only to the money somewhere behind the manager. Étienne, by the end of that first day, is thinking of “the crouching and sated god, to whom ten thousand starving men gave their flesh without knowing it” (1.6). The whole design follows from there. Nobody in Montsou is in charge of what is happening. The directors are in Paris, the manager Hennebeau is salaried and frightened of them, and the Grégoires, who live off one inherited share, are charming people who have never asked where the money comes from. The evil here belongs to the arrangement, and few novels of 1885 show that so clearly.

His sharpest demonstration is the tariff. The Company separates payment for timbering from payment for coal, an apparently reasonable measure that is in fact a “disguised lowering of wages” (3.4), worth two centimes a tub. No one can be accused of anything. The strike that wrecks the district starts over that sum.

The second argument is about hunger, and it runs against easy sympathy. Zola will not let the poor be noble because they suffer. Starvation makes them savage: the crowd’s chant “Bread! bread! bread!” rolls through the fifth part, and it ends in the worst thing in the book (5.6). At the same time, he will not let the rich be happy. As the mob howls under his window, Hennebeau, who has just found his wife’s scent-bottle in his nephew’s bed (5.5), envies them their simple appetite and wishes “to be a tree, a stone, less still, a grain of sand”. It is a magnificent and rather obscene scene: a man with a full stomach weeps with self-pity at the starving, and Zola means us to feel the pain and the insult together.

The shape of the book

Seven parts, forty chapters, and a shape as deliberate as a seed’s. The title is the month of the Republican calendar that falls in early spring, and the action runs from March to April. Part One and Part Two take a single day and map the whole society: the pit, the settlement, the bourgeois breakfast table. Part Three is a summer of slow politicising. The strike begins at the end of Part Three, and Part Four is winter and famine, closing with the great moonlit meeting in the forest (4.7). Part Five is one day of riot. Part Six ends with the soldiers firing into the crowd. Part Seven is the catastrophe underground, followed by the flawless last chapter, in which Étienne walks away on a bright morning and hears the picks under his feet.

Its last sentence gives the book its name and its famous hope: “Men were springing forth, a black avenging army, germinating slowly in the furrows, growing towards the harvests of the next century, and their germination would soon overturn the earth” (7.6). The promise needs to be read beside what surrounds it. Just pages earlier the whole workforce goes back down, each with a reason: “I have a mother.”—“I have children.”—“One must get bread.” The month’s name also carries a memory: the hungry Paris crowd that invaded the Convention on 12 Germinal, Year III, demanding bread.

The voice

Zola’s method is accumulation. He gives you the seam “scarcely more than fifty centimetres thick” (1.4) and then makes you lie in it for pages, with water dripping on your face. He is not subtle and has no wish to be. What he has instead is a talent for making an inanimate thing behave like an animal, and for turning a crowd into a single body with its own weather. The march in Part Five is his great set piece, and it set a standard for writing about crowds that very few have reached.

Critics have long asked whether this is realism at all. The factual research is thick, but the mine is a monster, the Torrent beneath the pit is “an unknown and unfathomable sea” (7.2), and the horses and the old men recur like figures in an epic. Bataille, the white horse who has spent ten years below without seeing daylight (1.5), is the most moving creature in the book, and his end in the flood is a mythological event as much as an accident (7.5). Georg Lukács held that Zola’s description freezes people into objects; Erich Auerbach, in Mimesis (1946), thought Germinal still terrifying decades on. Both of them are right, depending on the page.

Violence and the body

This is the part of the book that English readers were first denied, and it needs facing. The novel is frank about bodies in a way that shocked its age: Catherine, a girl in men’s clothes, is taken for a boy by Étienne until “You are a girl, then!” (1.3); sex in the settlements is as public and casual as the coal dust; and children learn it as they learn the pit. The bad shopkeeper Maigrat, who has taken payment in the bodies of miners’ daughters, falls from a roof fleeing the crowd, and the women castrate his corpse and carry the “lump of hairy and bleeding flesh” through the streets on a stick (5.6). Zola’s women are the most frightening thing in the riot, and he makes it impossible to disentangle their justice from their horror.

Three later killings make up the moral structure of the ending. The boy Jeanlin, for no reason he can give, stabs a homesick Breton sentry in the throat (6.4). Old Bonnemort, decades obedient and now mad, strangles the sweet young Cécile Grégoire when she comes to the settlement with charity (7.4); nobody understands what rose in him, and that is the point. Then Étienne, trapped in the flooded mine with Catherine and his rival, feels the “hereditary” craving rise and smashes Chaval’s skull with a sheet of slate (7.5). The doctrine of heredity is the weakest science in Zola, but here it works as tragedy: the man who has read the books still has it in him. Chaval’s corpse keeps floating back against their legs. Catherine dies on Étienne’s knees in the dark, after the one time they have been lovers, and he does not at first understand that she has gone.

The people

Étienne Lantier

A son of Gervaise from L’Assommoir, dismissed from the railway because “I struck my chief” (1.4). He rises because he can talk, and Zola is merciless about what he is talking with: “ill-digested reading” (4.3), Marx at second hand (4.4) and Darwin in a five-sou summary (7.2). When the men he led stone him, he reaches for his old speeches and only stones reply (7.1).

Maheude

The book’s real hero. She begins as a prudent mother who dreads the strike and becomes its fiercest voice. Facing the soldiers, she shames her own husband forward, “Are you a coward?”, and minutes later the last shot goes through his heart (6.5). She loses a son in a firedamp blast (7.4), Alzire to hunger (6.2) and Catherine to the flood. In the last chapter she has gone down the pit for “thirty sous” (7.6), and tells Étienne flatly that she threatened to wring the neck of the first child who went back. Her endurance matters more to that closing hope than any army.

Souvarine

The Russian engine-man, gentle with his rabbit and absolute in his doctrine: “Set fire to the four corners of the town, mow down the people, level everything” (3.1). His lover was hanged in Moscow (7.2). He does what the Company and the army never could: goes alone into the shaft with a small saw and wrecks the tubbing so that the water takes the pit, with men in it (7.2). That is Zola’s judgement on the revolutionary purist, and it is delivered without comment. The rabbit, Poland, ends up in the Rasseneurs’ pot and he has eaten her before he knows: “you ate one of her legs this evening” (6.3). Two tears are all he ever gives away.

Rasseneur, Pluchart and Hennebeau

Rasseneur is the moderate publican who loses the crowd to Étienne, then takes him in when it turns on him, and is cheered for it (7.1). Pluchart is the organiser who comes to recruit and treats the strike as a career opportunity (4.4). Hennebeau’s misery is real, and he too comes out well: a day after the pit collapses he is made an officer of the Legion of Honour (7.4). The arrangement survives and rewards its servants.

How it was made

Zola planned the book as his novel of the mines and of labour against capital. In the last week of February 1884 he went to Anzin, near Valenciennes, as a great strike was starting there. In about eight days he walked the settlements, questioned miners, overseers and engineers, met the strike leader Émile Basly, and went down the Renard pit at Denain. His field notes survive as Mes notes sur Anzin. He added mining treatises and medical works on the diseases of colliers, and moved the action back to the Second Empire, around the founding years of the International. The shooting draws on the killings by troops at La Ricamarie and Aubin in 1869. He wrote from April 1884 to January 1885, and Gil Blas serialised it from November; the book appeared in March 1885.

Ellis’s introduction to this translation says that Zola “travelled about” the region for six months. The record shows about eight days. The error is itself a tribute, because it is hard to believe that anyone got all this from a week of looking.

Readers and critics

Zola’s accredited critics were savage, Brunetière above all. Ellis records how the book’s standing grew all the same: Faguet, who thought posterity would not understand Zola’s popularity, conceded his power over crowds and this book’s ending, and André Gide said it filled him with astonishment. Ellis’s own account of the work is the best thing in his introduction: he and his wife Edith worked through it in a Cornish cottage in early 1894, “I translating aloud, and she with swift efficient untiring pen following”. The best-known tribute is the one with no critics in it. At Zola’s funeral in 1902, a delegation of miners from Denain is said to have followed the cortège chanting “Germinal! Germinal!”. The source is not firm, but the story fits how the book was taken up in the coalfields, where, Ellis reports, miners in every village knew it.

Afterlives

Ferdinand Zecca made short films from it in 1904–05; Albert Capellani made a long silent version in 1913, and Yves Allégret another in 1963. The BBC serialised it in 1970. Claude Berri’s film of 1993, with Renaud, Miou-Miou and Gérard Depardieu, shot in the former coalfield around Lens and Valenciennes, was at the time the most expensive film made in France. The unemployment that its cast and crew found there led Depardieu to head an association to relieve it, so the book was still doing what it set out to do. France 2 made a six-part series in 2021. The last French coal pit closed in 2004, so Germinal now describes a vanished world in France and a present one elsewhere.

How to read it

Know which text you are in. The Gutenberg text is the 1894 version by Havelock and Edith Ellis, complete and unexpurgated at a time when the English versions of 1885 and 1886 were cut. It is plain and strong, with some period stiffness. For a modern version try Peter Collier (Oxford, 1993) or Roger Pearson (Penguin, 2004); both are complete.
Take the first descent slowly. Chapters 3 to 5 of Part One seem long. They exist so that you feel the rest of the book in your knees.
Do the sums with Maheude. Her household budget in the second chapter (1.2) is the strike’s real origin.
Read Part Five in one go. It is one day, and the speed of the march is the effect.
Do not take the last paragraph as the author’s conclusion. Read it against the bare statement of the terms on which the men have returned, a few pages earlier.

Émile Zola, L’Assommoir (1877). Étienne’s mother and the Paris laundries: the novel of the working class that made Zola famous.
Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South (1854–55). A strike in a northern mill town, seen from the hope that masters and men might talk.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Demons (1872). The Souvarine type at full length, and far more frightening about ideas.
Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (1906). The Chicago stockyards done in the same spirit, with less art and more effect.
George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). Reportage from English pits, including the same crawl along the seam.