Germinal (3 page)

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? Those 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

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 straitened 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.

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.