by Emile Zola
Étienne left the building. Down below, beneath the screening-shed, he noticed someone sitting in the middle of a thick pile of coal with his legs stretched out in front of him. It was Jeanlin, whose job was to ‘clean the big bits’. He was holding a lump of coal between his legs and removing fragments of shale with a hammer. He was so completely covered in fine soot that Étienne would never have recognized him if the child had not looked up at him with his monkey-face of wide-apart ears and tiny green eyes. He gave a mischievous laugh, broke the lump of coal with one final blow of his hammer, and vanished in a billowing cloud of black dust.
Out on the highway Étienne walked for a while, deep in thought. All sorts of ideas were racing through his mind. But above all he felt the pleasure of the fresh air and the open sky, and he took deep breaths. The sun was rising gloriously on the horizon, stirring the countryside to a joyful awakening. A tide of gold was sweeping over the immense plain from east to west as the warmth of life took hold, spreading out in a tremulous wave of vibrant newness and youth that mingled the sighs of the earth, the songs of the birds and every murmur and whisper of stream and wood. It was good to be alive, the old world wanted to see another spring.
Filled with this spirit of hope, Étienne slowed his pace, gazing absently to left and right, taking in the gaiety of the new season. He thought about himself, and he felt strong, matured by his hard times down the pit. His education was complete, and he was leaving newly armed, a philosopher soldier of the revolution, having declared war on the society he saw around him and condemned. In his delight at going to join Pluchart, at going to be Pluchart, a leader who was listened to, he started making speeches to himself, rehearsing the phrases as he went. He considered how he might broaden his programme of objectives, for the bourgeois refinement that had taken him out of his own class had now made him hate the bourgeoisie even more. Discomfited by the workers’ reek of poverty, he felt the need to raise them up to glory and set a halo on their heads; he would show how they alone among human beings were great and unimpeachably pure, the sole font of nobility and strength from which humanity at large might draw the means of its own renewal. Already he could see himself addressing the Assembly, sharing in the triumph of the people – if the people didn’t destroy him first.
High above him he heard a lark singing, and he looked up at the sky. Tiny red clouds, the lingering mists of the night, were melting into the limpid blue; and in his mind’s eye the shadowy figures of Souvarine and Rasseneur appeared before him. It was clear that everything went wrong when people tried to gain power for themselves. Hence the failure of this famous International of theirs, which was supposed to have changed the world but which was now weak and impotent because its formidable army of supporters had been divided and fragmented by internal squabbling. Was Darwin right, then? Would the world forever be a battleground on which the strong devoured the weak in pursuit of the perfection and continuity of the species? The question worried him, even if, as a man sure in the certainty of his own knowledge, he believed he could answer it. But there was one prospect which dispelled all his doubts and held him in thrall, and this was the idea that his first speech would be devoted to his own version of Darwin’s theory. If one class had to devour the other, then surely it was the people, still young and hardy, which would devour a bourgeoisie that had worn itself out in self-gratification? New blood would mean a new society. And by thus looking forward to a barbarian invasion that would regenerate the old, decaying nations of the world, Étienne once again demonstrated his absolute faith in the coming revolution, the real revolution, the workers’ revolution, whose conflagration would engulf the dying years of the century in flames as crimson as the morning sun which now rose bleeding into the sky.
He walked on, lost in his dreams, tapping his stick on the stony road; and when he looked round him, he saw the places he knew so well. Here he was at La Fourche-aux-Bœufs, where he had taken command of the mob that morning when they had stormed the mines. Today the same slave labour was beginning all over again, as dangerous and as badly paid as ever. Just over there, seven hundred metres under the ground, he could almost hear the steady, ceaseless clunk of picks as his black comrades, the very comrades he had seen going down that morning, dug away at the coal in silent fury. Maybe they had been defeated, maybe they had lost money and lives; but Paris would never forget the day that shots were fired at Le Voreux, and the life-blood of the Empire would continue to drain from that unstaunchable wound; and even though this industrial crisis was drawing to an end and the factories were opening again one by one, a state of war had been declared and there could be no more talk of peace. The miners had stood up to be counted, and they had tested their strength; and with their cry for justice they had rallied the workers throughout the length and breadth of France. This explained why their latest defeat had reassured no one. The bourgeois of Montsou might be celebrating, but deep down they felt the gnawing unease that accompanies the end of any strike; and in the heavy silence they kept looking over their shoulders to see if their fate was not already, ineluctably, sealed. They realized that the revolution would not go away, that it would return, perhaps tomorrow even, in the form of a general strike when the workers would all act as one and be able, with the support of strike funds, to hold out for months and on a full stomach. This time, like the last, a crumbling society had been given one more jolt, and they had listened as the ancient structure creaked beneath their feet. They could still feel the shock waves rising, tremor after tremor, until one day the whole tottering edifice would collapse and be engulfed like Le Voreux in one long slide into the abyss.
Étienne turned left along the road to Joiselle. This, he remembered, was where he had stopped the mob from attacking Gaston-Marie. Far away, in the clear morning light, he could make out the headgears of several mines, Mirou over to the right, Madeleine and Crèvecœur side by side. Everywhere things were humming, and the picks he thought he could hear beneath the ground were now tapping away from one end of the plain to the other. Tap, tap, over and over again, under the fields and roads and villages that lay basking in the light: a whole world of people labouring unseen in this underground prison, so deep beneath the enormous mass of rock that you had to know they were there if you were to sense the great wave of misery rising from them. And he began to wonder whether all the violence had really helped their cause. The smashed lamps and the severed cables and the torn-up rails, how pointless it had all been! What good had it done to go rushing around in a mob of three thousand people destroying everything in sight? Dimly he foresaw that one day the law might provide a more terrible and powerful weapon. His thinking was maturing, he had got the wild rage of grievance out of his system. Yes, La Maheude had been right in her usual, sensible way: next time they would show ’em. They would organize themselves calmly and without haste; they would make sure they understood each other; and they would band together in unions as soon as the law allowed it. Then one morning there they would be, millions upon millions of workers standing shoulder to shoulder against a few thousand idle rich, and that day they would take power and become the masters! Ah, what a dawn that would be, the new dawn of truth and justice! It would mean the instant demise of that squat and sated deity, that monstrous idol hidden away in the depths of its temple, in that secret far-away place where it fed on the flesh of poor wretches who never even set eyes upon it.
But Étienne was now leaving the Vandame road and coming out on to the cobbled highway. Over to the right he could see Montsou in the distance disappearing down into the valley. Opposite him were the ruins of Le Voreux, the cursed chasm where three drainage-pumps were now working nonstop. Beyond, on the horizon, were the other pits, La Victoire, Saint-Thomas, Feutry-Cantel; while to the north, from the tall blast-furnaces and the batteries of coke-ovens, smoke was rising into the pure morning air. He had better hurry if he wanted to catch the eight o’clock train, because he still had six kilometres to go.
And far beneath his feet the stubborn tap-tap of the picks continued
. The comrades were all there, he could hear them following him with each stride he took. Wasn’t that La Maheude beneath this field of beet, bent double at her work, her rasping breaths audible above the roar of her ventilating machine? On the left, on the right, ahead of him, he thought he recognized others, there beneath the corn and the hedges and the young trees. The risen April sun now shone from the sky in all its glory, warming the parturient earth. Life was springing from her fertile bosom, with buds bursting into verdant leaf and the fields a-quiver with the thrust of new grass. Seeds were swelling and stretching, cracking the plain open in their quest for warmth and light. Sap was brimming in an urgent whisper, shoots were sprouting with the sound of a kiss. And still, again and again, even more distinctly than before, as if they had been working their way closer to the surface, the comrades tapped and tapped. 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.
Notes
(For explanations of mining vocabulary see Glossary of Mining Terms.)
PART I
CHAPTER I
1. Marchiennes to Montsou: Marchiennes, now Marchiennes-Ville, is situated east-north-east of Douai in northern France, in the Deépartment du Nord, just south of the border with Belgium and to the west of Valenciennes. Montsou is a fictional town, the name of which literally means ‘mountain of sous’. With the exception of Valenciennes and Anzin (see below, note 6) the remaining place-names used to describe the area around Montsou are also fictional.
2. Le Voreux: This fictional name suggests the ‘voracious’ nature of the mine. See Introduction, p. xxi.
3. fighting in America: This war in Mexico lasted from 1861 to 1867. In 1861 Britain, Spain and France had sent troops to Mexico in response to the refusal by the recently installed President Benito Juarez (1806–72) to honour the country’s foreign debts. Although Britain and Spain made peace in the course of the following year, France pursued its intervention, and the Emperor Napoleon III (1808–73), nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821), sought to impose the Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian (1832–67), brother of Emperor Franz Josef I of Austria (1830–1916), as the country’s new ruler in 1863. After France was forced to withdraw by America in 1867, Maximilian was executed by firing squad on 19 March, an event strikingly recorded in a painting by Manet. The accompanying reference to cholera (see below, note 4) implies that the novel opens in 1866, when the French position in Mexico was becoming untenable.
4. cholera: Zola is here using a small degree of historical licence in that the cholera epidemic which gripped the Lille and Valenciennes region of northern France occurred several months later in 1866.
5. they called me Bonnemort, for a laugh: Bonnemort means literally ‘good death’.
6. Anzin: A small mining town in the Denain coal-field, very close to Valenciennes, Anzin was the scene of several notable miners’ strikes and was visited by Zola as he researched Germinal. See Introduction, p. xix.
CHAPTER II
1. Two Hundred and Forty: These purpose-built pit-villages were indeed known by numbers rather than names, a fact which Zola highlights in order to stress the way in which mining companies treated their employees as faceless components in a mechanical process.
2. scrofula: ‘A constitutional disease characterized mainly by chronic enlargement and degeneration of the lymphatic glands’ (OED). The condition could be identified particularly by the presence of hard lumps or sores round the neck.
3. cap: In French ‘béguin’, a thin, bonnet-like cap usually made of cotton and worn under the leather cap, or ‘barette’, which miners wore to protect their heads.
4. till the fortnight’s up: During the nineteenth century mine-workers in both Britain and France were customarily paid fortnightly. Since usually they did not work on pay-day, as we learn later in Germinal, weekly payment would have meant another day off.
5. nine francs: In so far as the equivalent sum today can reasonably be calculated, one franc would now be worth in the region of £3 to £4, or approximately $5. At this period in the second half of the nineteenth century a sou, a pre-revolutionary unit of currency, was applied colloquially to a five-centime piece. It would therefore now be worth somewhere between 15p and 20p, or approximately 25c. See also Part II, Chapter IV, where La Maheude’s purchases provide some evidence of what money would buy at the time: 7 sous for brawn (£1–£1.25); 18 sous for potatoes (£2.80–£3.60), which seems very expensive, although we do not know how many she bought nor how scarce they were. A beer cost two sous (30p–40p) (see below, Chapter VI, note 1).
6. five francs: La Maheude uses the colloquial term ‘cent sous’ to mean a five-franc coin.
7. Emperor and Empress: The Emperor Napoleon III and his Spanish-born wife the Empress Eugénie (1826–1920).
8. ‘piece’: In French ‘briquet’, because of the brick-like shape of the thick sandwich.
CHAPTER III
1. stealing the girls’ bread out of their mouths: As alluded to earlier in the chapter, the miners were keen for women and girls to be employed since it boosted the family’s income.
CHAPTER IV
1. This particular seam was so thin: So-called ‘thin-seam mining’ of this kind was particular to northern France and Belgium and required different systems of working. Zola highlights it both for documentary reasons and to dramatize the difficulty of the conditions in which miners had to work.
2. special token: A piece of metal or leather stamped with the hewer’s or putter’s number or distinctive mark, and fastened to the tub he is filling or putting.
3. laundry-woman…rue de la Goutte d’Or: Gervaise Lantier, the central character in L’Assommoir (1877) lives and works as a laundry-woman in this slum area of northern Paris situated between Montmartre and the Gare du Nord. The plot of the earlier novel is briefly recalled in Étienne’s reminiscences in the following paragraph. At this point in the fictional time-setting of Germinal (March 1866) Gervaise has not yet reached the point within the fictional chronology of L’Assommoir where she walks the streets and dies a squalid and lonely death; but the readers of Germinal would have known the outcome already.
4. the lesion…harboured within his young, healthy body: Principally on the basis of his reading of Prosper Lucas’s Traité philosophique et physiologique de l’hérédité naturelle (1847–50), Zola was persuaded that alcoholism was inherited, and he used this as one of the main elements in his depiction of the degenerate Macquart branch of the family. Étienne’s brother Jacques in La Bête humaine is similarly afflicted.
5. Pas-de-Calais: The Department of the Pas-de-Calais is situated immediately to the north-west of the Département du Nord.
CHAPTER V
1. crosse: This game, somewhat similar to golf, is described in detail in Part IV, Chapter VI.
2. ten years’ service: Horses were generally sent down the mine at the age of four, ponies at the age of three, and the average length of service was ten years. Mules and donkeys had also been used but proved less co-operative.
CHAPTER VI
1. beer: In French ‘chope’, literally a beer mug or tankard. As Zola discovered on his visit to Anzin, a miner could buy a glass or mug of beer in three sizes: small, medium or large. The price was two sous, irrespective of the size. (See Henri Mitterand, Zola. II L’Homme de ‘Germinal’ (1871–93) (Paris, 2001), p. 725.) By translating ‘chope’ as ‘beer’ I have left the quantity drunk imprecise, as in the original French.
2. asking the bosses for what was possible: Rasseneur’s political views equate to those of the so-called ‘possibilists’, members of the Socialist Party formed in 1879 (under the leadership of Jules Guesde (1845–1922)), who subsequently parted company from their more radical leader in 1882 and founded (under the leadership of Paul Brousse (184
4–1912)) the Revolutionary Socialist Party, renamed the Federation of French Socialist Workers in 1883. Despite this temporary ‘revolutionary’ tag they were in fact opposed to revolution and favoured legislative reforms as the means to political and social progress.
PART II
CHAPTER I
1. some forty thousand francs: See Part I, Chapter II, note 5. Hence somewhere in the range of £125,000 to £150,000, or approximately $200,000.
2. standard currency unit of the day: Namely in the period before the French Revolution, after which the sou and the denier (and the écu) were replaced by the franc and the centime.
3. for a derisory sum: The State would have appropriated the land from Baron Desrumaux’s heir during the Revolution.
4. rejected by the Salon Hanging Committee: The selection committee for the Salon annually arranged by the Académie des Beaux Arts for the exhibition of new work. The rejection of Jeanne Deneulin’s painting, no doubt among a very large number submitted by amateurs and professionals alike, offers an ironic reminder of the furore created in 1863 (only three years before the fictional chronology of Germinal) when so many reputably innovative works (including Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe) were rejected by the committee and the Emperor himself gave orders for an alternative Salon, the so-called Salon des Refusés, to be organized. This controversy in turn forms the backdrop to L’Œuvre (The Masterpiece), the novel which follows Germinal in the Rougon-Macquart series and which was published in the following year. The battle fought by its central character, Claude Lantier (Étienne’s brother), to have his own work accepted illustrates the difficulties faced by the Impressionists as they, too, struggled for recognition – a struggle in which they were supported by Zola himself, who, as a journalist, conducted a vigorous campaign on their behalf in the press.
