I’m embarrassed not to have been familiar with Zola’s opus, especially Germinal, which is one of the BBC’s Big Reads. Even though there are some questionable inclusions in there (looking at you Swallows and Amazons), I’m so glad that this book was included, even though it may be one of the least well known and least read in that list. Because nothing prepared me of what kinds of devastation that this book will hook into your solar plexus. It is jarring, grimy, even disgusting. But my goodness it is such a necessary read.
Germinal is the 13th of 20 books in Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series, which most punters regard as his best stretch of writing. Zola’s writing is plagued with controversy, and perhaps he really was asking for it as it brought him the fame which propelled his success in literature. But from reading Germinal, I have a feeling that he’s got the right intentions and that it comes from a personal desire to see progress for the lower classes. Germinal is nothing short of an important book. It is an ugly book, which will leave you a bitter taste in your mouth for days to come, as though you are asphyxiated by the coal crystals that the miners have to breathe for ten hours a day. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing, right? A lot of books with that sorta pedigree often leave you devastated. This book is no different. If anything, it makes me want to read all the 20 books under the Rougon-Macquart opus.
A drifter, Étienne, cold and hungry and desperate for work perchance landed a job in the mines of Le Voreux, somewhere in Northern France, not too far away from Belgium. He managed to snag the job after one of the pushers in the team died and a quick replacement was needed. Although he was a bit lost as a sheepdog in the beginning, he quickly learned the ropes to be a respected member of the colliers and started to form his own opinion on the working conditions of the mines.
To be fair, the working conditions are dire. Older workers are cheated off their pension, the workers sacrifice their own safety by neglecting the timbering of the mines while trying to fill their tubs with coal, conditions are more competitive every year that the pay per tub is bargained down to inhumane amounts. Families are constantly in debt, bargaining their way for a handful of groceries with a shopkeeper who took daughters chastities as payment.
Meanwhile, the rich mine owners are pretty comfortable in their homes and often visit the mining families for shits and giggles. They are never charitable enough to give money to the starving poor, but to alleviate their social responsibility, give clothes and some brioche as tokens. The managers and engineers of the mine are always in constant tension with the workers they manage, yet some of these men are respected as they are often the first responders when shit goes down in the mines. Étienne gradually developed Marxist inclinations and started to become more influential with his peers. He became a de facto leader when things took a turn for the worse that the wheels start rolling and the miners strike.
I don’t think there are many books that address miners and labour strikes. I can’t help thinking about Gaskell’s North and South about the factory worker’s strike in a fictional version of Manchester. It is a starkly different perspective though. Gaskell, though not taking any sides also present the argument from the perspective of John Thornton, the factory owner — that if the strike continues that nobody will have a job in the long run. There was also the compromise between the side of the workers and the owner, where there is mutual understanding there is humanity. Gaskell, I think, encouraged a dialogue instead of taking a position for either.
Zola is quite clear on where he stands between the side of capital and labour. Germinal is pro-labour and is never for once apologetic about it. The mines, Le Voreux, is the main antagonist, the most powerful character on its own. He hammers it home in the first chapter, as he depicts the mine as a beast ready to devour the miners:
Hunkered in a hollow in the ground, with its squat brick buildings and a chimney that pokes up like a menacing horn, the pit looked to him like some monstrous and voracious beast ready to gobble everyone up.
Le Voreux is always a malignant presence where lives are wasted and for the workers, there is no such word as ambition. The Maheus had already fed the beast for five generations to be rewarded with meagre living plagues with debt.
Eventually, something has to give, and when the strike begins you should buckle your seatbelts wherever you are in the couch because it will be bumpy. It will start slow, almost in silence. What you think will take weeks of negotiations will stretch into months when tensions flare not only between the colliers and their employers, but among miners themselves and also within the fabric of the families. After all, there is no greater necessity in this world than to sustain oneself through food.
For all its devastating prose, Germinal can also be wildly entertaining. It is somewhat an overtly sexual novel as the young people constantly root on the fields and even on roofs for all to see. They start off pretty young, for the girls even before they started menstruating. There is no such thing as childhood here, and the children often perform acts that grown men only dream of doing. Zola received plenty of criticism for oversexualising the novel, but I get it. How else are you going to entertain yourselves during those times?
In a book full of vitriol for class difference, the core of Germinal focuses more on the humanity than the message. Zola stated himself that “Germinal is about compassion, not about revolution”. Even though the whole Rougon-Macquart series put the reign of Napoleon III (Not THAT Napoleon) under the microscope, it is only a small aspect of the book. There are philosophical questions in Germinal that to do this day is still unanswered: being a naturalist, Zola believes more on how nature conditions behaviour — how the biology of parents affect how their children will turn out. Will the colliers be forever forsaken by their nature? Is class mobility even possible?
At the end, though the cycle is completed, the colliers are much more aware of their potential and the strike has planted the seeds for the next wave of progress (hence the title). Zola knows of this as he wrote in hindsight when unions are more institutionalised. Still, the questions he had asked then is still relevant to today, where the rift between the rich and poor are gaping farther every day, and living conditions are becoming more and more unpalatable.
