Germinal
GERMINAL
ÉMILE ZOLA, born in Paris in 1840, was brought up in Aix-en-Provence in an atmosphere of struggling poverty after the death of his father in 1847. He was educated at the Collège Bourbon at Aix and then at the Lycée Saint-Louis in Paris. After failing the baccalauréat twice and then taking menial clerical employment, he joined the newly founded publishing house Hachette in 1862 and quickly rose to become head of publicity. Having published his first novel in 1865 he left Hachette the following year to become a full-time journalist and writer. Thérèse Raquin appeared in 1867 and caused a scandal, to which he responded with his famous Preface to the novel’s second edition in 1868 in which he laid claim to being a ‘Naturalist’. That same year he began work on a series of novels intended to trace scientifically the effects of heredity and environment in one family: Les Rougon-Macquart. This great cycle eventually contained twenty novels, which appeared between 1871 and 1893. In 1877 the seventh of these, L’Assommoir (The Drinking Den), a study of alcoholism in working-class Paris, brought him abiding wealth and fame. On completion of the Rougon-Macquart series he began a new cycle of novels, Les Trois Villes: Lourdes, Rome, Paris (1894–6–8), a violent attack on the Church of Rome, which led to another cycle, Les Quatre Évangiles. While his later writing was less successful, he remained a celebrated figure on account of the Dreyfus case, in which his powerful interventions played an important part in redressing a heinous miscarriage of justice. His marriage in 1870 had remained childless, but his happy, public relationship in later life with Jeanne Rozerot, initially one of his domestic servants, brought him a son and a daughter. He died in mysterious circumstances in 1902, the victim of an accident or murder.
ROGER PEARSON is Professor of French at the University of Oxford and Fellow and Tutor in French at The Queen’s College, Oxford. He is the author of standard critical works on Voltaire, Stendhal and Mallarmé. He has translated and edited Voltaire, Candide and Other Stories (1990), Zola, La Bête humaine (1996) and Maupassant, A Life (1999). He has also revised and edited Thomas Walton’s translation of Zola, The Masterpiece (1993).
ÉMILE ZOLA
Germinal
Translated with an Introduction and Notes
by ROGER PEARSON
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First published 1885
This translation published 2004
Translation and editorial matter copyright © Roger Pearson, 2004
All rights reserved
The moral right of the translator has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
9780141908373
Contents
Chronology
Introduction
Further Reading and Filmography
Note on the Translation
GERMINAL
Notes
Glossary of Mining Terms
Chronology
1840 2 April Émile Zola born in Paris, the son of an Italian engineer, Francesco Zola, and of Françoise-Emilie Aubert.
1843 The family moves to Aix-en-Provence, which will become the town of ‘Plassans’ in the Rougon-Macquart novels.
1847 Francesco Zola dies, leaving the family nearly destitute.
1848 The rule of King Louis-Philippe (the July Monarchy, which came to power in 1830) is overthrown and the Second Republic declared. Zola starts school. Karl Marx publishes Manifesto of the Communist Party.
1851 The Republic is dissolved after the coup d’état of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte who in the following year proclaims himself emperor as Napoleon III. Start of the Second Empire, the period that will provide the background for Zola’s novels in the Rougon-Macquart cycle.
1852 Zola is enrolled at the Collège Bourbon, in Aix, where he starts a close friendship with the painter Paul Cézanne.
1858 The family moves back to Paris and Zola is sent to the Lycée Saint-Louis. His school career is undistinguished and he twice fails the baccalauréat.
1860 The start of a period of hardship as Zola tries to scrape a living by various kinds of work, while engaging in his first serious literary endeavours, mainly as a poet. These years saw the height of the rebuilding programme undertaken by Baron Haussmann, Prefect of Paris from 1853 to 1869, which is reflected in several of Zola’s novels.
1862 Zola joins the publisher Hachette, and in a few months becomes the firm’s head of publicity.
1863 Makes his début as a journalist.
1864 Zola’s first literary work, the collection of short stories, Contes à Ninon, appears. Founding of the First International.
1865 Publishes his first novel, La Confession de Claude. Meets his future wife, Gabrielle-Alexandrine Meley; they marry in 1870.
1866 Leaves Hachette. From now on, he lives by his writing.
1867 Publication of Thérèse Raquin, the story of how a working-class woman and her lover kill her husband, but are afterwards consumed by guilt. In the Preface to the second edition (1868), Zola declares that he belongs to the literary school of ‘Naturalism’.
1868–9 Zola develops the outline of his great novel-cycle, Les Rougon-Macquart, which he subtitles ‘The Natural and Social History of a Family under the Second Empire’. It is founded on the latest theories of heredity. He signs a contract for the work with the publisher Lacroix.
1870 The outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War leads in September to the fall of the Second Empire. Napoleon III and Empress Eugénie go into exile in England and the Third Republic is declared. Paris is besieged by Prussian forces. La Fortune des Rougon starts to appear in serial form.
1871 Publication in book form of La Fortune des Rougon, the first novel in the Rougon-Macquart cycle. After the armistice with Prussia, a popular uprising in March threatens the overthrow of the government of Adolphe Thiers, which flees to Versailles. The radical Paris Commune takes power until its bloody repression by Thiers in May; the events would have great importance for the Socialist Left. Zola was shocked both by the anarchy of the Commune and by the savagery with which it was repressed. He begins to think of writing a novel about radical politics, which would later become Germinal.
1872 Publication of La Curée, the second of the Rougon-Macquart novels. Part of it had appeared in serialized form (September–November 1871), but publication had been suspended by the censorship authorities.
1873 Publication of Le Ventre de Paris, the third of the cycle, set in and around the market of Les Halles. Mikhail Bakunin publishes Statehood and Anarchy.
1874 Publication of La Conquête de Plassans.
1875 Publication of La Faute de l’ Abbé Mouret.
1876 Son Excellence Eugène Rougon follows the career of a minister under the Second Empire.
Later in the same year, the seventh of the Rougon-Macquart novels, L’Assommoir (The Drinking Den), begins to appear in serial form and immediately causes a sensation with its grim depiction of the ravages of alcoholism and life in the Parisian slums.
1877 L’Assommoir is published in book form and becomes a bestseller. Zola’s fortune is made and he is recognized as the leading figure in the Naturalist movement.
1878 Zola follows the harsh realism of L’Assommoir with a gentler tale of domestic life, Une page d’amour. Buys a house at Médan.
1879 Nana appears in serial form, before publication in book form in the following year. The story of a high-class prostitute, the novel was to attract further scandal to Zola’s name.
1880 Publication of Les Soirées de Médan, an anthology of short stories by Zola and some of his Naturalist ‘disciples’, including Maupassant. Zola expounds the theory of Naturalism in Le Roman expérimental. In May, Zola’s literary mentor, the writer Gustave Flaubert, dies; in October, Zola loses his much-loved mother. A period of depression follows and he suspends writing the Rougon-Macquart for a year.
1882 Zola’s next book, Pot-Bouille, centres on an apartment house and the character of the bourgeois seducer, Octave Mouret. The novel analyses the hypocrisy of the respectable middle class.
1883 Mouret reappears in Au Bonheur des Dames, which studies the phenomenon of the department store. While on holiday in Brittany meets Alfred Giard, left-wing député for Valenciennes, who interests Zola in the miners’ cause.
1884 La Joie de vivre. At the invitation of Giard spends a week at the end of February visiting the mining community of Anzin, near Valenciennes, and goes down a working mine to research the realities of life underground. Law passed on 21 March legalizing trade unions. 2 April Zola begins writing Germinal, which starts to appear in Le Gil Blas in November and is published in book form the following year.
1886 L’Œuvre provides a revealing insight into Parisian artistic and literary life, as well as a reflection of contemporary aesthetic debates, drawing on Zola’s friendship with many leading painters and writers. However, Cézanne reacts badly to Zola’s portrait of him in the novel, and ends their friendship.
1887 La Terre, a brutally frank portrayal of peasant life, causes a fresh uproar and leads to a crisis in the Naturalist movement when five of his ‘disciples’ sign a manifesto against the novel.
1888 Publication of Le Rêve. Zola begins his liaison with Jeanne Rozerot, the mistress with whom he will have two children.
1890 La Bête humaine, the story of a pathological killer, is set against the background of the railways.
1891 L’Argent examines the world of the Stock Exchange.
1892 La Débâcle analyses the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and the end of the Second Empire.
1893 The final novel in the cycle, Le Docteur Pascal, develops the theories of heredity which have guided Les Rougon-Macquart.
1894 With Lourdes, Zola starts a trilogy of novels, to be completed by Rome (1896) and Paris (1898), about a priest who turns away from Catholicism towards a more humanitarian creed. In December, a Jewish officer in the French Army, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, is found guilty of spying for Germany and sentenced to life imprisonment in the penal colony on Devil’s Island, off the coast of French Guiana.
1897 New evidence in the case suggests that Dreyfus’s conviction was a gross miscarriage of justice, inspired by anti-Semitism. Zola publishes three articles in Le Figaro demanding a retrial.
1898 Zola’s open letter, J’Accuse, in support of Dreyfus, addressed to Félix Faure, President of the Republic, is published in L’Aurore (13 January). It proves a turning point, making the case a litmus test in French politics: for years to come, being pro- or anti-Dreyfusard will be a major component of a French person’s ideological profile (with the nationalist Right leading the campaign against Dreyfus). Zola is tried for libel and sentenced to a year’s imprisonment and a fine of 3,000 francs. In July, waiting for a retrial (granted on a technicality), he leaves for London, where he spends a year in exile.
1899 Zola begins a series of four novels, Les Quatre Évangiles, which would remain uncompleted at his death. They mark his transition from Naturalism to a more idealistic and utopian view of the world.
1902 29 September Zola is asphyxiated by the fumes from the blocked chimney of his bedroom stove, perhaps by accident, perhaps (as is still widely believed) assassinated by anti-Dreyfusards. On 5 October his funeral in Paris is witnessed by a crowd of 50,000. His remains were transferred to the Panthéon in 1908.
Introduction
(New readers are advised that this Introduction makes the detail of the plot explicit.)
‘This is one of those books you write for yourself, as an act of conscience.’
(Zola, in a letter to Henry Céard of 14 June 18841)
Considered by André Gide to be one of the ten greatest novels in the French language, Germinal is the story of a miners’ strike. Set in northern France during the 1860s, the work takes its title from the name of a month in the Republican calendar. This calendar, introduced by decree on 5 October 1793 and backdated to 22 September 1792 (which thus became the first day of the First Republic), was a logical consequence of the ban on the Christian religion in France following the Revolution of 1789. Replacing the Gregorian calendar, it took the autumnal equinox as its starting point and was designed to segment time in a non-Christian manner. Each of the year’s twelve months was divided into three ten-day periods known as décades, while the five (or, in leap years, six) remaining days became national holidays.
The months themselves were renamed to evoke the principal organic or meteorological characteristic of the moment: Vendémiaire, Brumaire and Frimaire for the autumn months of vintage, mist and frost; Nivôse, Pluviôse, Ventôse for the winter months of snow, rain and storm; Germinal, Floréal, Prairial for the spring months of seed, flowers and meadows; and Messidor, Thermidor and Fructidor for the summer months of harvest, heat and fruit. Derived from Latin, these names –like those of the renamed days (primidi, duodi, tridi, etc.) – were intended to evoke the Roman Republic, which revolutionary France proudly if briefly took as its model. However, following Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup d’état in 1799 and his Concordat with the Roman Catholic Church in 1801, the calendar was eventually abandoned as from 1 January 1806.
Germinal was thus the seventh month – from 21 March to 19 April during the first seven years of the calendar, but from 22 March to 20 April during the subsequent six – and its name suggests germination and renewal. Not only was the calendar itself the product of the Revolution, but the date of 12–13 Germinal in the Year Three (1–2 April 1795) is also of particular significance because of a famous uprising mounted by the Parisian populace who were facing starvation. As a title, therefore, Germinal neatly focuses on the novel’s two central subjects: political struggle and the processes of nature. Indeed at the centre of the title is the mine itself (in French the word is pronounced like ‘mean’), Zola’s chosen emblem of the oppressive working conditions in which ill-paid labour makes a fortune for capital. Since the novel opens in March and ends in the April of the following year, its chronology combines one annual cycle with a symbolic passage through the month of ‘germination’. Thus, more obliquely still, the title also encapsulates a profound ambiguity at the heart of Zola’s narrative and perhaps at the heart of all human striving. Can there be progress – social, political, intellectual, moral progress – or is every new beginning but the repetition of an eternal cycle of growth and decay? If a revolution is one turn of the wheel, does it take us forward or bring us full circle? Are we getting somewhere or going nowhere?
Plans and Preparations
Germinal was originally published in serialized form in the newspaper Le Gil Blas. The first of the eighty-nine instalments appeared on 26 November 1884, the last on 25 February 1885. The completed novel was then published in book form on 2 March, and over the first five years this original French version sol
d some 83,000 copies. It was the thirteenth of the twenty novels comprising Zola’s great family saga entitled Les Rougon-Macquart (1871–93): its central character, Étienne Lantier, is the son of Gervaise, a laundry-woman, in L’Assommoir (The Drinking Den: 1877) and brother to the eponymous heroine of Nana (1880), to the artist Claude Lantier in L’Œuvre (The Masterpiece: 1886) and to the psychopathic engine-driver Jacques Lantier in La Bête humaine (1890).
Les Rougon-Macquart was intended, as its subtitle states, to present ‘The Natural and Social History of a Family under the Second Empire’, and Émile Zola (1840–1902) was only in his late twenties when he submitted a book proposal to the publisher Lacroix in 1869 outlining the project. Between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-five he had been working for the major Parisian publishing house Hachette, at first in the dispatch department and then in marketing, where he quickly rose to become head of publicity. There he learned the ‘business’ of being a professional writer: how to write, what to write, how to sell what you write. Notoriety helps, and the racy bedroom scenes of his first novel La Confession de Claude (1865) soon made his name widely known. The sex and violence of Thérèse Raquin (1867) caused an even greater stir, and in the following year controversy was further fuelled by his uncompromising Preface to its second edition. Rejecting all charges of sensationalism and pornography he roundly defended the ‘scientific’ purpose of the book: namely, a physiological rather than psychological analysis of the ‘love’ that brings two people of differing ‘temperaments’ together and an attempt to present the ‘remorse’ which follows their murder of an inconvenient husband as an entirely physical, ‘natural’ process.
By the time, therefore, that Zola submitted his book proposal to Lacroix he was a distinctly marketable commodity, and the project itself did not disappoint: a series of ten novels which would trace the effects of heredity and environment on the successive generations of one family while presenting an exposé of French society under the rule of the Emperor Napoleon III. Something like Balzac’s Comédie humaine therefore (which reflects the earlier decades of the century), but more ‘scientific’ – especially in its study of the effects of heredity – and also less coloured by the subjective opinions of its author. After an opening novel which traced the origins of the family and its division into a respectable and wealthy branch (the Rougons) and an illegitimate and genetically flawed branch (the Macquarts, from whom Gervaise Lantier and her children are descended), the remaining nine novels would focus in turn on the separate worlds of fashionable upper-class youth, banking and financial chicanery, government and the civil service, the Church, the army, the working class, the demi-monde, bohemia and the legal profession. A lucrative contract was secured.