No. 13 · 1885
Germinal
Germinal
Germinal is the greatest of the twenty novels, and one of the greatest novels ever written about class, labour, and the buried forces that drive history. The title is the name of the spring month in the Revolutionary calendar — germination, the thing beneath the surface that will eventually crack the earth open. Étienne Lantier, son of Gervaise Macquart, arrives on foot in a bitter winter night at the Voreux mine in the fictional Montsou in northern France. He is out of work and knows nothing about mining. He is taken on, goes underground, and discovers a world Zola had researched with extraordinary thoroughness: the galleries, the seams, the darkness, the coal dust in the lungs, the children and women who work alongside the men, the poverty of families who have worked the same pit for three generations. The Maheu family — father Toussaint, mother La Maheude, the children, old Bonnemort coughing in the corner — are Zola's vehicle for this world: not symbols but people, rendered with specificity and tenderness that makes their destruction unbearable. Étienne is self-educated, has read the International, has ideas — and ideas are dangerous in Montsou. When the Company introduces new pay conditions that effectively cut wages, Étienne helps organise a strike. The novel traces the strike through all its phases: the solidarity, the weeks of hunger, the violence (the wives of miners castrate the hated shopkeeper Maigrat in a scene of terrifying primal fury), the arrival of the army, the massacre — soldiers fire on the crowd including women and children, killing Maheu. The strike fails. The Russian nihilist Souvarine, who has watched all of this with cold contempt for political action, sabotages the Voreux's pit shaft; water floods in; the mine collapses. Étienne and Catherine Maheu are trapped underground; Catherine dies; Étienne is rescued after eleven days. He walks away from Montsou in spring, and Zola ends with one of the greatest closing passages in literature: men pushing upward, a black avenging army germinating slowly in the furrows, growing towards the harvests of the next century.
Le plus grand des vingt romans. Étienne Lantier arrive à pied au puits Voreux par une nuit d'hiver et découvre le monde souterrain de la mine et la misère des familles Maheu. Il organise la grande grève contre la Compagnie. Les semaines de faim, la violence — les femmes castrent Maigrat — l'arrivée de la troupe, le massacre : Maheu est tué. La grève échoue. Souvarine sabote le Voreux : inondation, effondrement, Catherine meurt sous terre, Étienne est sauvé. Il repart au printemps. Les dernières lignes : une armée noire qui germe, qui fera éclater la terre.
Setting: Northern coalfields