Germinal - Emile Zola [0]
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
PENGUIN BOOKS
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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.