Germinal - Emile Zola [11]
Enter the Hero
So where does Zola stand on the issue of people and politics? Is Germinal a blueprint for revolution or reform? Or neither? Is it perhaps a reactionary demonstration of the impossibility of change? Should we read it as a largely impersonal, non-committal documentary which happens to end with the vaguely optimistic prospect that the seeds of a better future lie buried in the mud and muddle of today? Or does it offer the more considered and authentic vision of a Darwinian evolution in which nature nurtured becomes a second nature?
Just as Souvarine dreams of a tabula rasa upon which to start afresh, so Zola begins his novel from scratch: ‘Dans la plaine rase, sous une nuit sans étoiles…’ Out on the open plain, on a starless, ink-dark night…Emerging from this featureless void and into the world of mining strides the figure of Étienne Lantier, a handsome 21-year-old mechanic, intelligent but poorly educated, and bearer of a fatal flaw: a predisposition to murderous, alcoholic rage, which he carries in his blood. And Germinal is the story of Étienne’s refusal to accept what he finds.
Unlike Grandpa Maheu, who has joined many strikes and been shot at by the King’s troops, Étienne scorns the mute acceptance of the ways of the world. Unlike La Maheude, who has known the danger and loss that come from stepping out of line, it will take little to rouse him to action. For Étienne is by nature rebellious, and the novel traces his education – in the classroom of experience as well as from books – as he struggles for a way of improving the lot of his fellow human beings, his ‘comrades’. His journey begins in his instinctive insubordination, of the sort which has seen him fired from his job as a railway mechanic in nearby Lille; and his untutored mind provides a propitious seedbed where the ideas and opinions of Rasseneur, Pluchart and eventually Souvarine may germinate and grow. At first he is simply intoxicated by the prospect of overthrowing the oppressor, but as yet he has no idea how to achieve this nor what political system to put in the oppressor’s place. As with the commercial opportunist Rasseneur and the political careerist Pluchart, his raised political consciousness stimulates personal ambition, and he becomes as much interested in his own image as a young leader of the people and in becoming the first working man to address the National Assembly in Paris. More insidiously he begins to aspire to some of the refinements of bourgeois living, and the reek of poverty soon nauseates him. Gradually his political ideas become more sophisticated, and he oscillates (healthily) between delirious moments of conviction and gloomy periods of doubt. But the question of what to put in place of the status quo is answered by the collectivism of Pluchart, which he espouses with a new glibness and fanaticism, and his moment of glory comes in the forest of Vandame as he is acclaimed by an assembled throng of some 3,000 people. But when, as Rasseneur bitterly predicts, the people turn on him and blame him for their defeat, his disgust at their poverty increases, and he becomes more and more tempted by the taste for final solutions manifested by Souvarine.
But he is ‘saved’ by reading Charles Darwin (1809–92), whose On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection was first published in 1859 and translated into French in 1865. His reading of Darwin makes him question Souvarine’s tabula rasa: what if the old injustices just spring up again in the vacuum left by the ‘total destruction’ which the Russian anarchists seek? And so Étienne reverts to Pluchart’s collectivism, except that now his disgust at the reek of poverty is exceeded by an even greater hatred of the bourgeois. Blending Marx and Darwin, he comes to see the bourgeoisie as a worn-out and superannuated class which, in the battle for the survival of the fittest, can be replaced by a ‘young’ and vigorous proletariat who will renew the world and its ways for the better. With organized trade unions and bigger provident funds, progress can be made.