Germinal - Emile Zola [12]
Beneath the blazing rays of the sun, on this morning when the world seemed young, such was the stirring which the land carried in its womb. New men were starting into life, a black army of vengeance slowly germinating in the furrows, growing for the harvests of the century to come; and soon this germination would tear the earth apart.
This is not the trite or spuriously optimistic image which some readers have thought, for in 1885 Zola knew what the future – as seen from 1867 – actually held in store: the legalization of trade unions and, slowly but surely, a better deal for organized labour. But also the Commune. Reform was possible – and urgently needed. For during the Commune and later at Anzin Zola had also witnessed first hand the pent-up anger which might indeed one day tear the earth apart. The Russian Revolution of 1917 would not have surprised him had he lived to see it, nor the Stalinist totalitarianism which later ensued. And nor would the taste for final solutions which brought the Holocaust, although perhaps he could not have predicted the way in which the seeds of that particular whirlwind were sown.
The Truth about Humanity: Nature and Naturalism
For these reasons Germinal bears out some of the claims which Zola made when he was writing his book proposal for Les Rougon-Macquart at the end of 1868. Then he argued that in depicting modern France he would have particular regard to the social upheaval consequent upon the gradual erosion of class barriers. His proposed novels, he noted, ‘would have been impossible before 1789’. In depicting this social upheaval he did not intend to gloss over the baser aspects of human behaviour, and he fully planned to depict the ‘moral monstrosities’ thrown up by the ‘turbulence’ of the contemporary world. While he conceded that there was a perceptible movement in the social and political life of contemporary France towards a fairer and more democratic society, he nevertheless stressed that ‘we are still beginners when it comes to improving our lot’: ‘men will be men, that is to say animals which are good or bad depending on the circumstances’. For Zola progress was less a matter of trying to change human nature than of knowing human nature and, slowly but surely, trying to make the world a better place on the basis of that knowledge. He thought that this move towards a freer and fairer society ‘would take a long time to come to fruition, even supposing that it ever could’. But what he really believed in was ‘the possibility of ongoing progress towards the truth’: ‘a better society can come only from knowing the truth’. And his own novels were intended to shed this light: ‘to tell the truth about humanity, to take the machine apart and show the hidden workings of heredity and the ways in which people are influenced by their surroundings. The law-makers and the moralists will then be free to draw whatever conclusions they wish from my work and to patch the wounds which I shall have revealed.’3
Zola’s preoccupation with heredity began as a way of going one better than Balzac, his major rival as a chronicler of French society, who had focused exclusively on the ways in which human behaviour is determined by habitat. To the modern eye the preoccupation may seem at once prescient and quaint. As the Human Genome Project decodes the formulae by which human beings are physiologically created and governed, the ancient notion of destiny is being given a new lease of life, and it seems appropriate that the health and behaviour of succeeding members of the Rougon and Macquart families should be dictated by their forebears. Moreover, recent research has confirmed that the predisposition