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By Root 1735 0

Zola constantly dispels our fond illusions by making a concerted attempt to break down the barriers between human beings and other animals, and between animals and plants or objects. The miners display the dumb submissiveness of the herd; the mob is like a river in spate. Horses like Battle and Trumpet are best friends, with memories and longings every bit as powerful as those of their supposed masters. The mine itself is a voracious beast, or a living network of veins and arteries which retaliates when injured. Whether it be the water flooding the mine or the alcohol-tainted blood pumping through Étienne’s brain, fundamental – even cataclysmic – natural processes are at work which render the distinctions of the world into animal, vegetable and mineral at best irrelevant and at worst deceptive. Seen in this light Zola’s Naturalist world is an entropic world, in which nature inevitably reverts to a state of chaos, despite all human effort to create order and to dominate its course. What is natural can no more be withstood or reversed than, it seems, one can protect a mine like Le Voreux from the great underground sea known as the Torrent.

And yet Le Voreux is destroyed, first and foremost, by human agency. The Torrent is unleashed by a crazed and perverted application of human reason. The mine, on the contrary, has become a safer place since the days when young girls would plunge down its shaft to their death with the merest loss of footing. If being part of the natural process means being shaped by heredity and environment and being assimilated to dumb animals and plants, by the same token it also means being part of a process of evolution. Where historically there is hope at the end of Germinal, because the future contains the legalization of trade unions, then ‘naturally’ there is hope also. For we carry within us the seeds of eventual betterment. Education – which the miners lack but are gradually receiving, which Étienne lacks but gradually acquires – is the key. Human beings can learn, and what they learn is genetically transmissable. The aristocracy and the bourgeoisie call this ‘breeding’; Zola calls it ‘progress’.

This central Zolian tenet is more plainly illustrated in La Bête humaine, published five years later, where the central psychopathic character finds himself unable to kill in cold blood because of the ‘accumulated effect of education, the slowly erected and indestructible scaffolding of transmitted ideas’. His hand is stayed by ‘human conscience’, an ‘inherited sense of justice’: only when his mind is overwhelmed by atavistic dark forces of primordial bloodlust at the sight of a woman’s white flesh does Jacques Lantier kill. But Zola’s idea of ‘civilization’ as a process of intellectual and moral evolution is already present in Germinal, where the novel ends on an optimistic note because human conscience has clearly taken a step forward. Though defeated, the miners have become more aware of their situation and of the possibility of improving it. The strike may have seemed like all the strikes before it: born of fond hope and killed by cruel reality. But with each strike the hopes become less fond and the reality slightly less cruel. For Zola it is possible to envisage that in demonstrating the ‘truth about humanity’ – as Étienne in his way has just done for the mining community of Montsou – the novelist is himself educating his reader and contributing to the gradual ‘evolution’ of a more civilized, less inhuman society. Indeed perhaps Zola is the real hero of Germinal, for as a consciousness-raiser his rhetoric is far superior – and far more insidious – than that of his leading character.

Presentation and Progress

As a revolutionary leader Étienne tends to talk in clichés, borrowing ideas and phrases from Marx and others or relying on the familiar vistas of the promised land and the city on a hill. But Zola’s moral landscape is a flat, open plain, a level playing-field on which to enact a Darwinian struggle in which humanity itself is fighting for survival. Not for him the quasi-mystical perpectives