Germinal - Emile Zola [162]
‘That is the situation, comrades, and tonight you must decide. Do you want to continue the strike? And, if so, how do you intend to defeat the Company?’
A deep silence fell from the starry sky. The invisible crowd made no reply from out of the darkness, sick at heart after what they had just heard; and the only sound among the trees was its long sigh of despair.
But then Étienne continued, in a different voice. This was no longer the local secretary of the International speaking, but the leader of men, the apostle of truth. Were they going to be cowards and go back on their word? What? Had they suffered to no purpose this past month? Were they going to return to work with their tails between their legs, return to the same endless poverty? Would they not do better to die here and now in the attempt to destroy the tyranny of capital that reduced the worker to a state of permanent starvation? Were they forever going to play the same stupid game of submitting to hunger and poverty only then to rise up when the hunger and poverty became too great to bear? That game could not go on. And he showed the miners how they were exploited, how they alone had to bear the consequences of industrial crises and were brought to the point of starvation the moment the demands of competition led to a reduction in prices. No, the new timbering rate was unacceptable, it was nothing but a concealed pay-cut, they were trying to rob every man of an hour of his daily work. This time they had gone too far, and the day was now approaching when the poor would take no more, when they would demand justice, when they would obtain justice.
He stood there with his arms raised. At the word ‘justice’ a long shudder ran through the crowd, and a burst of applause rippled away into the distance like rustling leaves.
Voices cried out:
‘Justice!…The time has come! Justice!’
Gradually Étienne warmed to his theme. He did not have the smooth articulacy of Rasseneur’s effortless delivery. He was frequently at a loss for a word, and he would get tied up in his sentences and struggle to finish them, reinforcing his point as he did so with a forward jerk of his shoulder. But in the course of these repeated hesitations he would chance on ways of saying things that struck home with immediate force and gripped the attention of his audience; while his gestures also had an extraordinary effect on the comrades, the gestures of a man at work, elbows back one minute and then released the next, as he brandished his fists and stuck out his chin as though he were ready to bite someone. Everyone said the same: he wasn’t a great speaker, but he made you listen.
‘The wage-system is a new form of slavery,’ he continued in even more rousing tones. ‘The mine should belong to the miner as the sea belongs to the fisherman or the land belongs to the peasant…Do you understand what I’m saying? The mine belongs to you, to every one of you. You’ve paid for it with your blood and suffering these past hundred years!’
Unabashed, he launched into discussion of various recondite legal questions, the whole panoply of laws that applied specifically to mining, but he soon lost the thread. What was beneath the land belonged to the nation just as much as the land itself; but, following the granting of a vile privilege, the companies now had sole rights