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of this innocent man. Had he now paid with his life for his belief in the truth? The answer to that question is not known. But on 5 October some 50,000 people followed his funeral procession through the streets of Paris, including a delegation of miners from the Denain coal-field. And from the single word they chanted during the procession it is evident that they at least believed in the authenticity of their champion – and in the power of that one word to symbolize protest against injustice wherever and whenever throughout the history of human affairs that injustice may be found: ‘Germinal! Germinal! Germinal!…’

NOTES

1. Émile Zola, Correspondance, ed. B. H. Bakker (10 vols, Montreal and Paris, 1978–95), vol. 5, p. 126.

2. Ibid., pp. 240–41.

3. Quotations from ‘Notes sur la marche générale de l’œuvre’ in Émile Zola, Les Rougon-Macquart (5 vols, Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1960–67), vol. 5, pp. 1738–41.

4. Zola, Correspondance, vol. 5, p. 249.

5. Ibid., p. 347.

Further Reading and Filmography

In English

All twenty novels in the Rougon-Macquart cycle have been translated into English, and the principal ones are available in Penguin Classics, as is Thérèse Raquin.

BIOGRAPHIES

Frederick Brown, Zola. A Life (New York, 1995; London, 1996)

F. W. J. Hemmings, The Life and Times of Émile Zola (London, 1977)

Graham King, Garden of Zola (London, 1978)

Alan Schom, Émile Zola. A Bourgeois Rebel (London, 1987)

Philip Walker, Zola (London, 1985)

CRITICAL STUDIES

David Baguley, Naturalist Fiction. The Entropic Vision (Cambridge, 1990)

— (ed.), Critical Essays on Émile Zola (Boston, 1986)

Elliot M. Grant, Émile Zola (New York, 1966)

—, Zola’s ‘Germinal’. A Critical and Historical Study (Leicester, 1962)

F. W. J. Hemmings, Émile Zola (2nd edn, Oxford, 1966; reprinted with corrections, 1970)

Irving Howe, ‘Zola: The Genius of Germinal’, Encounter 34 (1970), pp. 53–61

Robert Lethbridge and Terry Keefe (eds), Zola and the Craft of Fiction. Essays in Honour of F. W. J. Hemmings (Leicester, 1990; paperback edn, 1993)

Brian Nelson, Zola and the Bourgeoisie (London, 1983)

Naomi Schor, Zola’s Crowds (Baltimore, 1978)

Colin Smethurst, Émile Zola. ‘Germinal’ (London, 1974; repr. Glasgow, 1996)

Philip Walker, ‘Germinal’ and Zola’s Philosophical and Religious Thought (Amsterdam, 1984)

Angus Wilson, Émile Zola. An Introductory Study of his Novels (New York, 1952)

Richard H. Zakarian, Zola’s ‘Germinal’. A Critical Study of its Primary Sources (Geneva, 1972)

In French

CRITICAL EDITIONS

Germinal, ed. Colette Becker (Paris, 1989)

Germinal, ed. Henri Mitterand (Paris, 1978)

BIOGRAPHY

Henri Mitterand, Zola. I. Sous le regard d’Olympia (1840–1871), II. L’Homme de ‘Germinal’ (1871–1893), III. L’Honneur (1893–1902) (Paris, 1999–2002)

CRITICAL STUDIES

Colette Becker, Émile Zola: ‘Germinal’ (Paris, 1984)

—, La Fabrique de ‘Germinal’ (Paris, 1986)

Philippe Hamon, Le Personnel du roman: le système des personnages dans les ‘Rougon-Macquart’ d’Émile Zola (Geneva, 1983)

Henri Mitterand, Le Regard et le signe (1987)

—, Zola: L’Histoire et la fiction (1990)

—, Zola et le naturalisme (1986)

Michel Serres, Feux et signaux de brume: Zola (Paris, 1975)

FILMOGRAPHY

La Grève [The Strike], dir. Ferdinand Zecca (France, 1903)

Au pays noir [In the Black Country], dir. Lucien Nonguet (France, 1905)

Au pays des ténèbres [In the Land of Darkness], dir. Victorin Jasset (France, 1912)

Germinal, dir. Albert Capellani (France, 1913)

Germinal, anonymous direction (France, 1920)

Germinal, dir. Yves Allégret (France, 1963)

Germinal, dir. Claude Berri (France, 1993)

Note on the Translation

This translation is based on the text of Germinal edited by Henri Mitterand and published in vol. iii (1964) of Émile Zola, Les Rougon-Macquart (5 vols, Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1960–67) and as a separate volume (Gallimard, Folio, 1978).

Germinal was first translated into English in a pirated, American edition published by Belford, Clarke & Co. in Chicago in 1885. Given the extensive mistranslations