Germinal - Emile Zola [3]
Introduction
(New readers are advised that this Introduction makes the detail of the plot explicit.)
‘This is one of those books you write for yourself, as an act of conscience.’
(Zola, in a letter to Henry Céard of 14 June 18841)
Considered by André Gide to be one of the ten greatest novels in the French language, Germinal is the story of a miners’ strike. Set in northern France during the 1860s, the work takes its title from the name of a month in the Republican calendar. This calendar, introduced by decree on 5 October 1793 and backdated to 22 September 1792 (which thus became the first day of the First Republic), was a logical consequence of the ban on the Christian religion in France following the Revolution of 1789. Replacing the Gregorian calendar, it took the autumnal equinox as its starting point and was designed to segment time in a non-Christian manner. Each of the year’s twelve months was divided into three ten-day periods known as décades, while the five (or, in leap years, six) remaining days became national holidays.
The months themselves were renamed to evoke the principal organic or meteorological characteristic of the moment: Vendémiaire, Brumaire and Frimaire for the autumn months of vintage, mist and frost; Nivôse, Pluviôse, Ventôse for the winter months of snow, rain and storm; Germinal, Floréal, Prairial for the spring months of seed, flowers and meadows; and Messidor, Thermidor and Fructidor for the summer months of harvest, heat and fruit. Derived from Latin, these names –like those of the renamed days (primidi, duodi, tridi, etc.) – were intended to evoke the Roman Republic, which revolutionary France proudly if briefly took as its model. However, following Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup d’état in 1799 and his Concordat with the Roman Catholic Church in 1801, the calendar was eventually abandoned as from 1 January 1806.
Germinal was thus the seventh month – from 21 March to 19 April during the first seven years of the calendar, but from 22 March to 20 April during the subsequent six – and its name suggests germination and renewal. Not only was the calendar itself the product of the Revolution, but the date of 12–13 Germinal in the Year Three (1–2 April 1795) is also of particular significance because of a famous uprising mounted by the Parisian populace who were facing starvation. As a title, therefore, Germinal neatly focuses on the novel’s two central subjects: political struggle and the processes of nature. Indeed at the centre of the title is the mine itself (in French the word is pronounced like ‘mean’), Zola’s chosen emblem of the oppressive working conditions in which ill-paid labour makes a fortune for capital. Since the novel opens in March and ends in the April of the following year, its chronology combines one annual cycle with a symbolic passage through the month of ‘germination’. Thus, more obliquely still, the title also encapsulates a profound ambiguity at the heart of Zola’s narrative and perhaps at the heart of all human striving. Can there be progress – social, political, intellectual, moral progress – or is every new beginning but the repetition of an eternal cycle of growth and decay? If a revolution is one turn of the wheel, does it take us forward or bring us full circle? Are we getting somewhere or going nowhere?
Plans and Preparations
Germinal was originally published in serialized form in the newspaper Le Gil Blas. The first of the eighty-nine instalments appeared on 26 November 1884, the last on 25 February 1885. The completed novel was then published in book form on 2 March, and over the first five years this original French version sold some 83,000 copies. It was the thirteenth of the twenty novels comprising Zola’s great family saga entitled Les Rougon-Macquart (1871–93): its central character, Étienne Lantier, is the son of Gervaise, a laundry-woman, in L’Assommoir (The Drinking Den: 1877) and brother to the eponymous heroine of Nana (1880),