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By Root 1513 0

Those on the political Right charged him once again with being tasteless and immoral, while – more importantly for someone of his own moderate left-of-centre views – those on the Left condemned him for depicting the working class in such a negative light. Where Zola had thought he was indicting the system by showing how low human beings can be brought by background and circumstance – and often, as in Gervaise’s case, despite their very best efforts – his socialist detractors saw a degrading portrait which would only reinforce bourgeois prejudice. They were unwilling to acknowledge that in so powerfully eliciting the reader’s sympathy for Gervaise as the honourable victim of insuperable and malign forces Zola might have been hoping to make that reader a partisan of social and political reform.

By way of defending the honourableness of his intentions Zola let it be known that he was planning another novel about the working class, and one which would focus on its political aspirations and on the economic and social conditions in which its members lived. But which area of work should he choose? While on holiday at Bénodet in Brittany in 1883, Zola met Alfred Giard (1846–1908), the left-wing député for Valenciennes and a biologist with a particular research interest in the reproductive organs. Since his constituency in northern France was one of the centres of the French coal-mining industry, Giard no doubt saw a golden opportunity to secure the services of a brilliant publicist for the miners’ cause; while Zola, no doubt keen to re-establish his radicalist credentials, could also see the artistic and polemical merits of taking a miners’ strike as his subject. Accordingly, and characteristically, he began to document himself thoroughly, reading book after book about the mining industry, about the topography and geology of the area around Valenciennes and about radical politics: about the history of socialism and about the International Working Men’s Association founded in 1864, better known as the First International. He familiarized himself with the full range of radical political theory: the libertarian socialism of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–65), who had famously declared in 1840 that property is theft (if it means the ability of one man to exploit the labour of another but not if it means the individual’s right to possess his own ‘means of production’, be it land or a workshop full of tools); the ‘Communism’ or ‘centralized socialism’ of Karl Marx (1818–83), who had published his Manifesto of the Communist Party in 1848 and whose Das Kapital (1867) had begun to appear in French translation in 1875; the ideas of Auguste Blanqui (1805–81), the revolutionary socialist and insurrectionary who had been prominently involved in the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 and was elected President of the Commune (1870–71) while in prison, where indeed he spent long periods; and finally the anarchism, or ‘nihilism’, of the Russian revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin (1814–76), author of Statehood and Anarchy (1873).

More particularly, Zola read how Marx had been elected one of the thirty-two members of the First International’s provisional General Council and then assumed its leadership; how the representatives of the national federations would meet at a congress every year in a different city; and how at The Hague in 1872 the clash between supporters of Marx’s socialism and Bakunin’s anarchism led to an irrevocable split in the movement. In order to prevent the Bakunists from gaining control of the Association, the General Council, at Marx’s behest, moved its headquarters to New York before finally disbanding at a conference in Philadelphia in 1876. The Bakunists nevertheless took over the de facto leadership of the International and held their own congresses from 1873 to 1877. At the Socialist World Congress in Ghent in 1877 the Social Democrats broke away because their motion to restore the unity of the First International was rejected by the anarchist majority. But the International now began to wither, and after the Anarchist Congress in