Germinal - Emile Zola [6]
But by way of preparing to write Germinal Zola did not just read books. At first posing as Giard’s secretary (but then, when his cover was blown, being shown round by Giard’s brother Jules), he visited the small mining town of Anzin, near Valenciennes, on 23 February 1884. A strike had begun there four days earlier, and he remained for approximately a week, taking copious notes on what he saw and heard – a document which remains a powerful and accurate account of the realities of colliery life at that time. Zola was aware that there had been a major strike at Anzin in 1866 (as well as several since), and because Les Rougon-Macquart was set during the Second Empire, he chose this as the focus for his imaginative reconstruction of the past. Hence the chronology of Germinal, which begins in March 1866 – a date which is not given in the novel itself but which can be inferred from the reference in the opening chapter to the Emperor waging war in Mexico. But Zola drew on other strikes for his novel, notably on the strike at La Ricamarie in the mining area of Saint-Étienne, where on 16 June 1869 troops fired on the striking workers. Thirteen miners were killed, including two women, and sixty were given a prison sentence. Similarly at Aubin, in the Aveyron, fourteen striking miners were shot dead on 7 October 1869, and twenty were wounded. Working conditions in the mines had changed little in the intervening years, and so Zola could use what he saw at Anzin in 1884 for the fictional recreation of events in 1866–7. But the political situation had evolved considerably. A law passed on 19 May 1874 had made it illegal to employ women to work underground or children under twelve to work anywhere in a mine; and on 21 March 1884 a bill sponsored by René Waldeck-Rousseau (1846–1904) was passed, legalizing trade unions. The next day saw the beginning of what would have been the revolutionary month of Germinal. Twelve days later, on his very own ‘12 Germinal’ – and indeed on the day of his forty-fourth birthday – Zola began to write the first chapter of his novel.
As he wrote in a letter to Georges Montorgueil on 8 March 1885,
Perhaps this time they’ll stop seeing me as someone who insults the people. Is not the true socialist he who describes their poverty and wretchedness and the ways in which they are remorselessly dragged down, who shows the prison-house of hunger in all its horror? Those who extol the blessedness of the people are mere elegists who should be consigned to history along with the humanitarian claptrap of 1848. If the people are so perfect and divine, why try and improve their lot? No, the people are downtrodden, in ignorance and the mire, and it is from that ignorance and that mire that we should endeavour to raise them.2
People and Politics
Germinal is a novel about people and about the people: about particular human beings and about humanity at large. As the account of a miners’ strike it is the story of the 10,000 workers employed by the Mining Company based in the fictional location of Montsou, a town evocatively named as the place where the sous pile up in a mountain of riches for the enjoyment of everyone but the men, women and children who actually produce the coal. And it is the terrible fate of this workforce which is