• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1516 0

here traced in such well-documented and painful detail. But by extension, and as Zola wrote when he first began to draft the novel, it is the story of ‘the struggle between capital and labour’. Within the context of the 1860s Germinal records (with a small measure of historical licence) how a recession in the United States has led to empty order-books in the French coal-mining industry, where companies which have overinvested in new plant and machinery must now economize by cutting back production and reducing their workers’ pay. Bust threatens to follow boom, and it’s the poor what gets the blame – for drinking, for promiscuity, for having more babies than they need. Meanwhile shareholders feast and demand their dividend, and the nation’s ruler Napoleon III engages in quixotic warfaring in Mexico at great expense to his country’s economy. For Zola this ‘struggle between capital and labour’ would be the ‘most important issue of the twentieth century’, and Germinal was intended as a foretaste of what lay in store. But it was also a picture of what was actually happening: thanks to the wonders of the economic cycle the slump of the 1860s was happening again in the 1880s. And the miners were still striking.

While the novel thus anticipates the politics of the global economy and the global village, its narrative focus is nevertheless much more precise: namely, the inhabitants of Village Two Hundred and Forty, a purpose-built pit-village of no name and no character, serried rows of cheap housing perched on a windy plateau and overlooking a featureless plain where it always seems to rain. At Number 16 in Block 2 lives the Maheu family, who have worked in the mine since its creation exactly 106 years earlier. Grandpa Maheu, known as Bonnemort (literally ‘good death’) because death has spared him so often, is the grandson of Guillaume Maheu, who (he likes to believe) discovered the first coal near Montsou and so led to the first mine being sunk there. And his son and grandsons are now working down the mine at Le Voreux, that ‘voracious’ pit which seems to gobble up the workers’ flesh like some ancient god demanding human sacrifice. His son Toussaint Maheu and his daughter-in-law, La Maheude – so called, like all the miners’ wives, because she is merely an adjunct of her (wedded or common-law) husband – have produced seven children; and the heedlessness with which they have been conceived – at ‘playtime’, after the miner has had his bath – is matched only by the casual cruelty with which heredity and environment snatch their lives away. Already handicapped by the genetic effects of generation after generation of slave labour and malnutrition, they are ugly, anaemic and variously deformed – only then to be starved, crippled or fatally injured. Or shot, if they should dare to protest.

Love is not love but sex; and sex is not making love but screwing, raping, having it off, in the fields, on the roof of a shed, behind the spoil-heap where all the rubble from the mine is piled. Not a mountain of riches nor a bed of roses but a weed-infested dump upon which to sow the seed of yet more wasted, worthless lives. Such human fellowship as exists is the solidarity of ‘comrades’, of the men, women and teenage children who are obliged to live and work cheek by jowl, on an inadequate wage, a prey to illness and a miserable climate. To live is to survive; by stealing a moment’s bodily pleasure and starting another life, or by saving a life, racing to the rescue of a fellow-miner after a rock-fall or sinking new shafts through solid rock to save a comrade from drowning or starving to death hundreds of metres below the ground. Life goes on; it matters little who lives it.

Surrounding the Maheu family are other mining families: the Levaque household next door, where a slattern shares her bed with both husband and lodger, and the Pierrons’, where life is good because man and wife collaborate with the bosses. Violent, predatory males roam the streets and country paths or haunt the innumerable bars, bent on oblivion or a charmless fuck. Meek and powerless