Germinal - Emile Zola [9]
Just as he illustrates the different faces of capitalism, so too Zola takes pains to represent the wide variety of ways in which ‘labour’ reacts politically and practically to the impossibilities of its situation. Clearly the Catholic Church is of no use, be it in the form of cuddly Father Joire who is all things to all men and wants only a quiet life, or in the form of his replacement, Father Ranvier, a skeletal fanatic who exploits the miners’ suffering to try and convert (or return) them to the Catholic faith with false promises of a meritocracy and universal happiness. No, labour must find its own solution; and the options occupy a spectrum which runs from passive – and pacifist – acceptance to the most extreme anarchism. The older ones, like Bonnemort (aged fifty-eight) or his inseparable friend Mouque, have seen it all before. They have fought and protested and struck, but all to no avail. Why bother? Resistance is pointless and always ends in tears – and bullets. But in Germinal the situation becomes so extreme that even Bonnemort is eventually goaded into an act of barbarous ‘revolutionary’ vengeance. Those aged about forty, like Maheu and his wife, have learned from the events of 1848 twenty years earlier that ‘revolution’ can leave the revolutionaries destitute and the political situation unchanged. But these pragmatists are still young enough to feel anger and the longing for justice, and a combination of hunger-induced light-headedness and intoxicating political oratory still has the power to make them substitute aspiration for caution and to render them the most ardent and determined participants in the strike. Such are the bitter lessons of previous resistance that passive acquiescence has become almost a congenital flaw, and a young girl like Catherine is as dutiful in the workplace as she is submissive to the male. But even she ends up wanting to ‘slaughter the world’, much like La Brûlé, another skeletal fanatic, whose husband has been killed in the mine and who has never lost her passionate desire to wreak vengeance on the bosses.
For most of the miners resistance to oppression is an emotional and instinctive response, and few have the ability to articulate their feelings, let alone the social and economic realities of the situation in which they find themselves. Even Maheu, elected as their spokesman, is no orator. Tongue-tied and intimidated by the conventional hierarchy of worker and boss, he represents none the less the voice of genuine grievance, and when the miners’ delegation confronts the management in the person of M. Hennebeau, Maheu is inspired to fluent articulacy by his own, acute experience of the sheer impossibility of supporting a family on the meagre wage which he and its members are paid. Quite simply they are living below subsistence level. But just what this level should rightly be was then known in France – as it is in Germinal – as the ‘social question’: in a society which had only relatively recently been industrialized, what was a fair level of pay, and what sort of living and working conditions was it reasonable to provide for the new working class?
For some, like Rasseneur, the ex-miner and now owner of a public house, it was important (and supposedly