Germinal by Émile Zola Read Free Book Online Page B

that they are tourists. It has become fashionable to visit the scene of disaster, be it the collapse of Le Voreux or the rescue attempt going on to save the trapped miners. But Zola is no gawping rubberneck or heartless aesthete. Above all he is not simply the professional novelist doing the research for his latest, money-spinning bestseller, exploiting human suffering before he returns to his house in the country to write it up before a four-course lunch. Perhaps indeed that is why his documentation at Anzin was quite so thorough, and so valuable: he had a guilty conscience.
    And his only saving grace can be that of ‘education’. As Étienne walks along the road from Marchiennes to Montsou at the beginning of the novel, he is not only destitute, he is also ignorant. The world of mining is a closed book to him, and the plain itself is a barren, windswept wasteland. His only hope is that sunrise may bring a modest rise in temperature. At the end, as he walks along the same road in the opposite direction, he has become knowledgeable, and he has a job to do. He is a man with a train to catch. The new dawn means progress. The world of mining – and the workers’ struggle for justice – has become an open book, and the plain is now a teeming, ‘germinating’ surface from beneath which the truth is just waiting to spring into view: ‘a whole world of people labouring unseen in thisunderground prison, so deep beneath the enormous mass of rock that you had to know they were there if you were to sense the great wave of misery rising from them’.
    Buried beneath our own ignorance and incarcerated within our own prejudice, we readers of
Germinal
have similarly been provided with a map to the unknown. But we have not been lectured or subjected to the ‘humanitarian claptrap’ of the kind which Étienne himself still foolishly rehearses in his head: ‘Discomfited by the workers’ reek of poverty, he felt the need to raise them up to glory and set a halo on their heads; he would show how they alone among human beings were great and unimpeachably pure, the sole font of nobility and strength from which humanity at large might draw the means of its own renewal.’ Rather we have been given a warning:
    Germinal
is about compassion, not about revolution. What I wanted was to say loud and clear to the fortunate of this world, to its masters: Take heed. Look beneath the surface. See how these wretched people work and suffer. There may still be time to avoid total catastrophe. But hasten to be just, or else disaster looms: the earth will open at our feet and all nations will be swallowed up in one of the most terrible upheavals ever to take place in the course of human history. 5
    It could be argued that when Zola wrote those words in December 1885 (to David Dautresme, editor of
Le Petit Rouennais
) he was simply demonstrating the cynical pragmatism of a successful bourgeois who did not want his new-found wealth taken away from him. But it might more persuasively be argued that
Germinal
is a piece of shrewd propaganda, the work of a man of genuine compassion who was appealing to the cynical pragmatist in his fellow bourgeois in order to improve the lot of his fellow human beings.
    Is Zola’s warning still of relevance? It may seem not. In some so-called developed countries the mining industry itself has almost ceased to exist, and even the manufacturing worker is an endangered species. Social and economic conditions have changed enormously since the second half of the nineteenthcentury. But the fundamental issue in
Germinal
perhaps has not. Shoot the miners or pay them a fair wage? That question now seems simple. But it might not seem so simple – even if today’s reader of
Germinal
still wished to give the same answer – if the issue were put more broadly. Should ‘the fortunate of this world’, its ‘masters’, stamp out the expression of grievance or seek