"Germinal" by Emile Zola

Corn, Jack, 1929-, Photographer - Wikimedia commons File:FIRST SHIFT OF MINERS AT THE VIRGINIA-POCAHONTAS COAL COMPANY MINE ^4 NEAR RICHLANDS, VIRGINIA, LEAVING THE ELEVATOR.... - NARA - 556393.jpg

This no-holds-barred story tells of the people living in a French mining village in the 1860s. Hugely realistic, it chronicles their lives as men, women, children and horses go down into the pit to extract coal. It describes their poverty and the near-bestial lives they lead, unable to make ends meet, living together in single rooms, taking their pleasure in one another's bodies in the fields. They are struggling to survive. But there is a recession and the Company, awash with surplus coal, seeks to reduce the wages of the workers. This leads to a strike and to violence.

The title, which refers to a spring month in the French revolutionary calendar, relies on the last lines of the novel which, after so much bleakness and hardship, seem to promise a fresh start and hope for the future: "Men were springing up, a black avenging host was slowly germinating in the furrows, thrusting upwards for the harvests of future ages. And very soon their germination would crack the earth asunder." (7.6; last lines)

The central character, Etienne, is previously seen in another of Zola's twenty volume novel sequence in which he set out to write a a naturalistic and realistic mirror to society focusing on a single family.

Germinal is generally recognised as Zola's masterpiece. Its unrelenting focus on poverty reminded me of George Orwell's Road to Wigan Pier but it was written in 1885, fifty years before Orwell. Its political views reminded me of the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, written in the 1910s. I cannot think of any contemporary English novel that comes anywhere close to Germinal as an unrelenting 'warts and all' portrait. Yes, there are elements of Victorian prose-style, there is a touch of melodrama, and there is a clear cut division between the 'salt of the earth' poor and the decadent and selfish bourgeois, but it is as honest a portrait as anything I have read of the time.

It is the descriptions that make this a masterpiece. But Zola also works on the characters. Many of these are flat and one-dimensional, but others, such as Etienne and Catherine and Maheuse and Moquette are beautifully complex.

It might help to know that there were twenty sous to a franc, so a sou is worth five centimes. 

Selected quotes:

• "She sweated and panted and her joints cracked, but she never complained, for familiarity had brought apathy, and you would have thought that being doubled up like that was part of the normal course of human suffering." (1.4)
• "Perhaps he found in his new friend the good smell of the open air, the long-forgotten smell of the sun-kissed grass, for all of a sudden he burst into a resounding whinney, a song of joy with a sob of wistfulness running through it." (1.5) The horses have a stable in the pit, once sent down they never see daylight, and the old horse is a character all of his own.
• "Girls don't grow very fast hereabouts." (1.4) Catherine, despite being fifteen, has not yet had her first period, presumably because of malnutrition.
• "He pushed her to the table, cracking jokes to celebrate the one good moment a chap can enjoy during the whole day, calling it taking his dessert - and free of charge, what's more!" (2.4) There's a lot of sex in this book and very little romance. The poorer classes are described as if they are animals reproducing so that the bosses can have a constant supply of workers. 
• "Now who could pretend that the worker had had his fair share of the extraordinary advance in wealth and living standards over the last hundred years. It was a mockery to call them free - yes, they were free to die, and they did that all right!" (3.1)
• "It was ... her boast that not a single haulage girl became pregnant without first having lost her virtue at her establishment." (3.2)
• "Were they just cattle then, to be herded together like this in the fields, so on top of each other that nobody could change his shirt without showing his behind to his neighbours?" (3.4)
• "But even the Gregoires came back to the strike, expressing their astonishment that there was no law to prevent workpeople from leaving their work." (4.2) Following the recent public sector strikes in the UK, Conservative MPs have called for precisely this: laws to force public servants to work to provide minimum standards of cover. Has anything changed since Zola's day?
• "Even if you do have fun with men that doesn't mean you're a slacker." (4.5)
• "As though everything in the garden were lovely just because you had bread to eat." (5.5) Zola even-handedly shows that rich people have their problems ... and some of them are made to suffer as a consequence of the strike.
• "Everywhere, in the morning mist, along the shadowy roads, the trampling herd could be seen, lines of men plodding along with their noses to the ground like cattle being driven to the slaughterhouse." (7.6) 
• "Was Darwin right, then, was this world nothing but a struggle in which the strong devoured the weak so that the species might advance in strength and beauty?" (7.6)

A triumph of realism and a book set in the past which has so many uncomfortable echoes for our own days.

November 2023; 720 pages

There is a podcast about this novel on the BBC Radio 4 In Our Time website; it can be accessed here.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God