Germinal was first published in 1885 and has been translated many times, always keeping the original title.
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Tag Archives: Germinal
Germinal (1993) – Movie Images
Germinal is one of Zola’s most famous novels and is a bleak depiction of a mining community before, during and after a strike. The book, as usual for Zola, is packed with characters and events that bring the story alive.
The 1993 film adaption of the novel was directed by Claude Berri and starred Gérard Depardieu as Maheu. The film also had Renaud as Étienne Lantier and Miou-Miou as Maheude. Further information can be found at IMDb.
Germinal
Who said this and when?
I was expecting that–the accusation of starving the people and living by their sweat. How can you talk such folly, you who ought to know the enormous risks which capital runs in industry–in the mines, for example? A well-equipped pit today costs from fifteen hundred thousand francs to two millions; and it is difficult enough to get a moderate interest on the vast sum that is thus swallowed. Nearly half the mining companies in France are bankrupt. Besides, it is stupid to accuse those who succeed of cruelty. When their workers suffer, they suffer themselves. Can you believe that the Company has not as much to lose as you have in the present crisis? It does not govern wages; it obeys competition under pain of ruin. Blame the facts, not the Company.
The speaker is a the owner of a small coal mine in northern France in the 1860’s, a character in Zola’s novel Germinal. He lives comfortably enough, but he is a captive of the system, as are the miners. They are ground down by their lives in a world devoted only to coal. The old minor spits black phlegm:
“It’s coal. I’ve got enough in my carcass to warm me till I die. And it’s five years since I put a foot down below. I stored it up, it seems, without knowing it; it keeps you alive!”
This book is painful to read. Zola’s thorough research provides us with detailed descriptions of mining and the conditions in which the men must work. Each day is a struggle to earn enough to keep bread on the table. During the strike there is no bread and no table either, since everything is sold in the effort to survive.
Tears fell over each object of the poor household which had to go, and the mother was still lamenting that one day she had carried away in her skirt the pink cardboard box, her man’s old present, as one would carry away a child to get rid of it on some doorstep. They were bare; they had only their skins left to sell, so worn-out and injured that no one would have given a farthing for them. They no longer even took the trouble to search, they knew that there was nothing left, that they had come to the end of everything, that they must not hope even for a candle, or a fragment of coal, or a potato, and they were waiting to die, only grieved about the children, and revolted by the useless cruelty that gave the little one a disease before starving it.
Zola shows us a world in which all are trapped. The miners have only a dim understanding of the big picture, but they know it is not right.
The workers could not hold out; the Revolution had only aggravated their wretchedness; only the bourgeois had grown fat since ’89, so greedily that they had not even left the bottom of the plates to lick. Who could say that the workers had had their reasonable share in the extraordinary increase of wealth and comfort during the last hundred years? They had made fun of them by declaring them free. Yes, free to starve, a freedom of which they fully availed themselves.
One of the results, besides the strike, is senseless violence which often destroys what little the workers have or can depend on. The miners’ riot recalls some of the urban riots we have had in this country. At such times, people ask why do they destroy? It only hurts them in the long run. They destroy because they are angry and there is no long run.
Germinal is a powerful book. Zola takes the reader into the lives of the miners and makes you experience their anger and their grief.
Exceptional Excerpts: The Belly of Paris, by Émile Zola
The Belly of Paris was originally published in 1873 as Le Ventre de Paris; it was the third novel in the Rougon-Macquart series of novels and is centred around the busy Les Halles market in the centre of Paris.
This excerpt comes from a point about three quarters the way through the novel and takes place in Madame Lecoeur’s cheese storeroom. Also present is Mlle Saget and La Sarriette. Mlle Saget has found out some information about the main character, Florent. Although the reader of the novel already knows from the opening pages what this secret is I won’t reveal it here as I want to concentrate largely on the descriptive and lyrical prose of this section. It is, in total, about five pages long and begins with a page long description of all the cheeses in the storeroom, the women continue gossiping as the smells of all the cheeses in the enclosed room becomes overwhelming.
I would have liked to just quote the whole section but that might have been a bit excessive. Instead I’ve picked out some of the more descriptive text and left out most of the dialogue and gossiping, this is because the dialogue makes more sense as part of the plot, whereas the descriptive text more easily stands alone. I’ve indicated where I’ve skipped some text with an ellipsis in square brackets. I believe that this section was known as ‘The Cheese Symphony’ for reasons that will soon be clear.
All around them the cheeses were stinking. On the two shelves at the back of the stall were huge blocks of butter: Brittany butter overflowing its baskets; Normandy butter wrapped in cloth, looking like models of bellies on to which a sculptor had thrown some wet rags; other blocks, already cut into and looking like high rocks full of valleys and crevices. […] But for the most part the cheeses stood in piles on the table. There, next to the one-pound packs of butter, a gigantic cantal was spread on leaves of white beet, as though split by blows from an axe; then came a golden Cheshire cheese, a gruyère like a wheel fallen from some barbarian chariot, some Dutch cheeses suggesting decapitated heads smeared in dried blood and as hard as skulls – which has earned them the name of ‘death’s heads’. A parmesan added its aromatic tang to the thick, dull smell of the others. […] Then came the strong-smelling cheeses: the mont-d’ors, pale yellow, with a mild sugary smell; the troyes, very thick and bruised at the edges, much stronger, smelling like a damp cellar; the camemberts, suggesting high game; the neufchâtels, the limbourgs, the marolles, the pont-l’évèques, each adding its own shrill note in a phrase that was harsh to the point of nausea; […]
A silence fell at the mention of Gavard. They all looked at each other cautiously. As they were all rather short of breath by this time, it was the camembert they could smell. This cheese, with its gamy odour, had overpowered the milder smells of the marolles and the limbourg; its power was remarkable. Every now and then, however, a slight whiff, a flute-like note, came from the parmesan, while the bries came into play with their soft, musty smell, the gentle sound, so to speak, of a damp tambourine. The livarot launched into an overwhelming reprise, and the géromé kept up the symphony with a sustained note.
( The Belly of Paris, by Émile Zola, Oxford University Press, translated by Brian Nelson, 2007, p210-216)
Exceptional Excerpts: Germinal, by Emile Zola
Germinal, (1885) by Emile Zola, is the thirteenth novel in his twenty-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart, but it’s the first that I have read by this great French writer. The realism of this story of a miners’ strike in the 1860s in northern France is stunning.
In this Sensational Snippet, the strike has got out of control. A small contingent of soldiers are guarding Belgian scabs in the pit and the strikers are attacking them with stones and bricks. Zola – whose sympathies throughout this novel are with the miners and their cause – shows that things are never as simple as they seem afterwards in the cold light of day:
The little squad was nearly lost to sight under the hail of stones. Fortunately they landed too high and merely pitted the wall above. What was to be done? For a moment the captain considered retreating into the buildings, but the very thought of showing his back to the mob made his pale face flush – and in any case it was no longer practicable, for if they made the slightest movement they would be lynched. A brick had just broken the peak of his cap and blood was trickling down his forehead. Several of his men were wounded, and he realized that they were at the end of their tether and had reached the stage of instinctive self-defence when they would no longer obey their superiors. The sergeant had let out an oath when his shoulder had nearly been put out and his skin bruised by a heavy thud that sounded like a dolly banging the washing. The recruit had been grazed in two places, his thumb was smashed and his right knee was smarting: how much longer were they going to put up with this? One brick had bounced up and hit the veteran in the groin, and he had turned green and was raising his rifle with his thin arms. Three times the captain was on the point of ordering them to fire. He was torn with perplexity, and for some seconds an apparently endless struggle within him shook all his ideas, his sense of duty and his beliefs as a man and as a soldier. The bricks rained thicker still, and just as he was opening his mouth to shout ‘Fire!’ the rifles went off of their own accord; first three shots, then five, then the whole volley of a platoon and then, long afterwards, a single shot in the midst of silence.
There was a moment of stupefaction. They had really fired, and the crowd stood motionless, unable to believe it. Then piercing shrieks arose, while the bugle sounded the cease fire. And then a wild panic like the stampede of cattle before machine-guns, a frantic rush through the mud.
(Germinal, by Emile Zola, Penguin Classics, 1954 translation by L.W. Tancock, p 410-1)
Selected by Lisa Hill, 17/11/11 and cross-posted at ANZ LitLovers.
Germinal by Émile Zola, translated by L.W. Tancock
There have been some shocking accidents in coal mines in my life time, including the 2010 Pike River disaster in New Zealand which killed 29 men. More scandalously, multiple fatalities occur regularly in China, where there are numerous illegal mines and regulations to protect the workers in legal ones are obviously lax. (There were 2433 mine deaths in 2010 in China, and as I write this there is another mine disaster there this week). So even though Germinal is set in the 19th century and (according to the Introduction by L.W. Tancock) Émile Zola was writing of an earlier period when conditions were worse than they were at the time he was writing, reading some of the sequences were enough to make me wonder why in the 21st century the lives of men are still risked in this way. Germinal is very evocative writing.
The story traces events in the life of Etienne Lantier, an intelligent but uneducated man, who arrives penniless and starving in the mining town of Montsou after a punch-up with his former employer. Through a stroke of luck he gets work in the mine, and becomes fond of Catherine, one of numerous children in the poverty-stricken Maheus family, all of them destined to work in the mine from childhood onwards, except for Alzire, who is crippled. Conditions in their home are appalling. Hunger is constant, and since they cannot possibly manage on what they earn, the mother must go begging from the indifferent wealthy in order to appease her creditors.
But if conditions above ground are bad, below ground they are atrocious. There are some very distressing scenes involving terrified pit ponies destined never to see the sun again, but the miners likewise have no choice but to endure the confined spaces, foul air, long hours and extremely dangerous conditions. Because of the way they are paid for what is brought to the surface, they cut corners when it comes to putting in timber props to stabilise the rock walls above them, putting their own lives at risk. Their wages are kept low through the owners’ tactics of auctioning off plots for the miners to work, so to get work, the workers’ teams must continually undercut each other. This doesn’t just keep them poor, it keeps them divided as well. There are constant savage arguments and abuse of each other, especially amongst the women.
It seems an intolerable life, and so it’s understandable that there is heavy drinking, and the young people take their pleasures where they may: in grotty shacks in winter, and in the cornfields in summer. There is no middle-class morality to disapprove; what makes the parents cross is when an extra mouth arrives to be fed, or even worse if the couple marry and the income the errant son or daughter had been bringing in goes elsewhere. Etienne is not among those who frolic in this way: he had his eye on Catherine but she is too young and not emotionally ready. the villainous Chavel, however, has no such scruples and has his way with her before long. With the resignation that characterises all of them to their fate, Catherine submits to his affections and they become a couple.
In respect of this relationship, it’s a bit like Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbevilles: the actual event is ambiguous. Does Catherine say yes, or not? It’s hard to tell whether it’s a case of the author being coy in a typically 19th century way about rape, used here to symbolise the way the system overpowered individuals, or whether Zola himself thought some women – or these women – liked a bit of persuasion through rough-love. After her initial reluctance in the cornfield, Catherine and Chavel are reasonably fond at first but soon the relationship is marked by constant kicks and beatings. To a 21st century eye Catherine’s submission to Chavel’s sustained violence looks like the defeated actions of a battered wife.
Anyway, for Etienne, it’s company down at the bar when he’s not working, and there, influenced by the amoral Souvarine, a Russian anarchist and political émigré, he begins to educate himself in political and economic philosophy, reading everything he can get his hands on. Soon he becomes part of discussions about that fellow Karl Marx and his ideas about improving the lot of working people, arguing about whether there should be gradual change or full-scale revolution to overthrow capitalism altogether.
Etienne’s powers of persuasion enable him to set up a Provident Fund but when a change in pay scales finally forces the miners out of their passivity and triggers a strike, the fund is barely enough to support the miners for a week, never mind a sustained stoppage. The timing of their visit to the manager to plead their cause coincides with a splendid luncheon complete with truffles and partridge – and the diners make sport about it, sealing themselves inside a darkened room and pretending to each other to be so scared of the strikers that they must conceal their presence at the luncheon. The hungry men, by contrast, are so humble that they are too afraid of damaging the antiques to sit down outside in the reception room, and Maheu as spokesman is so deferential that he has no impact at all.
None of the bourgeois really has any idea about the misery their workers endure both above and below ground, M. Grégoire is a placid, lazy and sentimental man who simply wants to enjoy the fruits of his inherited wealth and lavish it on his spoilt daughter Cecile. The women view the entire enterprise as an opportunity for pseudo-works of charity (which don’t include giving what’s really needed – money and food). When there’s an accident, these women take advantage of it as a grotesque form of sight-seeing, and the daughters get out their paints to make a picture of the scene.
Zola, however, balances this picture of complacent bourgeois living off the labour of others with a more complex view of things from their point of view. These mine owners are under pressure themselves because of a downturn in orders from America, and one of them, Deneulin, has perilous debts due to the cost of modernising his plant and equipment and a small rise in labour costs two years before. For him to pay higher wages now would bring ruin and he tries to explain that the closure of his mine would leave them even worse off, but understandably the strikers are unconvinced. M. Hennebeau the manager is under pressure to return profits to the company he works for. Not only that, but manufacturing all around them is dependant on cheap coal, and a protracted strike is a disaster for the local economy. For all their faults, the bourgeois are not depicted as evil, but rather as characters caught in a complex web of economic realities which seem to preclude any just solution to the miners’ grievances.
So the violence when it comes, is a shock. It is mob violence, but personalised, and characters we have come to know do and suffer unspeakable things. There is an horrific scene when Catherine and Chavel, slaving underground in a torrid heat are trapped there by violence above, and the death of the shopkeeper who refused credit is revolting. Zola’s women are real furies indeed, but there is also the sickening example of a miner’s child wholly corrupted by violence. But in each case we see humanity caught in the web – see my Sensational Snippet for an example where the soldiers confronted by the savagery of the miners are compromised by their inability to withstand it.
The real villain of the story is the earth itself, and the final scenes below ground after the defeat of the strike are the stuff of nightmares. Although I’ve ordered the DVD, I’m not sure that I’m going to be able to watch it.
Although the introduction makes it clear that there are historical inaccuracies in the plot, Zola’s unrelenting realism succeeds in confronting the tragedy of the struggle between capital and labour. In this novel no one is to blame, and there are no ready solutions. It’s very powerful writing.
Commentary by Lisa Hill, 11/11/13 and cross-posted at ANZ LitLovers
Author: Emile Zola
Title: Germinal
Translator: L.W. Tancock
Publisher: Penguin Classics 1969, first published 1885.
ISBN: none
Source: an OpShop somewhere, purchased long ago.
Availability:
Fishpond: Germinal (Wordsworth Classics of World Literature).
Book Depository: Germinal (Wordsworth Classics of World Literature) They have the DVD of Germinal too, starring Gerard Depardieu.
The Books of Émile Zola 