We can trace the history of the 19th and early 20th century French through their fiction, from the romantic epic of Victor Hugo to the psychological retreat of , passing through , , and . Between 1870 and 1893 Émile Zola wrote twenty novels. Inspired by the ninety plays of Balzac’s Comédie Humane, Zola made his own “Natural and social history of a family during the Second Empire” to erase the line that separates science from literature, journalism from history. The thirteenth of these twenty novels that can be read separately is Germinalrecently republished by the publishing house Bernat Metge with the translation by Anna Casassas and the foreword by the poet Maria Sevilla.
The concept of a republic is incompatible with the private interests of the bourgeoisie
Germinal it is the story of a man, Étienne, of a family, the Maheu, and of an entire mining colony that wakes up from oppression and misery. Or maybe it’s the other way around, because the work begins with the plan of the family house, progresses with the general vision of the colony and continues with the figure of Étienne and other small and large miners, like an accordion that goes from the collective to the individual. The proletarian revolution germinates in the underground where every day 10,000 workers go to sleep, waiting for the utopian spring of socialism and the final anarchist liberation. This is the utopia that Étienne anticipates in the disordered readings he does, driven by a voracious passion to educate himself and become a revolutionary leader. To face the injustice, the miners go on strike until the last consequences. To die for the sake of dying, better to starve without working. “One of the theses of my prologue a Germinal is that the concept of a republic is incompatible with the private interests of the bourgeoisie”, he says from the other end of the phone. He continues: “what surprises me is that you get the idea of reading a ‘scientific novel’, cold, but the ending is so melodramatic and so implausible!”, Sevilla says it with an enthusiastic tone, of whom he has laughed.
The realistic melodrama about the class struggle
Germinal it glides like nothing, like a cinematic panorama. and on television, and it’s easy to understand why. If we get carried away from the beginning, we get carried away as today it seems that only endless TV series can capture the masses. The plot has it all: it infuriates us, it makes us suffer, it keeps us hopeful and it catches us from the beginning with the oldest ingredient in the world, the love tension between Étienne and one of the Maheu’s daughters. It is fair and necessary to remember the importance of the trade union struggle, and to read Germinal it’s a great way to do it, not only because of the message but mostly because of the style, translucent like a mirror. Zola does not miss any injustice, and describes the brutality of work as well as the ravages of alcoholism and systemic violence against women. Five hundred pages seem like a lot until you leave your phone in another room and let yourself be lulled by the author’s broad view of the world he saw and immortalized. Maria Sevilla explains it like this:
“We see the few hours that the Maheu sleep and then we are in the dining room of the mine owners, and the daughter wakes up late because ‘that night was windy’. The multiple focus also allows us to see the point of view of the bosses. The vision aims to be objective, because it shows us everything, but at the same time it is very playful. It is clear that in the novel you empathize with some and not with others”. In this Zola gives us a good example of the sweaty, but valid idea about the objectivity of journalism: it can never be completely objective, but it must aspire to tell us a story from different angles. We pass from the Maheu’s coffers to the gluttonous welfare of the owners of the means of production, who eat crayfish and languish in boredom. The novel alternates the story of the strike and the miners with the disappointments and passions of the bosses and their families, privileged and also a little unfortunate in their own way.
The failure of the French revolution
actually, Germinal is an investigative report of more than 500 pages inspired by the Anzin miners’ strike of 1884, which lasted 56 days and mobilized some 40,000 miners. The bourgeois revolution of 1789 had made all French citizens citizens on paper, but in practice the workers lived like animals and starved. Napoleon III ruled France as emperor, without taking into account either democracy or the values of freedom, equality, fraternity. In the Maheu family’s dining room hangs a picture of the emperor and his wife, as a mockery of the miners’ suffering. The coming revolution was coming: if the bourgeois brought down the Ancien Régime of the nobility, it is only a matter of time before the workers rebel against the new masters. The shrewdest and most charismatic miners know this, and the shrewdest bosses too, because they are aware that they live idle and only to exploit the coal mines that work entire starving families.
As a result of the Anzin miners’ strike, a historic strike, the Waldeck-Rousseau law was enacted, which legalized trade unions in France and which, therefore, could be categorized as the first essential step of the workers’ struggle and of everything that would come in the 20th century – the anarchist experiments, communism, the workers’ demands of European social democracy. Germinal it was published as a full novel a year after the famous strike, in 1885, and was a huge bestseller. At that time the Second Empire had already ended, and the maneuvers of the Prussian imperialist Otto von Bismarck would isolate France and feed the French resentment that in the 20th century would lead to the First World War.
The science of making a novel
to write Germinal Émile Zola did what had never been done with such precision until then: he went down to the mines, and turned the miners into subjects worthy of starring in a magnum opus that ennobles them. Hence the detailed descriptions of the world presented to us, from the instruments used in the mine to the daily routines of mining families. “Zola has an obsession with detail, and the biggest challenge is to make the translation as precise as the original text is at all times; you have to find the specific word that designates each thing, each tool, each piece, each action,” explains translator Anna Casassas.
You have to find the specific word that designates each thing, each tool, each part, each action
Émile Zola was the son of an architect who abandoned his mother when he was still a child, and began as a newspaper contributor. The author conceived Germinal like a building, and this means that he built an exact topography of the mines, that the notes of what would end up being the novel were twice its length: “everything is measured to the millimeter (in the environments, in the characters, in the rhythm)”. At the time, the public laughed at Zola’s ‘scientific’ methodology, which consisted of documenting himself first-hand, through the author’s visits to the mine. Today, any ambitious novelist is bound to document himself.
Maria Sevilla ends the prologue a Germinal with the , in which we were all forced to disconnect from work and the new forms of digital semi-slavery. I quote from the prologue: “Every revolutionary process requires a lot of political imagination, and it is precisely this – imagination, fantasy, fiction: literature – that the society of work, the culture of inattention and modern feudalism are taking away from us”. The American economist gave a speech in Madrid in 1930 in which he predicted that a century later, that is, now, we would only have to work an average of 15 hours a week. This has not been the case, because the capitalist gear only works if the balance of appetite is maintained (neither too much nor too little) and if the work is exponential. A bit like Zola’s miners, on April 28, 24 we had an unforeseen leisure space and dreamed of social revolution.
Germinal
Emile Zola
Translation by Anna Casassas, foreword by Maria Sevilla
House of the Classics
576 pages. 29.95 euros
