Germinal Read Online Free

the intervening years, and so Zola could use what he saw at Anzin in 1884 for the fictional recreation of events in 1866–7. But the political situation had evolved considerably. A law passed on 19 May 1874 had made it illegal to employ women to work underground or children under twelve to work anywhere in a mine; and on 21 March 1884 a bill sponsored by René Waldeck-Rousseau (1846–1904) was passed, legalizing trade unions. The next day saw the beginning of what would have been the revolutionary month of Germinal. Twelve days later, on his very own ‘12 Germinal’ – and indeed on the day of his forty-fourth birthday – Zola began to write the first chapter of his novel.
    As he wrote in a letter to Georges Montorgueil on 8 March 1885,
    Perhaps this time they’ll stop seeing me as someone who insults the people. Is not the true socialist he who describes their povertyand wretchedness and the ways in which they are remorselessly dragged down, who shows the prison-house of hunger in all its horror? Those who extol the blessedness of the people are mere elegists who should be consigned to history along with the humanitarian claptrap of 1848. If the people are so perfect and divine, why try and improve their lot? No, the people are downtrodden, in ignorance and the mire, and
it is from that ignorance and that mire that we should endeavour to raise them
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People and Politics
    Germinal
is a novel about people and about the people: about particular human beings and about humanity at large. As the account of a miners’ strike it is the story of the 10,000 workers employed by the Mining Company based in the fictional location of Montsou, a town evocatively named as the place where the sous pile up in a mountain of riches for the enjoyment of everyone but the men, women and children who actually produce the coal. And it is the terrible fate of this workforce which is here traced in such well-documented and painful detail. But by extension, and as Zola wrote when he first began to draft the novel, it is the story of ‘the struggle between capital and labour’. Within the context of the 1860s
Germinal
records (with a small measure of historical licence) how a recession in the United States has led to empty order-books in the French coal-mining industry, where companies which have overinvested in new plant and machinery must now economize by cutting back production and reducing their workers’ pay. Bust threatens to follow boom, and it’s the poor what gets the blame – for drinking, for promiscuity, for having more babies than they need. Meanwhile shareholders feast and demand their dividend, and the nation’s ruler Napoleon III engages in quixotic warfaring in Mexico at great expense to his country’s economy. For Zola this ‘struggle between capital and labour’ would be the ‘most important issue of the twentieth century’, and
Germinal
was intended as a foretaste of what lay in store. But it was also a picture of what was actually happening: thanks to the wondersof the economic cycle the slump of the 1860s was happening again in the 1880s. And the miners were still striking.
    While the novel thus anticipates the politics of the global economy and the global village, its narrative focus is nevertheless much more precise: namely, the inhabitants of Village Two Hundred and Forty, a purpose-built pit-village of no name and no character, serried rows of cheap housing perched on a windy plateau and overlooking a featureless plain where it always seems to rain. At Number 16 in Block 2 lives the Maheu family, who have worked in the mine since its creation exactly 106 years earlier. Grandpa Maheu, known as Bonnemort (literally ‘good death’) because death has spared him so often, is the grandson of Guillaume Maheu, who (he likes to believe) discovered the first coal near Montsou and so led to the first mine being sunk there. And his son and grandsons are