Germinal (6 page)

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 nineteenth
century. 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 to eradicate its cause? What if the choices were different, more contemporary? Tiananmen Square or a measure of democracy? A War on Terror or an autonomous State of Palestine?

When Zola was asphyxiated by the fumes from his bedroom fire on 29 September 1902, it was discovered that his chimney had been capped during repair work. Was this an accident or did someone on the political Right who objected to his defence of the Jewish army officer, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, plan his death? Already he had accepted a prison sentence and exile in England as the price of his defence of this innocent man. Had he now paid with his life for his belief in the truth? The answer to that question is not known. But on 5 October some 50,000 people followed his funeral procession through the streets of Paris, including a delegation of miners from the Denain coal-field. And from the single word they chanted during the procession it is evident that they at least believed in the authenticity of their champion – and in the power of that one word to symbolize protest against injustice wherever and whenever throughout the history of human affairs that injustice may be found: ‘Germinal! Germinal! Germinal!…'

1.
  Émile Zola,
Correspondance
, ed. B. H. Bakker (10 vols, Montreal and Paris, 1978–95), vol. 5, p. 126.

2.
  Ibid., pp. 240–41.

3.
  Quotations from ‘Notes sur la marche générale de l'œuvre' in Émile Zola,
Les Rougon-Macquart
(5 vols, Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1960–67), vol. 5, pp. 1738–41.

4.
  Zola,
Correspondance
, vol. 5, p. 249.

5.
  Ibid., p. 347.

All twenty novels in the Rougon-Macquart cycle have been translated into English, and the principal ones are available in Penguin Classics, as is
Thérèse Raquin
.

Frederick Brown,
Zola. A Life
(New York, 1995; London, 1996)

F. W. J. Hemmings,
The Life and Times of Émile Zola
(London, 1977)

Graham King,
Garden of Zola
(London, 1978)

Alan Schom,
Émile Zola. A Bourgeois Rebel
(London, 1987)

Philip Walker,
Zola
(London, 1985)

David Baguley,
Naturalist Fiction. The Entropic Vision
(Cambridge, 1990)

— (ed.),
Critical Essays on Émile Zola
(Boston, 1986)

Elliot M. Grant,
Émile Zola
(New York, 1966)

—,
Zola's ‘Germinal'. A Critical and Historical Study
(Leicester, 1962)

F. W. J. Hemmings,
Émile Zola
(2nd edn, Oxford, 1966; reprinted with corrections, 1970)

Irving Howe, ‘Zola: The Genius of
Germinal
',
Encounter
34 (1970), pp. 53–61

Robert Lethbridge and Terry Keefe (eds),
Zola and the Craft of Fiction. Essays in Honour of F. W. J. Hemmings
(Leicester, 1990; paperback edn, 1993)

Brian Nelson,
Zola and the Bourgeoisie
(London, 1983)

Naomi Schor,
Zola's Crowds
(Baltimore, 1978)

Colin Smethurst,
Émile Zola. ‘Germinal'
(London, 1974; repr. Glasgow, 1996)

Philip Walker,
‘Germinal' and Zola's Philosophical and Religious Thought
(Amsterdam, 1984)

Angus Wilson,
Émile Zola. An Introductory Study of his Novels
(New York, 1952)

Richard H. Zakarian,
Zola's ‘Germinal'. A Critical Study of its Primary Sources
(Geneva, 1972)

Germinal
, ed. Colette Becker (Paris, 1989)

Germinal
, ed. Henri Mitterand (Paris, 1978)

Henri Mitterand,
Zola. I. Sous le regard d'Olympia (1840–1871), II. L'Homme de ‘Germinal' (1871–1893), III. L'Honneur (1893–1902)
(Paris, 1999–2002)

Colette Becker,
Émile Zola: ‘Germinal'
(Paris, 1984)

—,
La Fabrique de ‘Germinal'
(Paris, 1986)

Philippe Hamon,
Le Personnel du roman: le système des personnages dans les ‘Rougon-Macquart' d'Émile Zola
(Geneva, 1983)

Henri Mitterand,
Le Regard et le signe
(1987)

—,
Zola: L'Histoire et la fiction
(1990)

—,
Zola et le naturalisme
(1986)

Michel Serres,
Feux et signaux de brume: Zola
(Paris, 1975)

La Grève
[
The Strike
], dir. Ferdinand Zecca (France, 1903)

Au pays noir
[
In the Black Country
], dir. Lucien Nonguet (France, 1905)

Au pays des ténèbres
[
In the Land of Darkness
], dir. Victorin Jasset (France, 1912)

Germinal
, dir. Albert Capellani (France, 1913)

Germinal
, anonymous direction (France, 1920)

Germinal
, dir. Yves Allégret (France, 1963)

Germinal
, dir. Claude Berri (France, 1993)

This translation is based on the text of
Germinal
edited by Henri Mitterand and published in vol. iii (1964) of Émile Zola,
Les Rougon-Macquart
(5 vols, Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1960–67) and as a separate volume (Gallimard, Folio, 1978).

Germinal
was first translated into English in a pirated, American edition published by Belford, Clarke & Co. in Chicago in 1885. Given the extensive mistranslations and omissions of this version (by ‘Carlynne'), it might be fairer to say that the first English translation was that undertaken by the journalist Albert Vandam, Paris correspondent of the London newspaper the
Globe
. This appeared in instalments in the
Globe
from 30 November 1884 to 26 April 1885 and was afterwards purchased and published in book form in June 1885 by Henry Vizetelly, father of Ernest (who subsequently edited and/or translated many of the Rougon-Macquart novels). But Vandam's version was bowdlerized. The first complete and unexpurgated translation of
Germinal
into English, privately published in London in 1894 by the Lutetian Society, was by Havelock Ellis (1859–1939), the celebrated authority on sex. Ellis's translation, prepared in collaboration with his wife Edith Lees (1861–1916), was first published in the Everyman Library in 1933. It was revised and edited by David Baguley for Everyman Paperbacks in 1996.

The present translation replaces that of Leonard Tancock for Penguin Classics, first published in 1954. Since then there have been at least two American translations: by Willard R. Trask for Bantam Books (New York, 1962) and by Stanley and Eleanor
Hochman (New American Library, New York, 1970). The most recent translation is that by Peter Collier in the Oxford World's Classics (1993), which is helpfully annotated by the translator and has an informative and well-judged Introduction by Robert Lethbridge

Germinal
poses none of the problems of
L'Assommoir
where the central characters employ the colloquialisms and slang of the contemporary urban working class. Zola chose not to repeat that experiment (which has been cleverly reconstructed by Margaret Mauldon in her 1995 translation for Oxford World's Classics). When an early reviewer of
Germinal
complained that its characters were unrealistic because they did not speak the local dialect of the Département du Nord, its author replied that if they had, no one would have bothered to read his novel. In translating the language of the miners of Montsou, therefore, I have respected the predominantly polite and literate register of the original French. As to the colloquialisms and ‘bad language' with which their language is nevertheless laced, I have tried to render this in a modern English which will seem neither too squeamish nor like a pastiche of working-class ‘speak'. I have sought to use four-letter (and six-letter) words as sparingly as Zola uses the French equivalents (notably ‘foutre' and ‘bougre') but with an equivalent measure of the shock value (in a literary context) which I suppose these words to have had in 1885. In particular, Zola makes a point of using such terms when his characters are under exceptional pressure, whether drunk, as in Étienne's case on one occasion, or having finally lost patience, as in La Maheude's case later in the novel. Hence my own usage at these points in the narrative.

As to the technical vocabulary associated with mining, I have endeavoured, like Zola, to do my research. This vocabulary is explained in the Glossary of Mining Terms.

GERMINAL

Out on the open plain, on a starless, ink-dark night, a lone man was following the highway from Marchiennes to Montsou,
¹
ten kilometres of paved road that cut directly across the fields of beet. He could not make out even the black ground in front of him, and he was aware of the vast, flat horizon only from the March wind blowing in broad, sweeping gusts as though across a sea, bitterly cold after its passage over league upon league of marsh and bare earth. Not a single tree blotted the skyline, and the road rolled on through the blinding spume of darkness, unswerving, like a pier.

The man had left Marchiennes around two o'clock in the morning. He walked with long strides, shivering in his threadbare cotton jacket and his corduroy trousers. A small bundle, tied up in a check handkerchief, was evidently an encumbrance; and he pressed it to his side, first with one arm, then with the other, so that he could thrust both hands – numb, chapped hands lashed raw by the east wind – deep into his pockets. Homeless and out of work, he had only one thing on his vacant mind: the hope that the cold would be less severe once day had broken. He had been walking like this for an hour when, two kilometres outside Montsou, he saw some red fires over to his left, three braziers burning out in the open as though suspended in mid-air. At first he hesitated, suddenly afraid; but then he could not resist the painful urge to warm his hands for a moment.

A sunken path led away from the road, and the vision vanished. To the man's right was a wooden fence, more like a wall, made from thick planks and running alongside a railway line; to his left rose a grass embankment topped by a jumble of gables, apparently the low, uniform roof-tops of a village. He walked on a further two hundred paces or so. Abruptly, at a turn in the path, the fires reappeared close by him, but he was still at a loss to explain how they could be burning so high up in this dead sky, like smouldering moons. But at ground level something else had caught his attention, some large, heavy mass, a huddled heap of buildings from which rose the outline of a
factory chimney. Gleams of light could be seen here and there through grime-coated windows, while outside five or six paltry lanterns hung from a series of wooden structures whose blackened timbers seemed to be vaguely aligned in the shape of gigantic trestles. From the midst of this fantastical apparition, wreathed in smoke and darkness, rose the sound of a solitary voice; long, deep gasps of puffing steam, invisible to the eye.

And then the man realized that it was a coal-mine. His misgivings returned. What was the point? There wouldn't be any work. Eventually, instead of heading towards the buildings, he ventured to climb the spoil-heap to where the three coal fires stood burning in cast-iron baskets, offering warmth and light to people as they went about their work. The stonemen must have worked late, because the spoil was still being removed. He could now hear the banksmen pushing their trains of coal-tubs along the top of the trestles, and in the light from each fire he could see moving shadows tipping up each tub.

‘Hallo,' he said, as he walked towards one of the braziers.

Standing with his back to it was the driver, an old man in a purple woollen jersey and a rabbit-skin cap. His horse, a large yellow animal, stood waiting with the immobility of stone as the six tubs it had just hauled up were emptied. The workman in charge of the tippler, a skinny, red-headed fellow, was taking his time about it and looked half asleep as he activated the lever. Above them the wind was blowing harder than ever, gusting in great icy blasts like the strokes of a scythe.

‘Hallo,' the driver replied.

There was a silence. Sensing the wariness with which he was being observed, the man introduced himself at once.

‘I'm Étienne Lantier, I'm a mechanic. I don't suppose there's any work here?'

The fire lit up his features; he must have been about twenty-one, a handsome, swarthy sort, thin-limbed but strong-looking all the same.