The Zola PagesThe Zola Pages
Émile Zola's Germinal was the thirteenth of a series of interconnected novels called Les Rougon- Macquart (The Rougon-Macquarts) and subtitled histoire naturelle et sociale d'une famille sous le second empire.
In much the same way as Balzac's Comédie humaine had attempted to portray France of the Restoration (1814-30) and the July Monarchy (1830-1848), Zola intended to produce a complete portrait of France under the Second Empire (1852-70. Like Balzac - whose Comédie humaine he reread in 1869 - Zola used interconnected novels and recurring characters to produce a comprehensive portrayal of French society between 1852 and 1870. Balzac's fictional model had a key influence on Zola (click on Zola salutes Balzac for a visual illustration of this) and Balzac's name recurs frequently throughout Zola's critical and theoretical writings. You should read Zola's `Differences entre Balzac et moi') and Philippe Hamon's comments on realism and naturalism to learn more about the similarities and differences between Zola's and Balzac's respective fictional projects.
Zola, however, sought to provide a more coherent pattern of relationships than the haphazard interconnections of La Comédie humaine. The unifying feature of Zola's series was two branches of a single family: the Rougons and the Maquarts. Since no single family could reasonably be expected to encompass the broad range of social types that he sought to represent, Zola chose to create a family with two branches: the one legitimate with the inherited social advantages of education and wealth; and the other illegitimate social outcasts with inherited genetic failings aggravated by their harsh urban and/or industrial milieux.
The first branch, the legitimate Rougons, would enable Zola to investigate the rising middle class - the driving force of the Second Empire's economic expansion - while the illegitimate Macquarts would provide a range of lower-class characters who represented some of the its negative consequences. The use of a family as the organising structure for his series of novels permitted not only a survey of Second Empire society from top to bottom, but also allowed Zola to elaborate on the influence of environment and heredity.
Certain genetic characteristics are traced through the original couple and then down through their various offspring both on the legitimate and illegitimate sides of the family. In particular there is the recurrent theme of le sang gaté (tainted blood) which inflicts individual characters. Inherited madness, alcoholism and congenital promiscuity haunt both branched of the family. Zola's innate pessimism meant that this family history was one of decline and fall. The legitimate Rougon are subjected to an essentially genetic degeneration, while the members of the impoverished Macquart branch are the victims of both social and genetic disasters.
The wide range of social backgrounds used in Les Rougon-Macquart enabled Zola to study the determining influence of milieu on different characters. As one can see in Germinal Zola was concerned with the effects on the miners of the dreadful conditions in which they lived and worked. The physical effects of the miners' environment is dwelt on at some length in the novel. The Maheu family In Germinal are typical of all mining families in the coron (pit village) and are in a state of permanent fatigue: they are all anaemic, malnourished, their bodies permeated by coal dust. Physically as well as behaviourally, they are all influenced by their environment.
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Activity 1 Re-read the above section and its related web sites and then write down what you consider the principal similarities between Zola's and Balzac's respective fictional projects Once you have formulated your own response click on Discussion 1. |
Despite their obvious similarities, there are a number of differences between Zola's Rougon-Macquart and Balzac's Comédie Humaine, the most signifiant being Zola's systematic appropriation of a scientific modus operandi supported by a number of key Positivist concepts relating to the determining influence of heredity and environment. Zola was the central novelist and theorist of naturalism, a literary movement whose objective was the exact and scientific description of social reality.
Zola was the central novelist and theorist of naturalism, a literary movement whose objective was the exact and scientific description of social reality. Naturalism may be seen as an extension or a continuation of realism as it shares many of the same premises.As its name suggests however, there is an important shift in emphasis and it might be useful here to discuss some of the earlier associations of the term. From the seventeenth century onwards the term `naturalist' was used to designate those working in natural sciences such as botany, zoology and minerology. Moreover, it was used to describe a philosophical doctrine which denied the existence of metaphysical or supernatural phenomena and concentrated solely on the material world.
These earlier meanings are important since the naturalist novelist's primary concern is with the natural world, with what could be directly observed. Zola's writings are marked by an evacuation of metaphysical depth and a stress on the functionning - or, rather, disfunctionning, of the natural world. His essay on Flaubert's Madame Bovary is interesting in this respect. To read an extract from this essay click on Zola on Flaubert.
One result of this concern with the natural world is an interest, shown in a number of naturalist novels, in disease, madness, alcoholism and pathological states. Zola's Thérèse Raquin - a novel predating Les Rougon- Macquart - is a good example of this and, in a hostile review article entitled `La Littérature putride' by Louis Ulbach, was described as `une flaque de boue et de sang'. Click on Gill's Putrid Image for an illustration of Zola, the connoisseur of putrefaction. Thérèse Raquin tells the story of a a woman who conspires with her lover to murder her husband and who is found out and punished, not because of a guilty conscience but because of their nervous temperaments. Zola claimed not to be interested in such themes as morality, sin, guilt or atonement but with the workings of specific temperaments when brought together. In the preface to the second edition of Thérèse Raquin (1868) Zola claimed that:
Mon but a été un but scientifique avant tout ... j'ai montré les troubles profonds d'une nature sanguine au contact d'une nature nerveuse ... J'ai simplement fait sur deux corps vivants le travail analytique que les chirugiens font sur des cadavres.As the above quotation illustrates, Zola tended to validate his ideas on the novel by claiming a similarity to the scientific methods and theories of the day. Zola had read and was greatly influenced by Prosper Lucas's Traité philosophique de l'hérédité naturelle which outlined the importance of heredity in the formation of the human character and behaviour. Heredity is, as I have already mentioned, one of the major concerns of Les Rougon-Macquart. Zola makes this explicit in the preface to the first novel of the series, La Fortune des Rougon (1871):
L'hérédité a ses lois, comme la pesanteur. Je tâcherai de suivre, en résolvant la double question des tempéraments et des milieux, le fil qui conduit mathématiquement d'un homme à un homme.There were other influences too: the writings of Hippolyte Taine - whose description of human behaviour as defined by `la race, le moment, le milieu' is particularly memorable - played a key role in developing Zola's arguments and Darwin's Origins of the Species, published in 1859 - though not translated into French until 1865, was particularly significant too in that it permitted a view of the individual as a product of natural history. This was highly significant since Zola himself came to view the individual as a product of environmental conditions. In Le Roman Expérimental, Zola stated that:
L''homme n'est pas seul, il vit dans une société, dans un milieu social, et dès lors, pour nous romanciers, ce milieu social modifie sans cesse les phénomènes.Zola's novels constantly underline the limitations under which individuals act, stressing environmental and genetic factors and playing down any meaningful sense of human agency.
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Activity 2 Re-read the above section and its related web sites and then write down what you consider to be evidence of typical naturalist preoccupations in Germinal. Once you have formulated your own response click on Discussion 2 |
Zola was the central novelist and theorist of naturalism, a literary movement whose objective was the exact and scientific description of social reality. The novelist, claimed Zola, was a scientist who placed characters and milieu together and observed the reaction produced (click on Émile Zola by Gill for a well-known illustration of this from 1877). In Le Roman expérimental written and published halfway through Les Rougon-Macquart in 1880, Zola makes this explicit and claimed that:
... le roman naturaliste, tel que nous le comprenons à cette heure, est une expérience véritable que le romancier fait sur l'homme, en s'aidant de l'observation.One of the most significant influences upon Zola's development as a naturalist was his reading of the Introduction à la médecine expérimentale by the physiologist Claude Bernard. In this work, Bernard had tried to establish a method for the invesigation of medicine. Zola responded to this by trying to adapt Bernard's method to literature. His ideas are expounded in Le Roman Experimental and as the title suggests, Zola attempted to apply Bernard's idea of experimentation to the novel. In Le Roman experimental Zola argued that just as science was on the way to explaining the laws of the physical world, so novelists could and should do very much the same by explaining the laws of human behaviour:
... si la méthode expérimentale conduit à la connaissance de la vie physique, elle doit conduire aussi à la connaissance de la vie passionnelle et intellectuelle.In order to achieve this understanding in literature, he proposes to apply Bernard's method directly to his work:
Je compte sur tous les plans, me trancher derrière Claude Bernard. Le plus souvent, il me suffira de remplacer le mot `médecin' par le mot `romancier' pour rendre ma pensée claire ...The steps which Zola attempted to follow in his experimental method to the writing of novels were as follows:
observation of the subject of inquiry (e.g. a mining community) supported by documentation (e.g. `Notes sur Anzin') ;
the experiment itself, in other words, the bringing together of various substances or the introduction of a catalyst (e.g. Étienne's entry into that mining community);
the observation of the results of the experiment.
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Activity 3 Re-read the above section then write down what you consider the principal intellectual failings of Zola's theory of the experimental novel. Once you have formulated your own response click on Discussion 3 |
One might argue that, in Germinal, Zola's primary interest is politics rather than genetics. In contrast with Zola's other novel on the urban working class, L'Assommoir, Germinal is a much more overtly political novel, a novel about the class conflict between the industrial proletariat, management and shareholders. At this point it is important to place Germinal in its proper historical context.
Germinal was written between April 1884 and January 1885 and was serialized in a publication called Gil Blas between November 1884 and February 1885 and was published in book form one month later. Although Germinal was written in the mid-1880's, its main action takes place in the mid-1860's. References within the text to the Mexican war and to the cholera epidemic make it possible to date the incidents which take place in the novel fairly precisely to the years 1866 to 1867. Zola then, is writing his novel some twenty years after the fictional events in his novel were supposed to take place. Germinal is a book which is actually about both historical periods: the 1860's which saw the tail end of the Second Empire and the 1880's which saw the early years of the Third Republic. In describing something of the social unrest of the 1860's Zola is also describing the conflicts and tensions of the late nineteenth century and anticipating those of the twentieth century. This is certainly how Zola viewed it in the ébauche to Germinal:
Le roman est le soulèvement des salariés, le coup d'épaule donné à la société, qui craque un instant: en mot la lutte du capital et du travail. C'est là qu'est l'importance du livre, je le veux prédisant l'avenir, posant la question la plus important du vingtième siècle.As the above claim makes clear class conflict is the central theme in Germinal. Zola, however, hesitated over the best way of presenting this struggle. Should he, for example, personalise the struggle between capital and labour by representing capital as a rapacious owner or should he portray capital as an essentially anonymous network of shareholders and managers? Zola settled on the latter option, producing a complex representation of shareholders, managers and, of course, workers.
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Activity 4 Re-read the above passage and its related web sites then write down what you consider to be the political significance of the title, Germinal. Once you have formulated your response click on Discussion 4 |
Zola depicted the negative consequence of the Second Empire's rapid industrial expansion.
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Activity 5 Re-read the above section and its related web sites and then explain Zola's use of animal imagery in Germinal. In what ways is it related to his desire to depict the realities of life in the mine? Once you have formulated your own response click on Discussion 5 |
In Zola et le naturalisme, Henri Mitterand claims that:
... le roman naturaliste - celui de Zola comme celui des autres - et le discours naturaliste ne sont pas homologues ... Germinal n'est pas l'application du Roman expérimental. (Mitterand: 1989 p.19)Other critics have taken a similar approach and have claimed that Zola's writings are traversed by an essentiallly poetic or epic vision. Read the passage below and reflect on the validity of this claim. On the basis of your analysis of the passage decide on what grounds Mitterand basis his argument.
C'était Maheu qui souffrait le plus. En haut, la température montait jusqu'à trente-cinq degrés, l'air ne circulait pas, l'étouffement à la longue devenait mortel. Il avait dû, pour voir clair, fixer sa lampe à un clou, près de sa tête; et cette lampe, qui chauffait son crâne, achevait de lui brûler le sang. Mais son supplice s'aggravait surtout de l'humidité. La roche, au-dessus de lui, à quelques centimètres de son visage, ruisselait d'eau, de grosses gouttes continues et rapides, tombant sur une sorte de rythme entêté, toujours à la même place. Il avait beau tordre le cou, renverser la nuque: elles battaient sa face, s'écrasaient, claquaient sans relâche. Au bout d'un quart d'heure, il était trempé, couvert de sueur lui-même, fumant d'une chaude buée de lessive. Ce matin-là, une goutte, s'acharnant dans son oeil, le faisait jurer. Il ne voulait pas lâcher son havage, il donnait de grands coups, qui le secouaient violemment entre les deux roches, ainsi qu'un puceron pris entre deux feuillets d'un livre, sous la menace d'un aplatissement complet.
Pas une parole n'était échangée. Ils tapaient tous, on n'entendait que ces coups irréguliers, voilés et comme lointains. Les bruits prenaient une sonorité rauque, sans un écho dans l'air mort. Et il semblait que les ténèbres fussent d'un noir inconnu, épaissi par les poussières volantes du charbon, alourdi par des gaz qui pesaient sur les yeux. Les mèches des lampes, sous leurs chapeaux de toile métallique, n'y mettaient que des points rougeâtres. On ne distinguait rien, la taille s'ouvrait, montait ainsi qu'une large cheminée, plate et oblique, où la suie de dix hivers aurait amassé une nuit profonde. Des formes spectrales s'y agitaient, les lueurs perdues laissaient entrevoir une rondeur de hanche, un bras noueux, une tête violente, barbouillée comme pour un crime. Parfois, en se détachant, luisaient des blocs de houille, des pans et des arêtes, brusquement allumés d'un reflet de cristal. Puis, tout retombait au noir, les rivelaines tapaient à grands coups sourds, il n'y avait plus que le halètement des poitrines, le grognement de gêne et de fatigue, sous la pesanteur de l'air et la pluie des sources.
Germinal (I, 4)
| Once you have formulated your own response click on Discussion 6 |
The French edition consulted is Colette Becker's (Paris: Bordas, 1989) for the Classiques Garnier series.
http://www.sunderland.ac.uk/~os0tmc/zola/zola.html
Concept: Tony McNeill, Text: Tony McNeill,
Artwork: Carole Baker
The University of Sunderland, GB, Last Update
8-Jan-96