Modern France: history, culture, and society

¶ … France

FRENCH HISTORY: GERMINAL and a LIFE of HER OWN

Emile Zola was a French critic and writer, better known for his extreme opposition of Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte and his fiery social commentaries against society in the 19th century. Zola was intensely interested in portraying life as he saw it without romanticizing about some of its aspects. Initially his works did not receive much public acclaim but after the publication of THeRESE RAQUIN in 1867, he became a well-known literary figure in France. From 1871 to 1893, Zola focused on the publication of what is now known as the Rougon-Macquart series. Under this series, he came up with some truly amazing novel including L'ASSOMMOIR (1877), NANA (1880), GERMINAL (1885) and LA B. TE HUMAINE in 1890.

All these novels were natural commentaries on the society and culture of 19th century France when industrialization was at its peak and social conditions at their bottom. France was undergoing tremendous change, which was more negative than positive in nature. Germinal thus focused on life of coal miners. Poverty-stricken coal-miners were ruthlessly exploited by the French bourgeois whom Zola once described as a family that "has as its prime characteristic the overflow of appetite, the broad up-thrust of our age, which flings itself into enjoyments. Physiologically the members of this family are the slow working-out of accidents to the blood and nervous system which occur in a race after a first organic lesion, according to the environment determining in each of the individuals of this race sentiments, desires, passions, all the natural and instinctive human manifestations whose products take on the conventional names of virtues and vices."

Zola was a naturalist and believed in presented his stories in the light of his definition of naturalism. His kind of naturalism was based on true depiction of life, as it exists. Germinal studied the circumstances of a group of men gripped in situations they simply couldn't control. French industrialization had resulted in extreme exploitation as at one point, the author observed:

The all-devouring mine had swallowed its daily ration of men, more than 700 workers laboring now in this giant ant heap, burrowing through the earth in every direction, riddling it like an old piece of wood infested by worms." (Germinal, 125)

Zola has used food as one of his tools to accentuate the differences that existed between lower and higher social classes in those times. Food has been described in great detail at various occasions to highlight the hunger that plagued the coalmining class and to stress the fact that man must eat or he perishes. In Part 2, Chapter 3, Zola describes a feast scene that makes one understand that how rarely coalminers were treated to lavish meals:

Beside the rabbit with potatoes, a rabbit which had been fattening in the shed for a month, the Maheus had meat soup and beef. The fortnight's wages had just fallen due the day before. They could not recollect such a spread. Even at the last St. Barbara's Day, the fete of the miners when they do nothing for three days, the rabbit had not been so fat nor so tender. So the ten pairs of jaws, from little Estelle, whose teeth were beginning to appear, to old Bonnemort, who was losing his, worked so heartily that the bones themselves disappeared. The meat was good, but they could not digest it well; they saw it too seldom. Everything disappeared; there only remained a piece of boiled beef for the evening. They could add bread and butter if they were hungry."

Similarly in Part 5, Chapter 4, Zola shows that the main reason behind French Revolution was shortage of food. In one scene, coalminers shout "Bread! Bread! We want bread!" (265)- a cry that symbolized hunger of working classes and stressed the need for better wages and more humane treatment.

The character that I liked the most was that of Catherine, daughter of an experienced miner Maheu, because of her remarkable survivor streak and for her vulnerabilities. Catherine was woman of incredible strength as she opted for harsh conditions of the mines since she found them better than starvation and working in brothels. She felt it was more respectful to push the heavy coal wagon with her body "bent forward and the arms kept stiff, so that [she] could push with all the muscles of the shoulders and haunches" (53) than starving in sub-human conditions. The author has added strength and power to this otherwise diminutive figure. Highly effective is the scene when Catherine leaves for brutalizing work in coalmines: "she seemed like some little man" (Part I, Chapter 2). Catherine plays an extremely significant role in the novel. While she is strong-willed on the one hand, she has her share of vulnerabilities that keep her apart from Etienne, her lover. She also allows herself to be dominated by Chaval- one thing that many readers find rather perplexing. Her death also served a critical purpose and highlighted the real plight of coalminers during French industrialization.