Germinal Read Free

one annual cycle with a symbolic passage through the month of ‘germination’. Thus, more obliquely still, the title also encapsulates a profound ambiguity at the heart of Zola’s narrative and perhaps at the heart of all human striving. Can there be progress – social, political, intellectual, moral progress – or is every new beginning but the repetition of an eternal cycle of growth and decay? If a revolution is one turn of the wheel, does it take us forward or bring us full circle? Are we getting somewhere or going nowhere?
Plans and Preparations
    Germinal
was originally published in serialized form in the newspaper
Le Gil Blas
. The first of the eighty-nine instalments appeared on 26 November 1884, the last on 25 February 1885. The completed novel was then published in book form on 2 March, and over the first five years this original French version sold some 83,000 copies. It was the thirteenth of the twenty novels comprising Zola’s great family saga entitled
Les Rougon-Macquart
(1871–93): its central character, Étienne Lantier, is the son of Gervaise, a laundry-woman, in
L’Assommoir
(
The Drinking Den
: 1877) and brother to the eponymous heroine of
Nana
(1880), to the artist Claude Lantier in
L’Œuvre
(
The Masterpiece
: 1886) and to the psychopathic engine-driver Jacques Lantier in
La Bête humaine
(1890).
    Les Rougon-Macquart
was intended, as its subtitle states, to present ‘The Natural and Social History of a Family under the Second Empire’, and Émile Zola (1840–1902) was only in his late twenties when he submitted a book proposal to the publisher Lacroix in 1869 outlining the project. Between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-five he had been working for the major Parisian publishing house Hachette, at first in the dispatch department and then in marketing, where he quickly rose to become head of publicity. There he learned the ‘business’ of being a professional writer: how to write, what to write, how to sell what you write. Notoriety helps, and the racy bedroom scenes of his first novel
La Confession de Claude
(1865) soon made his name widely known. The sex and violence of
Thérèse Raquin
(1867) caused an even greater stir, and in the following year controversy was further fuelled by his uncompromising Preface to its second edition. Rejecting all charges of sensationalism and pornography he roundly defended the ‘scientific’ purpose of the book: namely, a physiological rather than psychological analysis of the ‘love’ that brings two people of differing ‘temperaments’ together and an attempt to present the ‘remorse’ which follows their murder of an inconvenient husband as an entirely physical, ‘natural’ process.
    By the time, therefore, that Zola submitted his book proposal to Lacroix he was a distinctly marketable commodity, and the project itself did not disappoint: a series of ten novels which would trace the effects of heredity and environment on the successive generations of one family while presenting an exposé of French society under the rule of the Emperor Napoleon III. Something like Balzac’s
Comédie humaine
therefore (which reflects the earlier decades of the century), but more ‘scientific’ – especially in its study of the effects of heredity – and also less coloured by the subjective opinions of its author. After an opening novel which traced the origins of the family and its division into a respectable and wealthy branch (the Rougons)and an illegitimate and genetically flawed branch (the Macquarts, from whom Gervaise Lantier and her children are descended), the remaining nine novels would focus in turn on the separate worlds of fashionable upper-class youth, banking and financial chicanery, government and the civil service, the Church, the army, the working class, the
demi-monde
, bohemia and the legal profession. A lucrative contract was