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workshop full of tools); the ‘Communism’ or ‘centralized socialism’ of Karl Marx (1818–83), who had published his
Manifesto of the Communist Party
in 1848 and whose
Das Kapital
(1867) had begun to appear in French translation in 1875; the ideas of Auguste Blanqui (1805–81), the revolutionary socialist andinsurrectionary who had been prominently involved in the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 and was elected President of the Commune (1870–71) while in prison, where indeed he spent long periods; and finally the anarchism, or ‘nihilism’, of the Russian revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin (1814–76), author of
Statehood and Anarchy
(1873).
    More particularly, Zola read how Marx had been elected one of the thirty-two members of the First International’s provisional General Council and then assumed its leadership; how the representatives of the national federations would meet at a congress every year in a different city; and how at The Hague in 1872 the clash between supporters of Marx’s socialism and Bakunin’s anarchism led to an irrevocable split in the movement. In order to prevent the Bakunists from gaining control of the Association, the General Council, at Marx’s behest, moved its headquarters to New York before finally disbanding at a conference in Philadelphia in 1876. The Bakunists nevertheless took over the
de facto
leadership of the International and held their own congresses from 1873 to 1877. At the Socialist World Congress in Ghent in 1877 the Social Democrats broke away because their motion to restore the unity of the First International was rejected by the anarchist majority. But the International now began to wither, and after the Anarchist Congress in London in 1881, it ceased to represent an organized movement. Only later, four years after the publication of
Germinal
in 1885, was the Second International, the so-called Socialist International, founded at a congress in Paris. This Second International supported parliamentary democracy and finally, at its congress in London in 1896, expelled the anarchists (who opposed it) from its ranks, reaffirming the Marxist doctrine of the class struggle and the unstoppable advent of proletarian rule.
Germinal
was thus set at a time when the International was in its infancy and yet published after its (temporary) demise, and it must therefore have left its first readers with an overwhelming sense of both the ephemerality and the inevitable recurrence (1789, 1830, 1848, 1870–1…) of revolutionary fervour.
    But by way of preparing to write
Germinal
Zola did not justread books. At first posing as Giard’s secretary (but then, when his cover was blown, being shown round by Giard’s brother Jules), he visited the small mining town of Anzin, near Valenciennes, on 23 February 1884. A strike had begun there four days earlier, and he remained for approximately a week, taking copious notes on what he saw and heard – a document which remains a powerful and accurate account of the realities of colliery life at that time. Zola was aware that there had been a major strike at Anzin in 1866 (as well as several since), and because
Les Rougon-Macquart
was set during the Second Empire, he chose this as the focus for his imaginative reconstruction of the past. Hence the chronology of
Germinal
, which begins in March 1866 – a date which is not given in the novel itself but which can be inferred from the reference in the opening chapter to the Emperor waging war in Mexico. But Zola drew on other strikes for his novel, notably on the strike at La Ricamarie in the mining area of Saint-Étienne, where on 16 June 1869 troops fired on the striking workers. Thirteen miners were killed, including two women, and sixty were given a prison sentence. Similarly at Aubin, in the Aveyron, fourteen striking miners were shot dead on 7 October 1869, and twenty were wounded. Working conditions in the mines had changed little in