The dignity and desperation of those who want bread and justice

Émile Zola (Paris, 1840–1902), considered the father of Naturalism according to more conventionally academic literature textbooks, is often described as an old-fashioned, ponderous, didactic novelist. And in part, he is. His novels possess a linear solidity and expository clarity typically characteristic of the nineteenth century. The prolixity with which he narrates some scenes and situations makes certain passages seem superfluous and burdensome. And the scientific yet vindictive spirit with which he addresses injustices, class conflicts, and the subaltern condition of many characters gives his books such an explicit socio-ideological dimension that it can border on propagandistic pedagogy.

And yet, Zola is an extraordinary novelist, one of the giants of the 19th century novel, a century of enormous novels. Now the Catalan reader will be able to see this again by reading Germinal, one of his most paradigmatic works, originally published in 1885 as part of the cycle of The Rougon-Macquart, a detailed, panoramic narrative study of French society during the Second Empire. The edition produced by La Casa dels Clàssics within the Bernat Metge Universal collection is impeccable: a hyper-politicized prologue by Maria Sevilla Paris, inviting discussion, and a finely tuned translation, as usual, by Anna Casassas Figueras.

Set in a mining colony in northern France, not far from the Belgian border, Germinal reconstructs and recounts the exploited and degrading daily lives of the miners and their families, which contrasts with the well-off and privileged lives of the bourgeois owners of the mining company. Presented in this way, the general narrative situation may seem Manichean, and it is somewhat so, although Zola was too intelligent an observer and too astute a novelist not to complicate everything with subtleties, nuances, and contradictions. In any case, these subtleties and nuances do not in the least dilute how things were and how Zola saw them and intended to describe them: on one side, the poor workers, exploited and subjected to all kinds of injustices; on the other, the wealthy bourgeoisie, exploiters and parasites of all injustices. And, between them, the conflict.

Devastated lives

Germinal It's a populous novel, with a rich cast of characters, each with their own subplot and psychology. But the character of Étienne is the one Zola chooses to guide us through the miners' appalling working conditions (the miserable wages, the extreme temperatures, the accidents caused by cave-ins and floods) and through their lives devastated by helplessness, despair, and misfortune and misfortune and misfortune and misfortune and revolt. Étienne is a machinist who has been fired due to a non-ideological conflict (this is important, and demonstrates Zola's subtlety) and who arrives at the mining colony of Montsou looking for work. He finds and is welcomed by the Maheu family, where three generations live together, all marked by the mine: the men live swallowed by the depths of the earth, the women are worn out from childbirth, the old people cough and spit out palmettos as black as coal, the children go hungry...

Apart from the prose, of a muscular precision that combines insight and showiness, ideas and drama, the great virtue of Germinal This is how Zola gradually broadens his focus and progressively enriches the world he portrays. The narrator's omniscience initially focuses all his attention on the everyday life of the mine, but as Étienne becomes a standard-bearer for the union struggle and the entire colony follows him and the Maheus in a bitter strike, the novel opens up and incorporates all the attitudes of political struggle (sensible pact-makers, the shades of socialism (from nihilistic black to reformist pink, obviously passing through revolutionary red) and, also, all the discussions, disputes and crises that defined the First International.

Majestic and combative, Germinal It is a masterpiece of denunciation literature. But it is also, and above all, a masterpiece of literature, plain and simple.