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their frustration, become more receptive to its revolutionary agenda.
    From a post-twentieth-century perspective Pluchart’s Marxist programme may seem dated and, in some respects, even uncontroversial. Rather than being powerless and divided within their own workplace, the workers of the world need to unite and rise up against the bourgeois men of property, seizing the means of production – or rather taking them back into their own rightful ownership – and replacing a class-based political system with the rule of the collective. Patriarchal family structures shall be replaced by relationships based on equality, between men and women, between parents and children; marriage shall be abolished, as shall the right to inherit. But even Pluchart’s Marxism is not enough for someone like Souvarine, a young Russian aristocrat who has given up training to be a doctor in order to learn a manual trade – to be more in touch with the people – and who is a convert to the anarchism, or ‘nihilism’, of Bakunin. For the anarchists, the only way forward is to start again from scratch,
ex nihilo
. All attempts at rationally conceived reform, and even the Marxist overthrow of the bourgeois State, are anathema, for they will not extirpate the underlying canker of inequality and injustice. Only by beginning with an absolutely clean sheet – even if this were to mean wiping out most of the human race – can we hope to establish a just society on apermanent and secure basis. Within the novel Souvarine’s philosophy is the most chilling and, as it turns out, the most destructive. But with characteristic subtlety Zola makes Souvarine, of all the characters in
Germinal
, the most acute commentator on the situation facing the miners. He sees that in an unregulated capitalist economy the minimum wage is actually determined by capital’s need for labour and that it will fluctuate in such a way as to allow workers to produce more workers (that is, live and raise families) but at the cheapest possible cost. And he sees that during a slump it is financially in the interests of the Montsou Mining Company to provoke a strike rather than to lay off its workers: that way it avoids the odium of a lockout, and it weakens its opponents by exhausting their nascent provident fund.
    But Souvarine represents the ultimate paradox: inhumanity in the service of humanity. He has severed all ties of blood and affection, save only for his obsessive stroking of a plump rabbit whom, with Russian wit, he has christened Poland. Just as the Bear looks down on its neighbour as a mere political satellite, so the anarchist cuddles a pet in his lap and dreams of holding the fate of the whole world in his hands. His is the conviction of the religious fanatic or of a Robespierre ushering in the Reign of Terror. But Zola is no terrorist.
Enter the Hero
    So where does Zola stand on the issue of people and politics? Is
Germinal
a blueprint for revolution or reform? Or neither? Is it perhaps a reactionary demonstration of the impossibility of change? Should we read it as a largely impersonal, non-committal documentary which happens to end with the vaguely optimistic prospect that the seeds of a better future lie buried in the mud and muddle of today? Or does it offer the more considered and authentic vision of a Darwinian evolution in which nature nurtured becomes a second nature?
    Just as Souvarine dreams of a
tabula rasa
upon which to start afresh, so Zola begins his novel from scratch: ‘Dans la plaine rase, sous une nuit sans étoiles…’ Out on the open plain, on a starless, ink-dark night…Emerging from this featureless voidand into the world of mining strides the figure of Étienne Lantier, a handsome 21-year-old mechanic, intelligent but poorly educated, and bearer of a fatal flaw: a predisposition to murderous, alcoholic rage, which he carries in his blood. And
Germinal
is the story of Étienne’s