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refusal to accept what he finds.
    Unlike Grandpa Maheu, who has joined many strikes and been shot at by the King’s troops, Étienne scorns the mute acceptance of the ways of the world. Unlike La Maheude, who has known the danger and loss that come from stepping out of line, it will take little to rouse him to action. For Étienne is by nature rebellious, and the novel traces his education – in the classroom of experience as well as from books – as he struggles for a way of improving the lot of his fellow human beings, his ‘comrades’. His journey begins in his instinctive insubordination, of the sort which has seen him fired from his job as a railway mechanic in nearby Lille; and his untutored mind provides a propitious seedbed where the ideas and opinions of Rasseneur, Pluchart and eventually Souvarine may germinate and grow. At first he is simply intoxicated by the prospect of overthrowing the oppressor, but as yet he has no idea how to achieve this nor what political system to put in the oppressor’s place. As with the commercial opportunist Rasseneur and the political careerist Pluchart, his raised political consciousness stimulates personal ambition, and he becomes as much interested in his own image as a young leader of the people and in becoming the first working man to address the National Assembly in Paris. More insidiously he begins to aspire to some of the refinements of bourgeois living, and the reek of poverty soon nauseates him. Gradually his political ideas become more sophisticated, and he oscillates (healthily) between delirious moments of conviction and gloomy periods of doubt. But the question of what to put in place of the status quo is answered by the collectivism of Pluchart, which he espouses with a new glibness and fanaticism, and his moment of glory comes in the forest of Vandame as he is acclaimed by an assembled throng of some 3,000 people. But when, as Rasseneur bitterly predicts, the people turn on him and blame him for their defeat, his disgust at their poverty increases, and he becomes more andmore tempted by the taste for final solutions manifested by Souvarine.
    But he is ‘saved’ by reading Charles Darwin (1809–92), whose
On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection
was first published in 1859 and translated into French in 1865. His reading of Darwin makes him question Souvarine’s
tabula rasa
: what if the old injustices just spring up again in the vacuum left by the ‘total destruction’ which the Russian anarchists seek? And so Étienne reverts to Pluchart’s collectivism, except that now his disgust at the reek of poverty is exceeded by an even greater hatred of the bourgeois. Blending Marx and Darwin, he comes to see the bourgeoisie as a worn-out and superannuated class which, in the battle for the survival of the fittest, can be replaced by a ‘young’ and vigorous proletariat who will renew the world and its ways for the better. With organized trade unions and bigger provident funds, progress
can
be made. Above all Étienne steps back from the allure of violence and destruction and comes to place his faith in legality. Though the strike has been defeated, there is a new political awareness among the miners at large, together with a new preparedness to abandon their age-old passivity and a readiness to organize their resistance. And this is what informs the famous image of germination with which the novel ends:
    Beneath the blazing rays of the sun, on this morning when the world seemed young, such was the stirring which the land carried in its womb. New men were starting into life, a black army of vengeance slowly germinating in the furrows, growing for the harvests of the century to come; and soon this germination would tear the earth apart.
    This is not the trite or spuriously optimistic image which some readers have thought, for in 1885 Zola knew what the future – as seen from 1867 – actually