Germinal

"Both Germinal and A Tale of Two Cities made an impression on me. They are about the lives of poor people and the kind of life they lead in poverty. In Bangladesh it’s all about poverty, the extreme poverty you see around you and you want to do something about it. These books talk about poverty in Europe."

"Novels are important, and I’ve been a bit too academic in my choices so far. I went for Germinal , by Émile Zola. During the Third Republic, Zola wrote a 20-novel cycle about the French Second Empire, so he’s looking back a generation. It’s called the Rougon-Macquart cycle and Germinal is the most famous. It was an Open University set text for decades. It’s about a miners’ rebellion in the 1880s in France. It’s an amazing novel because Zola pulls absolutely no punches at all. He looks from the mine owners, to the more privileged miners, right down to the children working in the mines who are abused by people who might be trade unionists. It gives an extraordinary picture of the mine as this almost inhuman, machine-like development devouring the souls of everybody who works in it. We know from Orwell’s descriptions what a completely different world mining is. Zola went to the coalfields in northeast France and went down a mine. He experienced a miner’s strike. So when he’s writing about it, it has the fine-grained feel of ordinary life, which is very far from the historical generalities that historians tend to talk about. I’ve tried to recapture some of that in writing about Peterloo, the small detail of the bottom of the heap, as well as the grand generalizations. Some of his portraits of individuals, of the workers, of the experience of going down a mine are quite vivid and extraordinary. “I’m a strong believer in the power of non-violence. Any gains that violence makes tend to be short-term and illusory” It’s called Germinal from the month of ‘Germinal’ in the French Revolutionary calendar. It’s the spring, the sowing, but he turns that around. The workers are appallingly badly treated. They behave with great resentment and violence as a result, and the entire strike [SPOILER ALERT] ends in disaster. An anarchist saboteur, a nihilist, sets charges and blows up the mine and it collapses into a huge hole. At the end of it the original character who is our eyes and ears—the person who walks into the area and gets the job in the mine and finds out about it—is almost the only person to survive. And yet Germinal has been interpreted as a politically optimistic novel. Towards the end of it Zola writes that the miners, ‘passed by in a constant stream like a routed army forced to march and retreat, moving ceaselessly onwards with their heads hung low, filled with a quiet but furious rage at the thought of needing to start struggling all over again, and seek revenge.’ Well, you can read revolutionary pessimism, human pessimism or perhaps revolutionary optimism into that. The final image is the following spring, when flowers spring up in the meadow where the mine has collapsed, to symbolize the endless renewal of the human spirit and the possibility of doing better next time. Again, towards the end, Zola writes, ‘their crumbling society had received another body blow, they’d heard the foundations cracking beneath their feet and felt the first shockwaves of tremors to come, which would grow in number until the whole rotten tottering edifice would come crashing down and disappear into the abyss like La Voreux’ (the mine, ‘the voracious one’.) You can read what you want into that, but it’s an absolutely fantastic portrait of a strike and of a whole society at war with itself. Apart from anything else, Germinal is a great read. What all the books I’ve chosen have in common is that they all spend a lot of time looking at the very significant details. They don’t generalize or theorize. They do have broad visions, they do make broad points, but they do it on the basis of insights into all sorts of tiny, significant, little things that are happening, the human details, the significant details, the images, the pictures. They look at life on a human scale. They look at real things. That’s true of all five of them. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Four out of the five—with the exception of The Making of the English Working Class— also make a point of looking at the authorities pretty much equally. They analyze the whole thing in terms of the interplay between authority and power and protest and people. It’s the interplay between the two and the detail that makes gripping history and that’s what I’ve tried to do in Peterloo . It’s a very dangerous thing to offer tactical or strategic advice to protesters, not least because the message received would likely be very different from what was sent, even if it was ever heeded. But in all things, it’s important to think of the longer-term, of how this will pan out, of what eventually will provide a solution. What, realistically, will success look like? And then aim for that, thinking long term, doing as little human damage as possible. One massacre, or one episode of unjustifiable violence, might work in the one instance, but it will come back to you 10, 20 times over and hamper whatever it is you’re trying to do in the future. That’s true of authorities or, for that matter, of revolutionary massacres and violence from the bottom. The consequences will be visited on you not just once, but many times over. I think I draw a distinction between conflicts within a state and the use of military force in war or under a military occupation. That’s a different situation. But if you are talking about using violence within a state to achieve long-term political ends, then the long-term damage that does is much greater than the short-term benefits that it brings. Yes, the concentration camps needed to be captured by force, but to slide between things like that and the notion of revolutionary violence is very dangerous. As an anti-nuclear campaigner in the 1970s and 1980s I was influenced by Gene Sharp’s The Politics of Nonviolent Action . It’s an encyclopaedia of historical examples where he argues that it’s essentially the exercise of citizenship and things other than violence that tend to bring about enduring change."