Plot Background Zola\'s Germinal Encompasses Thinking Major

¶ … plot background Zola's Germinal encompasses thinking major figures discussed

Revolutionary Sentiment

By most estimates, the historical epoch of the mid to late 19th century was fairly turbulent, particularly within the throes of Western Civilization. Earlier in that century the communist urgings of Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels challenged the conventional politics and economics of the time period in which the capitalist divide between those that have and those that have not was especially noticeable -- even blatantly so (Marx, Engles 1848). Additionally, psychological notions of hysteria, the likes of which would be innovated and championed by Sigmund Freud, were also being explored (Scurr 2010), while conventional notions of labor and exploitation were also being challenged. Much of the zeitgeist that was existent during this epoch is demonstrated within Emile Zola's Germinal, which was the 13th novel within the author's 20 volume series entitled Les Rougon-Macquart. A close analysis of the majority of characters within this novel, as well as the background and the plot involved, reveals that the author was actively attempting to accurately reflect the intellectual hegemony existent during this time period.

Germinal is set within the French coal mining town of Montsou in the 1860's. Many of the conditions that led political thinkers such as Marx and Engels to unveil their communist ideology are highly palpable in this poor town, which is rooted in the type of penury in which denizens routinely have difficulty eating. One of the primary characters within this work, a young woman by the name of Catherine who is at the center of a love triangle involving Etienne Lantier and her lover Chaval, reflects upon the poor economic conditions that eventually contribute to a decidedly violent strike in the following quotation. "She had had enough of being beaten and thrown out by her man, of wading like a stray dog through the mud on the road, without even being able to ask her father for a bowl of soup, for he was as starving as she was" (Zola). This quotation represents the fact that both Catherine and her father, a character named Maheu, are suffering from poverty. As residents of Montsou, the pair is highly emblematic of the impoverished conditions of the town as a whole. This notion of dire economic straits, of course, was central to the theories of communism that abounded during this time period.

Yet what is perhaps even more emblematic of the conditions that were responsible for the engendering of communism is the wanton exploitation of labor that the lower classes, or proletariats, routinely endured at the hands of the controlling class bourgeoisie, which are represented in the novel in many forms. Whereas laborers such as Catherine, Lantier and most of the other townspeople spent the vast majority of their lives laboring in the coal mine, they had very little to show for it. On a certain level, this sort of exploitation of labor propagated by the working class is reflected within the fate of a salacious shopkeeper, who would routinely allow sexual favor from female customers who were too poor to pay for his goods. After killing this shopkeeper the townspeople even castrated him, and reveled in the significance of his death which the following quotation indicates. "They passed round the bleeding stump, as if they had exterminated a wild animal that had been preying on each and every one of them, and saw it their inert and in their power" (Zola). What is most significant about this quotation is the fact that this shopkeeper, who is emblematic of the bourgeoisie that exploited the people's labor, is described as "preying" on the masses of people. This type of language and its connotations are central to communist, and even socialist conceptions at the time that reviled the exploitation of the proletariat's labor.