Germinal by Émile Zola

to eradicate its cause? What if the choices were different, more contemporary? Tiananmen Square or a measure of democracy? A War on Terror or an autonomous State of Palestine?
    When Zola was asphyxiated by the fumes from his bedroom fire on 29 September 1902, it was discovered that his chimney had been capped during repair work. Was this an accident or did someone on the political Right who objected to his defence of the Jewish army officer, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, plan his death? Already he had accepted a prison sentence and exile in England as the price of his defence of this innocent man. Had he now paid with his life for his belief in the truth? The answer to that question is not known. But on 5 October some 50,000 people followed his funeral procession through the streets of Paris, including a delegation of miners from the Denain coal-field. And from the single word they chanted during the procession it is evident that they at least believed in the authenticity of their champion – and in the power of that one word to symbolize protest against injustice wherever and whenever throughout the history of human affairs that injustice may be found: ‘Germinal! Germinal! Germinal!…’
NOTES
    1.   Émile Zola,
Correspondance
, ed. B. H. Bakker (10 vols, Montreal and Paris, 1978–95), vol. 5, p. 126.
    2.   Ibid., pp. 240–41.
    3.   Quotations from ‘Notes sur la marche générale de l’œuvre’ in Émile Zola,
Les Rougon-Macquart
(5 vols, Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1960–67), vol. 5, pp. 1738–41.
    4.   Zola,
Correspondance
, vol. 5, p. 249.
    5.   Ibid., p. 347.
Further Reading and Filmography
In English
    All twenty novels in the Rougon-Macquart cycle have been translated into English, and the principal ones are available in Penguin Classics, as is
Thérèse Raquin
.
BIOGRAPHIES
    Frederick Brown,
Zola. A Life
(New York, 1995; London, 1996)
    F. W. J. Hemmings,
The Life and Times of Émile Zola
(London, 1977)
    Graham King,
Garden of Zola
(London, 1978)
    Alan Schom,
Émile Zola. A Bourgeois Rebel
(London, 1987)
    Philip Walker,
Zola
(London, 1985)
CRITICAL STUDIES
    David Baguley,
Naturalist Fiction. The Entropic Vision
(Cambridge, 1990)
    â€” (ed.),
Critical Essays on Émile Zola
(Boston, 1986)
    Elliot M. Grant,
Émile Zola
(New York, 1966)
    â€”,
Zola’s ‘Germinal’. A Critical and Historical Study
(Leicester, 1962)
    F. W. J. Hemmings,
Émile Zola
(2nd edn, Oxford, 1966; reprinted with corrections, 1970)
    Irving Howe, ‘Zola: The Genius of
Germinal
’,
Encounter
34 (1970), pp. 53–61
    Robert Lethbridge and Terry Keefe (eds),
Zola and the Craft of Fiction. Essays in Honour of F. W. J. Hemmings
(Leicester, 1990; paperback edn, 1993)
    Brian Nelson,
Zola and the Bourgeoisie
(London, 1983)
    Naomi Schor,
Zola’s Crowds
(Baltimore, 1978)
    Colin Smethurst,
Émile Zola. ‘Germinal’
(London, 1974; repr. Glasgow, 1996)
    Philip Walker,
‘Germinal’ and Zola’s Philosophical and Religious Thought
(Amsterdam, 1984)
    Angus Wilson,
Émile Zola. An Introductory Study of his Novels
(New York, 1952)
    Richard H. Zakarian,
Zola’s ‘Germinal’. A Critical Study of its Primary Sources
(Geneva, 1972)
In French
CRITICAL EDITIONS
    Germinal
, ed. Colette Becker (Paris, 1989)
    Germinal
, ed. Henri Mitterand (Paris, 1978)
BIOGRAPHY
    Henri Mitterand,
Zola. I. Sous le regard d’Olympia (1840–1871), II. L’Homme de ‘Germinal’ (1871–1893), III. L’Honneur (1893–1902)
(Paris, 1999–2002)
CRITICAL STUDIES
    Colette Becker,
Émile Zola: ‘Germinal’
(Paris, 1984)
    â€”,
La Fabrique de ‘Germinal’
(Paris, 1986)
    Philippe Hamon,
Le Personnel du roman: le système des personnages dans les ‘Rougon-Macquart’ d’Émile Zola
(Geneva, 1983)
    Henri Mitterand,
Le Regard et le signe
(1987)
    â€”,
Zola: