Ian Birchall, "Germinal's Forbears: Some Fictional Representations of Nineteenth-Century French Miners"

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Emile Zola'sGerminal is recognised as part of the literary canon, but at the same time it has won a working-class audience, especially among miners. They have found in Germinal not merely the depiction of suffering, but also the way in which miners became conscious and organised their resistance.

Zola was not the first French novelist to make miners his subject. The decade before Germinal saw at least six novels dealing with aspects of mining. This paper discusses three novels from the period after the amnesty of the communards (1880), which saw the revival of the French working-class movement: Maurice Talmeyr, Le Grisou (1880), Yves Guyot, La Famille Pichot (1882), and G. Maisonneuve, Plébéienne (1884).Their interest complements that of Germinal. Zola aimed to arouse to awareness his middle-class readers, while giving a voice to his working-class audience. Talmeyr, Guyot and Maisonneuve all wrote for a middle-class readership, aiming to reinforce their prejudices. The limitations of their novels expose the limitations of their understanding - limitations apparent in more recent conflicts.

The novel about the working class was less developed in France than in England. The audience was still primarily middle class, and the working class, whose life was unknown to such readers, replaced the strange customs of distant lands. The mining milieu was a good source of such exoticism. By their black skins, the miners acquired the same sub-human status attributed to colonial subjects. The pit disaster was a standard feature of mining novels; another theme was the strike - reality was inflated by class-based fear.

The industry was in rapid expansion; coal was the basis for other economic sectors, notably the railways. Miners were concentrated in pit villages, making the strike a community as well as workplace confrontation. The mining strike distilled the class struggle in pure form. And all this in the shadow of the Commune.

Maurice Talmeyr (1850-1931) was among the troops who crushed the Commune. Later he worked as a journalist, writing for socialist or republican papers. In 1880 he published his novel Le Grisou (Fire damp). A young miner, Jacquemin, had raped a young woman in the mine, pushing over a lamp and causing a fire-damp explosion. Believed dead, he survived and left the area. Thirty years later he returned to find the woman he had raped insane and the son born of the encounter mentally handicapped. Jacquemin sought atonement, but became caught up in a strike, which spilled over into violence, killing the local mayor. Jacquemin was accused of his murder, and in despair, committed suicide. The melodramatic story and the psychology of Jacquemin were constantly in the foreground; the life of miners formed merely a background. Talmeyr recognised the dehumanising effect of exploitation, yet saw the miners as dehumanised and incapable of self-emancipation.

Yves Guyot (1843-1928) was a prolific writer on economic matters, and a practising politician. He was a liberal, and some books were devoted to the denunciation of socialist 'sophisms' and 'tyranny'. He opposed all strikes.

La Famille Pichotdealt with a mining family; the daughter, Fanny, had become mistress to the mine-owner. The story began with a pit disaster, followed by a strike over a mutual aid fund; the workers were starved back to work; no alternative route was shown. The scenes of working-class life were sentimental; little was shown of the miners' life and work. The portrayal of upper-class life verged on caricature.

Guyot made some criticisms of the social order, but had no positive proposals. The strike was doomed from the start. Guyot put his own position into the mouth of Ravaner, a skilled engineer, rather than an ordinary working miner. Guyot's miners were capable of nothing but disorganised violence, also involving women. For Guyot the enemy was 'ignorance', the solution enlightenment.

Maisonneuve was the author of at least one other novel, a dystopia depicting a society in which the separation of church and state led to the repression of Christianity. Plébéienne was the story of an agitator, Julien, with assorted pseudonyms. Julien, a spoilt child, had become jealous of his younger brother and turned vicious. He went to Geneva in the 1870s and met exiled communards, becoming involved in a mysterious organisation and receiving instructions from one called 'The Master'.

In his task of corrupting the innocent miners, Jonathan had the assistance of a female agitator, who revived the myth of the unsexed woman revolutionary. Maisonneuve confronted a contradiction: if the agitator was self-evidently evil, while the miners were self-evidently good, how could the agitation work? Maisonneuve had to admit that the miners had grievances, albeit springing from idleness and greed. The miner who won Maisonneuve's approval was Plébéienne's father, Jean Seguin, regarded as a father-figure by the workers, and by the management as their 'most precious collaborator'. His existence proved there were no irreconcilable conflicts of interest. Reconciliation was the message of the conclusion. Troops were brought in during a strike. When Plébéienne was killed by a bomb planted by the anarchists, the strikers were shocked into reconciliation.

Similar stereotypes re-emerged in the press coverage of the 1984-85 miners' strike. On the one hand there was the constant refrain of irrational violence by 'pit head thugs'. This alleged brutality was the other side of the coin to the myth of the agitator, the sinister figures who infiltrated the ranks of miners.

What is missing in these anti-socialist, anti-working class caricatures is consciousness. The miners are deemed mere brutes, incapable of thought, unable to grasp the fact of their shared interests with the employers and easy prey to the manipulation of agitators. What any honest account of a strike shows is that the workers, despite the brutalisation imposed by poverty and working conditions, are able to recognise their exploitation, and to plan their own strategy for emancipation.