In Our Time - Germinal

Episode Date: November 23, 2023

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Emile Zola's greatest literary success, his thirteenth novel in a series exploring the extended Rougon-Macquart family. The relative here is Etienne Lantier, already known to Zola’s readers as one of the blighted branch of the family tree and his story is set in Northern France. It opens with Etienne trudging towards a coalmine at night seeking work, and soon he is caught up in a bleak world in which starving families struggle and then strike, as they try to hold on to the last scraps of their humanity and the hope of change.WithSusan Harrow Ashley Watkins Chair of French at the University of BristolKate Griffiths Professor in French and Translation at Cardiff UniversityAndEdmund Birch Lecturer in French Literature and Director of Studies at Churchill College & Selwyn College, University of CambridgeProducer: Simon TillotsonReading list:David Baguley, Naturalist Fiction: The Entropic Vision (Cambridge University Press, 1990)William Burgwinkle, Nicholas Hammond and Emma Wilson (eds.), The Cambridge History of French Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2011), particularly ‘Naturalism’ by Nicholas WhiteKate Griffiths, Emile Zola and the Artistry of Adaptation (Legenda, 2009)Kate Griffiths and Andrew Watts, Adapting Nineteenth-Century France: Literature in Film, Theatre, Television, Radio, and Print (University of Wales Press, 2013) Anna Gural-Migdal and Robert Singer (eds.), Zola and Film: Essays in the Art of Adaptation (McFarland & Co., 2005)Susan Harrow, Zola, The Body Modern: Pressures and Prospects of Representation (Legenda, 2010)F. W. J. Hemmings, The Life and Times of Emile Zola (first published 1977; Bloomsbury, 2013)William Dean Howells, Emile Zola (The Floating Press, 2018)Lida Maxwell, Public Trials: Burke, Zola, Arendt, and the Politics of Lost Causes (Oxford University Press, 2014)Brian Nelson, Emile Zola: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2020)Brian Nelson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Emile Zola (Cambridge University Press, 2007)Sandy Petrey, Realism and Revolution: Balzac, Stendhal, Zola, and the Performances of History (Cornell University Press, 1988)Arthur Rose, ‘Coal politics: receiving Emile Zola's Germinal’ (Modern & contemporary France, 2021, Vol.29, 2) Philip D. Walker, Emile Zola (Routledge, 1969)Emile Zola (trans. Peter Collier), Germinal (Oxford University Press, 1993)Emile Zola (trans. Roger Pearson), Germinal (Penguin Classics, 2004)

BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. This is in our time from BBC Radio 4, and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find on BBC Sounds and on our website. If you scroll down the page for this edition, you can find a reading list to go with it. I hope you enjoyed the programme. Hello, in 1884, Emil Zola began to serialise

his latest work, Germinal, for the French public. It was to prove his greatest success. The novel was the 13th, in a series looking at one extended family, the Rougain Makar, and the relative here is Etienne Lantier, already known to Zola's readers as one of the blighted branch of the family tree. It opens with him trudging towards a coal mine at night, seeking work, and soon he's caught up in a bleak world in which starving families struggle

and then strike as they try to hold on to the last scraps of their humanity and the hope of change. With me to discuss Germinal by Emel Zola are Susan Harrow, Ashley Watkinshire of French at the University of Bristol Edmund Birch, lecturer in French literature and director of studies at Churchill College and Selwyn College, University of Cambridge, and Kate Griffiths, Professor in French and Translation at Cardiff University. Kate Griffith, what ought to we know about Zell in his early life?

So it was born in 1840 and he died in 1902. Though he was born in Paris, he spent most of his early life down in Exxon-Provence. The family had moved there, because his father was a civil engineer and had been hired to build a municipal water system. Now, Zola's father died when he was seven and the family was plunged into poverty. Notable amongst his friends when he was a child was the painter, Paul Cizan, who would become a post-impressionist leading figure. Zola actually moved back to Paris to finish his studies,

but he failed his baccalaureate twice. And so had to leave, could not continue onto university, and was forced to find employment. He actually went through two years of unemployment with bitter poverty. Legend has it that he pawned all of his objects and survived by eating sparrows that landed on his garrette windowsill. But he then got taken on by Hachet, the publishing company. And this was to prove a key moment

because though he started as a clerk, he then went on to work in publicity and he learnt what it was that sold novels in the 19th century. So there's three big takeaways here. The first is that his writing draws on his life. It is very autobiographical. The second is that he is a writer who understands poverty, and it both drove his narratives,

but it also drove his production because he was someone who wrote a ferocious amount of work. He produced his 20 novel series, averaging about one novel per year, writing every single day. The final takeaway from his biography is that he knew what sold books, and in the 19th century it was sensationalism, it was scandal,

it was also being the head of a literary movement, and he cultivated those things when he went on to write his novels. What were his aims with this series of novels? Zola conceived of writing a series of novels in 1868. He originally planned that there would be 10 novels, but they expanded to 20, and they're known as the Rougon-Makar series of novels. They're based around one family.

And Zola had three aims when writing these novels. the first was that he wanted to document his time. He wanted to give an accurate reflection of the era in which he lived. All of Zola's Hugomacher series are set in the period known as the Second Empire in France, which ran between 1852 and 1870. Zola was a huge opponent of the Second Empire because he believed it to be politically, morally and financially corrupt. The second aim that he had when writing these novels,

was to give us a vision of human behaviour. He was interested in who we are and how we become who we are. And he had a very determinist vision of humanity. He believed that we are all the products of our environment, our era and our heredity. And so his 20 novel series traces those theories looking at the ways in which those forces shape each and every one of his characters. He's influenced by the philosopher, Tern. Is that right?

He was very much. So Teng is not a fiction writer, but Zola takes his idea. and he enacts them in fiction. The final aim that Zola had within his novels was to write about the real, to find beauty out of everyday life. And so he marks a real turning point in fiction

because the subjects that he included were drawn from everyday life. He had this belief that if something existed in life, then it could be put into art. Thank you very much, Edmund Birch. Can we expand this run, these 20 novels in the Second Empire? Can you just tell this this a bit more about how he was doing it and what they represented?

One of the things that Zola does is he writes novels about different areas of society. So he looks at the Second Empire. This is a retrospective vision of the Second Empire, as Kate was saying, a period of which Zola was deeply critical. And he focuses his novels on different areas of life in the Second Empire. They have a panoramic quality. We might think of Largen, money, a novel about the bourse. Germinal, a novel about mining. La Semoire, an earlier novel,

focused on urban poverty in the city of Paris. The Ventre de Paris, focused on the market, les ales in Paris. So Zola takes different areas of life in the Second Empire, and he subjects these to scrutiny, to analysis. He explores them. He constructs a kind of vision of society of this Second Empire world through these different interlocking fiction. What's the basis of his structure? Is he approaching it as much as a social scientist as a novelist? There is that dimension to Zola. Zola does have a distinctly sociological dimension,

and he was certainly to claim this. Zola reflected at great length at times on the influence of scientific models, models taken from popular science, and the way these fared into his fiction. He was also motivated, as Kate was saying, by a kind of criticism of the period of the Second Empire as well. This is a big one. Can you summarise the plot of Germinal?

It was released in 89 episodes at the time, for which, alas, we haven't got the time, but at least you can give viewers an overall view, I'm sure. The novel begins with our hero Etienne Nantes, arriving in a mining community in the north of France. He is hungry, he's desperate for work. He goes to work in the mine, and he is shocked by the conditions of life that he finds in the mine,

the conditions in which the miners live. In many respects, this is a novel about men and women who go to work in a mine, who get up at 4 o'clock in the morning and go to work in a mine, it's backbreaking work, it's incredibly dangerous work, and they come home and they can't afford to live. And Etienne notices this, and he is offended by this inequality, and he leads and he plays a leading role in a strike. the miners withdraw their labour.

The strike is characterised by hardship, hunger and moments of violence, and in the end, in many respects, it is a failure, and the surviving miners go back to work. Etienne, at the end of the novel, leaves the community, where the novel began with his arrival, it ends with his departure. That's brilliant. On the way there, there are hundreds of pages with almost hundreds of characters. It does grip you.

It takes you through. No wonder it's his most successful novel, still read, still studied, still making television series ever still making films of it. How did it go down at the time? The novel was a great success. One thing we can think about with Zola is that he spends a lot of time as the subject of various attacks by different figures in the literary landscape. Zola is criticized for the apparent immorality of certain of the subjects that he depict. this had been a great feature of his earlier novel, La Somois, a novel about the urban poor in Paris. So there's a question about how the subjects that Zola writes about are understood within the cultural landscape. There were further debates about the political implications

and the political dimensions of the novel. How should its enigmatic ending be understood, for example? That was one question that was important. Thank you very much. Susan Susan Harrow, how did he prepare for writing this novel? He prepared himself in his traditional way, which was to be very meticulous, very comprehensive about the research he undertook. So that meant library research, going along to the National Library of Paris and reading treatises on the medical conditions of minors, on pathologies, the physiology of the miners, the whole spectrum of diseases from pneumonia to scrofula, to cholera, epidemics. He studied geology, topography, the engineering side of mining. He learned a lot about the lexicon, the vocabulary of the mines, which he was then going to transplant into the narrative. He did as well, and this is really central, remarkable fieldwork for this novel. He was invited

by a left-wing MP whom he'd met on holiday in Brittany, who invited him to come and get to know the coal fields. This man was called Alfred Jir. So in February 1884, it's very fortuitous. It's at the moment of a huge strike where 12,000 miners are out on strike. Zola zooms up to the border land with between France and Belgium,

near Valenciennes, to the place called Enzanne. And he spends a full week interviewing miners, interviewing colliery managers, and learning about the whole. spectrum of mining activity and the community cultures around mining. At the centre of this was a wonderful opportunity for him to actually go down into a mine. So he gets into the cage and he experiences that terrifying drop that Etienne does as well at the beginning of the novel.

Etra being the hero, our protagonist in the fiction, drops to the bottom and is able to experience crawling, Zola crawling on all fours down of very tight tunnel to get a really close up, literally close up, experience of the miners' work. And this was no small feat for Zola. At this point, he's in his mid-40s, he's corpulent, and he is a lifelong claustrophope. So that was a really challenging moment, but he grasped it with both hands. And then, of course, he amplified that research on the ground, more especially under the ground, with lots of research around how the mining families live.

domestic cultures, community practices, high days and holidays, food, the whole gamut of life, everyday life, as Kate was saying. So on the first encounter, as it were, we have with the book, is when Etienne is walking, having been fired from his previous shop

for an attack on his boss. It's dark, it's muddy, it's bleak, it's rather like being down a mind, really. But in the distance, There's this glow, this is and it becomes, this is where he uses the idea of it being mythic. There's this mythic thing going on, which is a mine, of course. But Zola begins to inhabit it with mythic qualities. Can you talk about that?

Absolutely. So Zola, in that opening scene, very much constructs Le Vore, the voracious one, the name of the mine, as a kind of mythic beast, a slumbering, sullen, malevolent deity. And in this, Sola is creating a kind of misoerreousaliener. mythology of the modern, is if he's going back to Greek mythology, for example, with his vision of Tartarus, it calls it the Tartare in the novel, and he's making it modern. He's looking at one of the machines of advancing capitalism, the mining industry, carboniferous capitalism, and he's really plunging into the fantasies, the fears that we all have associated with the dark, with the deep,

and so that unrolls as a kind of dark, fantastic, as the novel unfolds. So this weaving together of his own mythology that's drawn through metaphor, through anthropomorphic visions, through almost hallucinatory writing sometimes. And poetic writing? Yes, it's a kind of harsh poetic writing, absolutely. I mean, he saw that as his mission, really, to use the real, in which he's steeped as well, as a kind of springboard to that visionary writing or poetic writing, highly figurative and metaphoric writing that really produces a very compelling narrative fabrics that's richly textured.

Do we no worry about the idea that this one man would enter this, one foreign man as well as a French of course, but foreign to mining, would enter this and carry the burden of this long convoluted plot? It's certainly a kind of building's romance, a kind of novel of an apprenticeship, in a world of work that is quite alien to Etienne Lantier. It's as if Lantier, of course, he's been fired from his job on the railway, so another great big engine of modernity in a place of myth in Zola's fiction will be in La Betumen, the human beast. And in a way, it's the atavistic violence that has arisen in Etienne,

caused him to assault his boss and he gets fired, which makes him jobless and therefore seeking a new departure. So very much I think there's a kind of blending of Etienne and the reader because we are seeing through Etienne's eyes and experiencing almost through Etienne's viscera the feelings of trepidation and terror that he experienced when he makes his first plunge into the vortex of the mine in the opening scenes when he gets taken on.

Thank you very much indeed. There are so many characters in this, that so many episodes, we're going to take Etienne as our way through it. It does indeed is. But let's have one or two of us, of course. What about the Mahia family? Kate, can you tell us about them and why they're important? They're hugely important for a number of reasons.

The first is that they are fairly revolutionary in literature at the time because this is the first novel that really engages us with the daily minutiae of working-class life, of poverty, of misery in lots of different ways. Not only is the subject matter revolutionary, but the ma'u are important because Zola will not allow us to judge them. They do some pretty horrific things in the course of this novel. They are part of a mob that pushes a man to his death and subsequently castrates him. They are part of the destruction of the mine.

And yet, because we see through their eyes, because we live their emotions, because we walk in their shoes, we understand their actions. And they start this novel as the most moderate, moderate, heart. hardworking, decent family of the community. And so in a way, what Zola encourages us to think about is, if they are pushed to such violence, such desperation, it makes us re-evaluate the nature of the poverty and understand that the fact is driving that. You're also very meticulous about the poverty,

how the women make a meal out of leftover vegetables and so on. Can you elaborate in that a little? Yes, there is a terrible detail in Zola's novels, and it is a detail of the every day. What he does is he will take us through the daily life of these individuals and we watch them scrabble for food, we watch them not able to feed their children. And I always find that reading a Zola novel is a little bit like being wrung out like a towel

because by the end of it you have so engaged with these characters. It's a very powerful thing though because he's asking us to understand this poverty. He's asking us to empathise with a mob, you know, who strike, who break things, who kill people. but he's asking us to think about the reasons behind their actions. And it's also a time when women are going down the mines and children are going down the minds. And it's important for this next point for Zola and horses are going down the mines. There's one pick where a horse goes down and he says,

that horse will never see the light of day again. Absolutely. And the scenes in which that takes place are amongst the most harrowing. It's almost like he mechanises the humans. He makes the machines. They are producing coal. They're producing money. And they lose some of their humanity.

And yet the machines take on a life force. And we almost feel an immense, larger amount of emotion for this poor horse than we do for the characters. Because the Maher family that you asked about were, they're not only do we engage with them, but they represent a huge mass of people beyond them. And so he's using them as symbols. These are very specific miners and a very specific mine. And yet we can extrapolate from them to workers around France and elsewhere. Thank you very much.

Edmund. Let's go back to Etienne Launtyé. What does he bring to the village and how does he cope with what he gets? So in many ways, as Susan was saying, the novel resembles a building's roman, a novel of apprenticeship, a novel of education. And we follow Etienne as he grows as he learns about the world. What does he learn?

In particular, he learns about socialism, about political action and political engagement. Etienne embarks on a program of reading. He reads a wide range of books. He subscribes to different periodicals. So he thinks... He comes very skillful at his job and well thought of and very able, and therefore although the money isn't good,

he's at the top of the tree for earning the money that you do earn as a minor at that time. He also becomes a highly respected worker precisely. One of the features of the novel is that it documents and thinks about the learning that Etienne does on political questions. But it insists repeatedly the narrative that Etienne doesn't quite understand the reading that he is embarking upon. There's something he's confused about it.

He's confused by these different socialist writers that he reads. But anarchism and Marxism and socialism and so on. He gets it all a little bit mixed up. His reading is ill digested in the words of the novel. He hasn't quite managed to digest it properly. And of course, this is a novel, as we were just hearing, that is fascinated by eating, that is about digestion, it's an activity in the novel, it's a metaphor, the mine is voracious, the mine wants to devour the miners.

So Etienne's reading is ill digested. He hasn't grasped the political stakes of the material with which he's working. And the material of which is working is that people are making a great deal of mine yard of keeping the mines going and part of their purpose is to keep the miners working for next to nothing. Yes, and the depiction of poverty in this sense is unflinching. as we were hearing. There are numerous moments that are difficult to read in this regard.

Susan, it's been mentioned that Zola makes inanimate objects come alive. Living human body often becomes inanimate now. Where does that take us? I think Zola's approach to the body is particularly, I would say,

a muscular approach to the way he represents the body. So we get a very vivid, very raw sense of quite often the frictions between bodies. One great example, of that I think is quite early in the novel. We learn that Al-Zir, who is one of the young daughters of the Mao household,

has a deformity. She has humped back. And we learned that this hump sticks into her older sister, Katrina's ribs, while the two girls sleep in bed. So we get a strong sense, almost of a kind of bodies coming together, colliding, overlapping. It's a very felt sort of novel. We talk about Zola as a visual writer. which he is, but he's also very alert to the full range of connected senses, if you like.

And he talks very vividly of the way that they all cluster together down the mine and women too, going into places that mankind going to, sometimes stripping off to go there. Yeah, men and women, young people and old people, so it's a very, very mixed demography. Catherine at one point divests herself of all her clothing, but there is nothing lewd or erotic. here at all because she is covered in coal dust. In fact, Etienne, at the beginning of the novel, fails to recognise that she is a woman. She is dressed in the kind of gender neutral clothing of the miners and she's rather amused that he hasn't noticed that she's actually a female and so there's a love interest there grows. I mean, one of the absolutely amazing instances where Zola

gives us a sort of microscopic study of the body is when the narrator takes us into the body's cavity into the mouth of the old miner, Mook, and his mouth is blackened, it's bleeding, and we travel, as readers, along the gum line, the very gum line of the character. So it's as if we are inside their bodies, we know the surface of their bodies, the interior of their bodies,

and there is this very strong sense of they work in the mine, it was living in the mine, but the mine is also living in them, and it's there in the black sludge that the miners expectorate. That's right. And which is projected on the ground and creates dark patches. It's one of the very first observations that Etienne makes when he arrives and when he's trying to take in all these features.

So a very muscular kind of writing of the body. And of course the body is at the centre of the conflicted relationship between labour and capital and also at the centre, the core, the pulsating core, of relationships between the minors and their families because they're not a homogenous body of people. There are rivalries, conflicts, adulteries, transgressions, solidarity. Thank you. Kate, Kate, Givers. Some of the first reactions to Germinal

will rather like some of the first reactions to Zola's work when you started writing that they were trashy, that there were, I suppose we would say, touching on pornography, that they were too scandalous, there were second-rate, alterca. That has changed with Germinard. Can you develop that? Absolutely. I mean, sensationalism in Zola's novels is really important. He's doing it on purpose. He's doing it to sell books. He wants to be polemical. He wants the backlash. And he did get the backlash because there was a very famous critic called Ferragus, who termed Zola's novels, inflect de bouche, a puddle of mud. And Zola's response was perfect because he turned around and he said that truth like fire purifies everything. So the sensationalism was there. The other really interesting side of the sensationalism was that it travels.

with Zola as he moved to different countries. When his novels were translated into English, there was actually a parliamentary debate in 1888, and a British MP called Samuel Smith. Their debate was on problematic literature, named Zola as inartistic trash. And his English translators, the Visitellies, amongst others, the father was prosecuted for obscene libel

for publishing Zola, even in heavily edited form. But you're right to focus on women in Zola because they are hugely important. Yes, there is the sexual element that you underlined. But actually, there is also, I would argue, a feminist side to Zola, because if you look at the heroine, Lamarad, in the 19th century, there was a huge debate about the place of women in society. They were supposed to be looked after by their husbands and their fathers.

They were thought to be naturally weaker, mentally and physically. And yet, La Maude blows all of those arguments out of the water. She's the one who looks after and cares for and provides for the men in her family. She's also the one who is able to interrogate Etienne and actually engage with his philosophies. So on the one hand, women in Zola are very, very sexualized. On the other hand, you have some very strong figures who offer us a very different vision of gender in the 19th century. This is before the strike, but just before the strike, is there a sense of ferment? Is there a sense of the thing brewing?

Edmund, can you check that up? It's worth considering in this respect why the novel is called Jarminal. And the novel is entitled this. It's a reference to the period of the French Revolution, nearly a hundred years before Zola published this novel, because Jarminal was a month in the revolutionary calendar. One of the things the revolutionaries did is they transformed the calendar, ordering the organization of time.

And Jarminal was a month between March and April in the revolutionary calendar. So Zola is referencing, specifically, the legacy of the French Revolution. And there's many moments in the strike where we find elements of that revolutionary iconography being noted, being explored. Can you briefly tell us how did it start? The strike begins in the wake of a dispute between the miners and the company around pay, in particular around how wages are calculated and how safety is organised in the mine, timbering in the mine. Initially, there is a strike fund, essentially, planned by Etienne, but this gradually runs out, and the strike is characterised by starvation, by poverty, by a lack of food,

as well as by these moments of upheaval and violence, the miners, for example, rampaging across the different minds. Zola explores in this novel different visions of left-wing politics in the ways that these relate to the strike. So in the character of Etienne, we have a relatively radical figure. who's pushing for the strike, who believes in the strike. But that's not the only vision of left-wing politics that we find in the novel. We might think of another character, Rassner, who is far more moderate than Etienne. And we also have the character of Soverein, who is described in the novel as an anarchist. A Russian anarchist, precisely.

He has a terrible backstory, and he, ultimately, in the novel, will sabotage the mine. And the one thing that we have to note and that we have to confront in this novel is the extent to which the strike is a failure. The miners go back to work. In many cases, their conditions may even be worse than they were at the outset. What does it say about this novel that it can't imagine a different kind of resolution to industrial action? It concludes, in other words, with a kind of grim acceptance of a status quo characterized by inequality. Susan, Susan Harrow, Zola is very calculating.

Well, so were many people. He's not an accusation. But one of the things he wanted to give his bourgeois readership a sense of horror, how did he do that? Absolutely. He says in the Iboche, in the description of his vision for this novel, that he wants to give them a shiver. He wants to set a tremor going in the reader.

I think there are two aspects to this. When the novel was published in 1885, Zola gave an interview to Lométham. newspaper and he sort of explains his rationale there. And he says, educated readers, the middle classes, need to wake up and they need to heed and respond to the growing momentum of the demands for social justice. And he said, if we don't do that, society as we know it will be swept away. Will my readers understand this? He hopes so, but he says, I don't know. And there's very much there the voices, as Edmund's been saying, the voice of the reformist who wants to improve

society, but who is not a revolutionary himself, doesn't want to sweep it away. But he does want to wake up and spark that coming to consciousness in his readers. So there's that, the humanitarian, progressive, forward-looking Zola, who's looking to the 20th century and saying, if we don't pay heed and respond, there will be a huge social fracture. that will be devastating. And there's also, maybe in a slightly lighter vein, the desire to give a thrill to the reader in that this is a long novel, 600 pages, seven parts,

and as we were saying earlier, how does Zola sustain that lengthy narrative, which is quite technical in ways with the mining of vocabulary, the processes, etc. And of course, some of the scenes of unspeakable violence and violation are ways in which we, in perverse ways, we find readerly pleasure, just like we love detective novels and murder mysteries. So there is that kind of sustaining of the fascination, keeping the reader enthrall to the narrative through, for example, that's

coming back to Kate's point about the feminist side of it, the women who decide to take their revenge on a sexual predator, an economic exploiter, migrable, or at least on his corpse, he's dead, he's fallen, they emasculate him and they brandish his testicles at the end of a stick and carry that stick throughout the village because he has abused them, forced them to pay huge amounts of credit, sexually abused them and sometimes their daughters too. So it's a moment of feminist or feminine revenge.

It's almost unreadable as an episode. I think it's the same in the film of Claude Béry. It's a powerful moment. Can I, sorry, please come in. Just that question that you asked about class is really, really intriguing because as I mentioned earlier, Zola takes us into the heads of the miners, the working class so that we appreciate their plight. He also, in moments, takes us into the heads of the bourgeois characters.

So we are not allowed fully to side on either side because what he will do is he will show us the bourgeois struggles, he will show us the Monsieur Einabou, okay, who is desperately in love with his wife who sleeps with everyone but him. and he will dramatise and have us live the envy that he feels for the miners because although they don't have food they do have lovers. The other really interesting thing about class is that when Zola circulated in England, he was heavily censored when he was translated.

But if you were educated and rich enough to be able to access the text in French, you could access Zola unexpigated. So there is a really interesting class dimension about his consumption as well. he's often linked with we've let it go with impressionism from his early days in the friendships he formed in the south of France near Ex-on-Provence. Can you develop that? Very much so, because part of his relationship with key painters was autobiographical and he wrote it into his fiction. So, Suzanne was a childhood friend and although Zola didn't actually rate his painting that much, he did use the contacts and the environment that Suzanne provided.

as a background for some of his fiction, most notably a novel, Love, the masterpiece that he wrote on the world of painting in 1885. I think that more important are his relationships with Mani. Now Mani painted Zola in 1868, and he also painted one of Zola's characters, the character Nana, so there's a very close relationship there. What I want to underline are the links

between the Impressionists and Zola's writing. They were both scandalous for their time. The Impressionists now have become very, very acceptable to us, but at the time, people thought they were unfinished. People thought that they were hasty in their execution. They couldn't understand the strange colours and the kind of unformulated approach to sort of positioning in the pictures. Zola claimed to translate the Impressionists into fiction, and you can see that in his novels. He takes the subject matter of the everyday, just as the Impressionists did, and puts it into art. So we see washing scenes, we see courtesans, we see bars.

But it's not just the question of subject matter, it's also the question of style. One thing that sticks in my mind is that Monet did a series of paintings of Ruan Cathedral in different lights, in different seasons. In a funny kind of way, Zolas Germinal anticipates this, because he paints, in words, the mine, in different light conditions, in different seasons, and we get almost an impression. series painting of a mine. The final point that I would make on this is that there are certain stylistic techniques which link the Impressionists and Zola. My favourite impressionist painting is Manet's Bar

or Foli Berger, and it crops. There's a beautiful little pair of tiny green shoes in the top corner of the painting because what Mane wanted to do was show that his picture was a slice of life, that reality exceeded it. And if you look closely at Zola's descriptions of landscape in Germinal. It does the same. It crops things at the edge of his

descriptions, showing how far the description can go, the limits of his fiction. Thank you very much, Edmund. Edmund, Bertsch, was he a revolutionary or a reactionary? This is a big question, and it's been long debated, and one thing that's also been debated is whether the novel itself is revolutionary or reactionary. When we think about Zola and his political interventions, the key moment as we assess his career is of course his defense of Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish army officer wrongly accused of betraying military secrets to the Germans. And Zola famously defended Alfred Dreyfus in an article Jacques, published in 1898, surely the most famous article ever written in the history of the French press.

So we know Zola as a public intellectual as someone who is prepared to take a stand, to take risks in his political engagements. Jaminal too is often held up as an important engagement from Zola, not least because of the way in which he represented the question of poverty. But on this issue of revolutionary or reformist, Zola, in most critical and historical accounts, comes out as a bit more of a reformist. He is different, for example, from his contemporary Valéz,

who was much more radical, politically radical, but also perhaps more formally radical. Zola was much more uneasy about the violence of the Paris commune. I just come in on that question on revolution, because obviously revolution has two meanings, a clean break with the past, but also the revolution of a wheel, something turning full circle.

Those two things are at conflict in Germinal, because the miners want a clean break from the past, but there is a brilliant character called Bonnard, who is a very, very old miner. And he says, when they're at their meetings, I've seen this before, I've heard these words before. And there's a brilliant line that he says, which I'll translate roughly, say whatever you want, it'll be as if you didn't say anything at all

because everything will come back as it was before. And really sadly, at the end of the novel, that is the case. The miners go back down and history turns on another cycle. Susan, is there something about the way Zola writes that alerts us to the failure of the strike? And can we bring Etienne back into it now? Yes, I think Etienne's did. departure, you know, he has been the leader. He's been a kind of charismatic leader. He's been

enjoying something of the cult of personality too in his nice boots and his nice jacket addressing the crowd of striking minors in the forests of Vandam by the moonlight. It's a wonderful chiaroscuro moment in Zola's writing, wonderful colourist Zola. At the end of the novel, we see the miners returning, as we've heard. But Etienne is going off to Paris. He's got a date with Plouchard, who is his kind of socialist inspiring agent, and we get the perspective of Etienne, who believes that as a spring is no springing, and there's lots of sort of references to germination, green shoots pushing through the earth, he feels hope that Paris and a new departure, and the narrative actually says he's going to follow Plushar in Paris.

he's going to become plushar. So he sees himself as having this political career. But, you know, as Kate was saying, we can't help thinking it's the return of the self-same, the revolution that carries on circling round and round. So Zola leaves it open. Kate, maybe all of you can join in it. How did it move from being considered to be a trashy writer

to being a classic? It was a very slow move. I think it's really worth underlining that Zola was not canonical. in his lifetime. He was nominated, for example, for the Academy Francaise, the French Academy 19 times and never got elected. 19 times. And he set up a literary school and yet in 1887, five of that literary school repudiated him and said, no, actually, this is not what we want to do. I would suggest that

he did not really become canonical until about the 1950s and the 1960s when he started appearing on university syllabi. And I'm really intrigued by the fact that he did not really become canonical. that in 1908, shortly after his death, he was moved to the pantheon. But Anatol France, the man who pronounced his eulogy, his eulogy, said, lauded him as a moment in the human conscience. It was almost as if he was pantheonised for his role in Jacques, that Edmund was talking about more than for his fiction. His fiction has become canonical now, but it certainly wasn't in his lifetime. Susan Harrow. Van Gogh reads Germinal, just weeks after it's published in 1885.

and he writes to his brother Theo saying, I have just read Zola Germinal. It is splendid. It is magnificent. The richness of vision has overwhelmed me and it has provoked me to go immediately and start to draw a head and then he draws a series of miners' heads.

A little bit later, he comes back to Germinal in a letter and says, the reading that we artists make of Germinal enters us, stays with us, inhabits us. So I think that's a really, incredibly interesting for the position of Zola, the stature he has among modern artists, and not simply the idea that he is influenced by modern art,

which he is, but that the traffic is going to some extent in the opposite direction. He is influencing post-impressionism. And so if we take a painting like the potato eaters with a family huddled in all their distorted forms around a very meager supper table with a very atmospheric yellowish light beaming out, That painting is produced in May, I think, of 1885,

so two months after Van Gogh has read Germinal. That could be a scene from the Mao family. Edmund, you want to come in on this. One anecdote that sticks out is the miners following Zola's funeral cortege and chanting the title of this novel, Germinal, as a mark of respect to Zona. We're near the end of the programme now. Could ask each of you to summarise what the main chief legacy of it is?

today? Well, I think there's a strong legacy in terms of dystopian fiction and dystopian film, a 20th century legacy. And when I go back to those chasms of mouths that open up, one can see connections with Beckett plays

like Not I, where the mouth is the main character. There is also a post-colonial implication as well from the reading of Germinal, the Senegalese author, Usman Saint-Ben creates a novel around a major strike that took place in 1947

on this Dakar to River Mali Railroad, God's bits of wood. That's directly inspired by Germinal. Of course, there's D.H Lawrence from the mining coal fields of Nottinghamshire and the rainbow 1915. Was there any evidence that Lawrence read Germinal? Yes. I think Germinal has become almost like a myth for us. And that's an interesting thought to me because myth perforates this novel.

It's a story that we keep retelling and we keep adapting it to our eras. So, I mean, it's not for nothing that this has been adapted into film, radio, television, theatre, almost any medium that you can imagine. What strikes me is that this is an extraordinary moment in the history of literary fiction. Who is granted access to the novel? Who can be represented in fiction? And Zola plays an incredibly important role in that history. Thank you very much, thank you.

Thanks to Susan Harrow, Kate Griffiths and Edmund Birch, and to our studio engineer Emma Hath. Next week, Aristotle's Nicomachean ethics, which for two millennia-shaped ideas and how life should be lived. Essential then, fascinating now. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material

from Melvin and his guests. So I ask only one question really, and that is, what did you fail to say you'd like to have said, starting point? I'd like to talk a little bit about colour in the visual practice of Zola as writer, because he is a very accomplished colourist.

The palette that he presents to us, inky blues, black, silver, white, and the whole spectrum of reds from orangey, read through to the scarlet of blood is once more a source of the poetry, if you like, part of the myth-making and part of the harsh beauty that he unfolds as he shows the relationship between human beings and the earth they walk. And I think there's lots for us to say potentially about the coincidence of natural ecologies and human ecologies here in the environmental aspect, which is so resonant for us in the

21st century. Did you say that he didn't think greatly of his boyhood friend and lifelong friend Suzanne's works? You said that, did you? I did say that because in his novel L'Evre, it's a novel about a painter and a painter of huge

immense talent, but actually a painter who ends up committing suicide because he cannot realise that talent, he cannot actually produce. Cisanne and he rather famously ceased to be friends after the publication of that novel because Cizanne thought it was a story reflecting

both on his art and on his trajectory as a painter. So while Zola was friends with Cizan, the type of art that Cizan produced didn't speak to him in the ways that the art of the Impressionists very, very clearly did. Now, I mean, obviously Cizan has links with the impressionist, but he's not someone that I would characterize as a straight impressionist

if there is any such thing. Anything you want to talk about? Yes, I mean, it's fascinating to hear about these connections between Zola and Cisanne, Zola and the art world. But I wanted to add that we should also, of course, see Zola and his work as being bound up with the history of literary realism in France. So Zola very interested in Boussac and the legacy of Boussac. Zola very interested also in Flaubert. And there are other writers that we can touch on as well, such as the Brothers Gancourt who inspire Zola too. one of the interesting things that Zola does is he's associated with something called naturalism, literary naturalism.

And this, there's many ways that we can think about and define this, but it is in all kinds of ways an extension of the realist poetics, of the realist literature, that had dominated France in the earlier part of the century, Flaubert, Basak and so on. So Zola's connected to figures in the history of art and visual culture, but he's also very bound up with an important. important realist legacy in France. He writes an important essay on the differences between Balzac and himself. And of course, one of those major differences is this interest in heredity, the transmission of, as it were, the genetic flaw down the bloodline. And that, of course, is a really fertile source of plot lines

because it's about things going breaking down, things going chaotic, what we've called following David Baguilly, the entropic vision. that Zola unfolds, so that the speeded up rhythms that, you know, are going along, being very productive, and then there is a tipping point where there's over-acceleration, things fall apart, there's total destruction. So that kind of rise and fall is very much a, you know, quite often powered by heredity, but also by questions of environment, questions of the moment in history at which the plot is set, create this upward and then steeply downward trajectory. and really sustains the narrative momentum and readers' interest, I think.

But what's interesting actually is what different eras keep from Zola. So whenever he is adapted or translated into a new context, it always strikes me the elements that are left out. So, you know, we keep the violence, we keep the sensationalism. These days we tend to minimise the political critique. But we also, in relation to Jarminal, A lot of the adaptations keep hold of the labour question because it still speaks to our century.

So there's a brilliant 1970s BBC TV adaptation which takes Germinal puts it into the north of England, into the mine. So the characters all have beautiful northern accents, but they still have French names. So you get a lovely fusion of Zola, but also contemporary 1970s UK. Is this a series?

It is a series, yes. It was a multi-part series. series that aired. It wasn't uncontroversial because it came out at the time where there was the morality campaign by Mary Whitehouse. And she and the producer, the dramatist behind the Germinal locked horns a little bit because of the content of that BBC adaptation. Do I do anything? Yes. I mean, I think Zola famously thought about the novel as being prophetic. And so it seems to me right that we should be thinking. thinking about the way in which the novel has continued into the 20th century and beyond continues

to be debating. He saw this struggle between capital and labour. That is at the centre of Jarmina. He saw this struggle as being one that the 20th century would have to deal with in some way. And of course, one of the features when you read Jarminal is this thought that we're not past this. For all the specificity and the historical precision that Zola brings to the analysis of this world of the miners, we're not actually beyond. this fiction? I think there's something very holistic there in that Zola is writing about the Second Empire from a point in the Third Republic, but he's also writing about his own moment and his perspective in his vision forwards because at the end of the novel, there

are references to the coming century. So he's got that vision towards the 20th century. So really it's very holistic in its historical, its recording of history, and it's thinking through history and it's projecting to the history of the future. What stamina to write 20 books? Huge stamina. He used to have a little sign on his desk in Latin that said no days without lines and he would sit and he would write no days without lines so that he had to write some text every single day.

And I think, you know, in a way that takes us full circle back to the poverty that I talked about at the start. For me, that's what distinguishes Zola from Flaubert, from Balzac. and it's, for me, he's one of the first industrial writers, partly because he writes about industry, but partly because he treats his writing as a profession and if he doesn't write, then at some stages in his career he just doesn't eat.

So there is a rawness, there is a kind of torrent of production, but there's an energy that comes with that too. I think it's really amazing that on the back of the prophets he made from La Somois in 1877, which is really the novel of Etienne's mother, the laundress, Gervais Macar, With the money he'd arise from that very successful novel, he's able to purchase a house outside of Paris downstream of the capital at Medan.

And he describes in a letter to Flourbert that it's a mere rabbit hatch. It's tiny. With his increasing wealth, he's able to add extensions. And so I think it shows you something of Zola's affection for his work and for his characters. So one tower that he builds, he calls Nana, the round tower, the hexagonal tower, like this hexagonal table, he names that one germinal. So he's kind of inhabiting every day,

whether to play pool or, as Kate was saying, to write more lines of text, he's inhabiting those spaces. And so there's a kind of affection, I think, that comes through there, real authenticity. She had joy in the energy of writing and being a creative writer who can afford to immerse in that, in a wonderful setting.

I think our producer is pouring in the ground. Would anyone like tea or coffee? I'll have some tea. Tea? I'll have coffee in honour of Germany now. Love a tea. See, you want coffee. I'm fine, thank you.

I'm fine, thank you. Thank you very much. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. Hi, I'm Christy Young, and this is Young again, my podcast for BBC Radio 4, where I get the chance to meet some of the world's most noteworthy and intriguing people and ask them the question if you knew then what you know now

what would you tell yourself? I don't regret anything in my life you don't know, no way oh we could only turn back for me well I probably tell my younger self to slow down not to be so judgmental but all that worrying was wasted energy and that a perm is always a bad idea

this might be the best therapy I've had all year by the way so you never know. Join me for some Frank and I hope fascinating exchanges. Subscribe to Young Again on BBC Sounds.