Metaphor and Management- The Paternal in Germinal and Travail Author(s)- Donald Reid

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Metaphor and Management: The Paternal in Germinal and Travail Author(s): Donald Reid Source: French Historical Studies, Vol. 17, No. 4 (Autumn, 1992), pp. 979-1000Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/286839Accessed: 09-10-2015 18:44 UTC

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Metaphor and Management: The Paternal in Germinal and Travail

Donald Reid

Our management is wholly paternal. President of the Anzin conseil de regie during the 1884 strike, clipped by Zola from Le Temps as he researched Germinal'

You see old miners say, in speaking of this young man, "He is our father."

Prefect of the Nord, on the miner and strike leader Emile Basly during the 1884 strike at Anzin.2

Germinal, first published in 1885, has earned canonical status both as an exemplar of the naturalist novel and as one of the great artistic treatments of industrial conflict. Literary historians have studied the naturalist novel in the making by meticulously reconstructing Emile Zola's preparatory reading for Germinal and poring over the notes he took on his visit to Anzin, the largest coal company in France and the model for Montsou,3 in order to assess the relative importance of re-

Donald Reid is professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of The Miners of Decazeville: A Genealogy of Deindustrialization (Cambridge, Mass., 1985) and Paris Sewers and Sewermen: Realities and Representations (Cambridge, Mass., 1991).

My thanks to Sima Godfrey, Lynn Hunt, Michael Kazin, Lloyd Kramer, Janet Polasky, Steve Vincent, and the anonymous readers of French Historical Studies for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. The Institute for the Arts and Humanities of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill provided a congenial locale to complete research and writing. References to Germinal are to Emile Zola, Les Rougon-Macquart, ed. Henri Mitterand (Paris, 1964), vol. 3.

"Au jour le jour" Le Temps, 3 March 1884, in La Fabrique de 'Germinal', ed. Colette Becker (Paris, 1986), 470-71. La Fabrique presents Zola's complete "dossier preparatoire" for Germinal (BN, MSS n.a.f. 10307 and 10308).

2 Bruno Mattei, Rebelle, rebelle! Revoltes et mythes du mineur 1830-1946 (Seyssel, 1987), 102.

3 "Ebauche" in La Fabrique, 274. The name Montsou also recalls Montceau-les-Mines, operated by one of the most vociferously paternalist firms in France.

French Historical Studies, Vol. 17, No. 4 (Fall 1992) Copyright ? 1992 by the Society for French Historical Studies



980 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

search, observation, and imagination in the conception and writing of the novel.4 Not surprisingly, this scholarship on the composition of Germinal threatens to degenerate into an arcane search for disembod- ied facts, phrases, or scenes. It often fails to take into account the interpretation which the novel offers of the sociopolitical literary context in which it was written. What is needed is an examination of Germinal in relation to contemporary journalistic and literary constructions of the miners' world.5 Only after identifying the literary devices used to structure and explain the world of mining, can we begin to discern the orig- inal contribution of an overtly encyclopedic novel like Germinal. Far more than a compilation of facts and observations, Germinal consti- tutes a critical commentary on the texts and social experiences in which these facts and observations were embedded.

Social historians generally read novels like Germinal in search of social phenomena they have uncovered through other means rather than as interventions in debates over systems of meaning that render such social phenomena identifiable and interpretable.6 Social historians appropriation of analogues to their archival findings is the com- plement to literary historians' search for sources-confirmation that the text adheres to a social reality as well as to textual antecedents. Both are necessary and valuable forms of scholarship. However, while I draw upon and contribute to these endeavors, my primary aim in this essay is

4 Ida-Marie Frandon, Autour de 'Germinal': La Mine et les mineurs (Geneva-Lille, 1955). Elliot M. Grant, Zola's 'Germinal' (Leicester, 1970). Paule Lejeune, 'Germinal': Un Roman anti- peuple (Paris, 1978). Henri Marel, Emile Zola: 'Germinal' (Paris, 1973). Philippe Van Tieghem, Introduction a l'&tude d'Emile Zola: 'Germinal' (Paris, 1954). Andre-Marc Vial, 'Germinal' et le "socialisme" de Zola (Paris, 1975). Richard Zakarian, Zola's 'Germinal': A Critical Study of its Primary Sources (Geneva, 1972).

5 For a typology of novels about mining, see Pierre Reboul, "La Mine dans la litterature du XIXe siele" in Charbon et sciences humaines, ed. Louis Trenard (Paris, 1966), 427-42. See also Francois Ewald's perceptive comments in L'Etat providence (Paris, 1986), 255-57. Colette Becker remarks that "one finds nothing in [Zola's] dossier on Germinal about novels on mining already published with which he was familiar." Zola en toutes lettres (Paris, 1990), 76. For an instance of this familiarity and its influence on Germinal, see "Le Grisou et Germinal: Les IdWes de M. Zola," interview with Mario Fenouil, Le Gaulois, 6 August 1890, in Entretiens avec Zola, ed. Dorothy E. Speirs and Dolores A. Signori (Ottawa, 1990), 65. Zola's denial of literary context in his working notes suggests a level of repression characteristic of the scientific pretensions of the naturalist novel-and a particular opportunity for critics.

6 See Louise A. Tilly, "Coping with Company Paternalism: Family Strategies of Coal Min- ers in Nineteenth-Century France," Theory and Society 14 (1985): 403-17; Elinor Accampo, In- dustrialization, Family Life, and Class Relations: Saint-Chamond, 1815-1914 (Berkeley, 1989), 53, n. 12; and Michael Hanagan, Nascent Proletarians: Class Formation in Post-Revolutionary France (Cambridge, 1989), 121, for discussions of the family economy in Germinal. One of the driving forces behind the conflicts in both Germinal and the 1884 strike at Anzin was the break- down of the patriarchal family economy in the mining community by a paternalist employer. Montsou took on Etienne as part of its plan to end underground work by women (several years before legislation in 1874 outlawed the practice). The company's policy upsets the miners, "who worry about the employment of their daughters" (1156). "So, the boys are going to eat the girls'



METAPHOR AND MANAGEMENT 981

to examine the workings of a particular historically situated language in Germinal. Therefore I present the novel less as a compilation of texts or as a snapshot of society than as an intervention in political struggles about the legitimacy of conceptualizations of social order in late nineteenth-century France. More generally, I am trying to suggest how social historians might go about reading works of popular fiction not solely as reflections of social conditions but also as interpretations of the language in which these were conceived.

Zola wrote Germinal during a period of intense public debate over the place of large, "feudal" mining firms in the French polity.7 The authoritarian management of isolated industrial communities was an af- front to the democratic ideology of the nascent Third Republic and an obstacle to its efforts to establish political hegemony.8 Mining firms' continued reiteration of a paternalist rhetoric was a crucial element in their efforts to counter the crisis in their authority generated by the con- juncture of the creation of the Third Republic and the Long Depres- sion.9 Such gendered language structured the efforts by all parties during the Third Republic to establish their legitimacy. 10 An implicit competition arose: could the self-styled employer patriarchs or the new

bread" (1163), is Chaval's comment on the hiring of Etienne. Zola captures the consequent confu- sion in gender roles in Etienne's initial identification of Catherine as male. Germinal concludes with the dissolution of the Maheu family: the company makes a "charitable exception" (1584) to allow La Maheude to work underground. Similar concerns existed about the employment of older workers. The saga of Bonnemort and his pension, treated as an individual drama in Germinal, was at the root of the 1884 strike at Anzin, where the company decided to lay off hundreds of older maintenance workers who then became burdens on their families. For a discussion of the relationship of mineowners' paternalism and patriarchy within miners' families at Anzin, see Donald Reid, "Industrial Paternalism: Discourse and Practice in Nineteenth-Century French Mining and Metallurgy," Comparative Studies in Society and History 27 (1985): 592-601; and two excellent articles on mine employment elsewhere: Michael Hanagan, "Proletarian Families and Social Pro- test: Production and Reproduction as Issues of Social Conflict in Nineteenth-Century France" in Work in France, ed. Steven Kaplan and Cynthia Koepp (Ithaca, 1986), 418-56; and Patricia Hilden, "The Rhetoric and Iconography of Reform: Women Coal Miners in Belgium, 1840-1914," The Historical Journal 34 (1991): 411-36.

7 The Anzin mining firm was a "curious legacy of the Old Regime." Louis Reybaud, Le Fer et la houille (Paris, 1874), 174.

8 David Bell is wrong to describe Montsou as "state-owned and operated," managed by "civil servants": Models of Power: Politics and Economics in Zola's 'Rougon-Macquart' (Lincoln, 1988), 51. Mining firms were private businesses.

I Companies cited social welfare institutions as proof that state intervention in industrial relations was unnecessary (except to maintain order during strikes). The state considered mining firms responsible for supervision and control of both their pits and their labor forces. After the mining disaster at le Voreux, Montsou preferred to assume blame for insufficient supervision (1549) rather than reveal evidence of sabotage which would cast doubt on its control over its employees.

10 Among the many recent works on the early Third Republic which reveal the centrality of gender in politics, see Debora Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Sizcle France: Politics, Psychol- ogy and Style (Berkeley, 1989); and Mary-Lynn Stewart, Women, Work, and the French State: La- bour Protection and Social Patriarchy, 1879-1919 (Montreal, 1989).




republican femme au foyer fraternity better contain potentially disruptive workers and women? The political impact of Germinal for readers of the mid-1880s came therefore not simply from its depictions of workers' hardships but from its subversion of coal companies' self- congratulatory paternalist language at a time when these firms were threatened by large strikes and by a variety of projects for protective labor legislation and even calls for nationalization."

What is most interesting in examining Zola's borrowings from writings on mining and labor relations is less what he took from them-the purview of those who have studied Zola's sources-than what he did not: their accounts of solicitous paternalist management. Germinal is set in 1866-67, the last years of the Second Empire. Zola scholars have pointed out that he drew most of his technical, scientific, and medical material from works written in the 1860s, and his political and economic theories from works published in the early 1880s. What they have ignored is that public discussions of large capitalist industry in the 1860s saw a new degree of familiarization of the firm and its management which served to counter the potentially disruptive social and economic transformations of the liberal empire: free trade, legalization of strikes, relaxation of measures governing joint-stock companies, and so on.'2 Zola's sources from this period were infused with a familial, often paternal, language. His primary authority on mining, Louis- Laurent Simonin, explained in La Vie souterraine, first published in 1867, that "mine directors watched over the fate of their workers with a paternal solicitude"'3 and concluded his Les Cites ouvrieres des mineurs, which also appeared in 1867, with the prediction, "Soon, workers and owners will make up one big family."'4 Anzin spoke in similar terms. At the death of Jean Le Bret, manager of the Anzin mines from 1839 to 1866 (the year in which Germinal begins), his successor wrote:

Between the miner and the company there exists a bond of reciprocal affection which makes him think of it as a good mother; between the miners and their general manager there has existed since time im- memorial, in the fullest sense of the word, the idea of patronage which makes the miners consider him their father.'5

1' Becker, Zola en toutes lettres, 138. 12 J discuss this in my unpublished essay, "In the Name of the Father: The Language of Labor

Relations in Nineteenth-Century France" (available from the author upon request). 13 Louis-Laurent Simonin, La Vie souterraine (Paris, 1867), 260. 14 Louis-Laurent Simonin, Les Cites ouvrieres des mineurs (Paris, 1867), 36-37. 15 Amedee Burat, Situation de l'industrie houillere en 1869 (Paris, 1870), v. Le Bret was fired

in 1866 to make way for a manager who would institute unpopular changes in mine work. Marc




The questions such references to paternal managers, maternal companies, and familial firms left unanswered were whether the anthropomor- phized firm could itself be rendered paternal and what this would mean. Contemporary reviewers and later literary scholars have chided Zola for projecting the conflicts of the 1880s into the 1860s; however, this device permitted him to examine the contested paternalist language of the 1880s in the context in which it reached its apogee.

Zola recognized that paternalism derived its emotional and ex- planatory force from deployment of the paternal metaphor in different situations, each of which endowed the others with meaning. In Germi- nal Zola uses the paternal metaphor to describe three distinct forms of social relations: private charity (the Gregoires); the small firm in which the owner knew his employees individually (Deneulin); and the large capitalist firm in which paternalism was institutionalized (Montsou). 16

The shareholder Leon Gregoire expresses "paternal feelings with respect to the miners" (1313); the Gregoires' world is "patriarchal" (1195, 1424). They practice charity, giving "alms" (1210) to miners whom they do not know personally and whom they recognize only vaguely as responsible for their wealth. But this gesture, like other forms of individual paternalism in the era of large industrial capital- ism, ultimately widens the gap between rich and poor. Zola makes this clear in his intertwined histories of the Gregoire family and the mining family of the Maheus. Both began their association with Montsou in 1760: Guillaume Maheu discovered the vein of soft coal at Requillart (1140) and Honore Gregoire invested his savings in the new Montsou firm (1190). For four generations the Gregoires passed on the "paternal legacy" (1198) of the share (denier), while the Maheus passed on the oc- cupation of mining "from father to son" (1140).17 The veteran miner Bonnemort Maheu vainly seeks the full pension which is the equiva- lent of the Gregoires' dividends for a worker who has invested his life in the mines. His murder of Cecile Gregoire when she comes to give alms to the Maheus reveals the fundamental impotence of the Gregoires' paternalism in the face of the deep unspeakable resentments engen- dered by firms like Montsou.

Simard, "Situation 6conomique de l'entreprise et rapports de production: Le Cas de la Corn- pagnie des Mines d'Anzin (1860-1894)," Revue du Nord 65 (1983): 590-91.

16 For a different tripartite division of "bourgeois solutions" to the social problem in Germi- nal, see Colette Becker, Emile Zola. 'Germinal' (Paris, 1984), 122-24.

17 Reybaud compared the inheritance of stockholders' shares and the mining profession at Anzin. Le Fer et la houille, 192-93. However, Zola broke with the common motif of a transmission from father to son of a "love" of mining.




The Gregoires' cousin Deneulin, engineer-owner of a single pit, knows his miners as individuals and appeals to the interest he and they share in keeping his mine in operation: "he showed himself to be paternal toward the men" (1391), but tellingly "gives free rein to his daughters" (1201). Deneulin tries to convince his workers not to go on strike by contrasting his management to that of Montsou: "He didn't reign supreme from a distance, in an unknowable tabernacle; he wasn't one of those shareholders who paid managers to fleece the miner he had never seen: he was a patron; he risked something besides his money; he risked his intelligence, his health, his life" (1392-93). Deneulin is ultimately unsuccessful in keeping his miners from joining the strike. He lacks the authority and power of the father he claims to be. As a conse- quence of the strike, Deneulin is forced to sell out to his nemesis, the immense Montsou mining firm, which hires him as an engineer.

Zola endows the Montsou firm (although not its manager Henne- beau) with the same paternal metaphor as the Gregoires and Deneulin, but he employs it ironically. He refers to the "paternal arms" of the company directors after the massacre (1512) and to the company's "paternal advice" to Etienne to abandon work in the mines when the company fires him (1581). Zola brings out the emptiness of the paternalist language in industrial management by associating it with the company only after the strike has revealed the absence of a true paternal relationship between management and labor at Montsou.

In sketching out Germinal, Zola debated whether to focus on a small firm run by a "patron who personifies capital in himself" or on a "joint-stock company, shareholders, in sum the world of big industry, the mine directed by a manager appointed with a whole staff and having behind him the lazy shareholder, the real capital." He settled on the latter plan, leaving the former as the Deneulin subplot, on the grounds that a book on Montsou "would certainly be the most current, have the biggest scope and would pose the issues as they present themselves in big industry."'8

Zola's decision to write about a firm like Montsou placed Germi- nal squarely in the midst of contemporary debates about industrial management. In researching Germinal, Zola was influenced by the liberal economist Paul Leroy-Beaulieu's argument that large industrial centers composed primarily of workers and managers (like Montsou) were ripe for socialism:'9 "The worker's intelligence is not developed

18 "Ebauche," in La Fabrique, 256. 19 Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, La Question ouvrizre au XIXe siice (Paris, 1872), 32-34. Zola flags

this passage: "very important." "La Question ouvriere," in La Fabrique, 432.




enough for him to consider with due respect the companies, these ab- stract bodies which appear to him to be Machiavellian contrivances."20 Only the active intervention of upper managerial personnel in contact with their workers could prevent strikes and the spread of socialism.2' These managers necessarily came from the bourgeoisie because only the bourgeois family nurtured the "habits of order, discipline, fore- sight, and perseverance" necessary to overcome man' s naturally unruly character:

This is why the bourgeoisie, more than any other class, is suited to the management of enterprises. The majority of its members have lived in a moral atmosphere which has strongly favored the growth of the qualities of mind and character without which one cannot con- ceive of large industrial development.22

The bourgeoisie in turn had a special tutelary role to play with respect to workers: "It is these healthy habits of practical life that it is most important to propagate. 23 Leroy-Beaulieu argued that managers had a particular responsibility in this realm: "Doesn't one often have occasion to remark on an almost complete lack of man-to-man relations between the patron and workers?" This, Leroy-Beaulieu maintained, was the cause of many strikes.24 Much discussion at the time of the 1884 An- zin strike revolved around the issues raised by Leroy-Beaulieu, and in particular whether a joint-stock company could exercise the kind of paternalist direction over its employees which one could expect of an owner-managed firm. The consensus was that only a manager of high moral character with a great deal of autonomy from the board of directors could do so.25

Zola responded in Germinal by creating a company manager who lacked the authority and influence which defenders of industrial paternalism felt was essential for successful direction of a large firm. From the opening pages of the "Ebauche," Zola identifies the board of directors as a "living god" in a "far-off tabernacle,"26 an image he repeated frequently in the final text. Managerial personnel are bereft of the neces-

20 Leroy-Beaulieu, La Question ouvrizre, 31. 21 Ibid., 312-13. Leroy-Beaulieu believed that the success of a firm depended almost solely on

the capacities of the individual entrepreneur and was therefore skeptical of joint-stock companies which restricted the director's autonomy.

22 Ibid., 242-43. 23 Ibid., 293. 24 Ibid., 311. 25 See especially Gabriel Ardant, "Le Mineur d'Anzin. La Famille de l'ouvrier et patronage de

la Compagnie," La Reforme sociale, ser. 1, vol. 8 (1 September 1884): 205-6. 26 "Ebauche" in La Fabrique, 256.




sary autonomy: "The board has decided that . . . the board demands that . . . ; and it is like an oracle which speaks."27 Zola's managerial personnel "do not want to crush the worker, even have good inten- tions," but "are only cogs in a machine."28 While paternalist discourse presented a conciliatory vision of labor relations to the public, it masked the growing dissociation of financial powers and managerial execution within the large capitalist firm, particularly after the liberal- ization of laws governing joint-stock companies.29

Early in the novel, Bonnemort explains-as no real miner would have-that "Monsieur Hennebeau is only the general manager. He is paid like us" (1141). If even a miner can see that Hennebeau is subordi- nate to the board, this diminishes the likelihood that he will command the authority necessary to exercise a paternal style of management. Hennebeau's effort to turn his inferior position into a social bond with the workers fails. He tells a delegation of strikers who have presented him with their demands: "I'm a wage-earner like you. I have no more say than the least of your pit-boys." The implication is that the firm is organized like a crew in which members of the board of directors have the same relation to the manager as head miners in a crew have to their pit-boys. Hennebeau's specious analogy makes the miners view him with more suspicion: "a schemer perhaps, a man who was paid like a worker but was living so well!" (1324).30 His position as salaried employee undercuts his authority as husband as well as manager. Henne- beau's wife, daughter of a millowner, taunts him for remaining a wage earner and never becoming a partner or shareholder. And, in fact, Hennebeau's reason for assuming the directorship at Montsou had been the vain hope that he could reform his wife in "the desert of the black country" after her blatant infidelity in Paris (1305-06).

Zola's depiction of Hennebeau as a weak figure can be illuminated by comparing Germinal to Yves Guyot's Sce'nes de lenfer social, published in 1882, one of the few contemporary novels to critique mining firms. Like Germinal, Guyot's novel is set at the end of the Second Empire, in 1868. While Guyot took inspiration from the strikes of the Second Empire, he was also influenced by his experience as a newspaper reporter in Anzin during the 1878 strike.3' A staunch de- fender of small business, Guyot's aim was to reveal the necessary im-

27 Ibid. 28 Ibid., 262. 29 For the limited powers of managers at Anzin, see Reid, "Industrial Paternalism," 594-95;

and Marcel Gillet, Les Charbonnages du nord de la France au XIXe siecle (Paris, 1973), 315. 30 Marcel Gillet, "La Grave d'Anzin de 1884 et Germinal," Cahiers naturalistes 50 (1976): 65. 31 Yves Guyot, Scenes de lenfer social: La Famille Pichot (Paris, 1882), 1.




morality of big business like coal mining. Unlike Zola, he makes the reviled owner of the large Carboville mines, Oneisme Macreux, repeat on every occasion that he is le pere. It is not the owner's absence, as in Germinal, but his presence which the novelist chastises.

Me, I am the father of my workers. They should know nothing but me and my will. I am their director, I am their owner, I am their pur- veyor, I am their doctor, their pharmacist, their providence at all times. I am their mayor and on my territory no one can face up to me. I am their deputy; I've got my police, my judiciary, army and money. It's me who made Carboville. I certainly have the right to be their master. As long as they do what I want, I am their father, I love them like children, but if it ever enters their heads to have a desire other than mine, I would say, 'Ah, you are not obedient? Well, we'll see about that. He who loves well punishes well!'32

Zola's critics grasped the point of his portrayal of Hennebeau as too weak to play either the patriarchal ogre like Macreux or the good father to his errant flock. Roger Des Fourniels' novel Floreal, published in 1886-a direct response to Germinal-presents a fictionalized account of Montceau-les-Mines in which the mine director Dubut and his wife are warm, perceptive individuals, charitable to a fault. The director is described as "le chef et l'ame" of his employees. Voltin, the Etienne- character who comes to the mining town at the beginning of the novel, is eventually promoted to supervisor. The socialist Floreal is cured of his errant beliefs through contact with the director.33

While showing that the basis for a paternal relationship between employer and employee was lacking at Montsou, Zola denigrates the institutional welfare system which mining companies paraded before the public and the government as proof of their paternal solicitude for their employees. He points instead to the moral and social consequences of the truly paternal project of spawning new generations of miners to work in the pits.

Mining firms claimed that their social welfare programs elimi- nated the kind of poverty found in big cities and created a familial sense of solidarity.34 This is certainly the message of several contemporary

32 Ibid., 30 (quoted), 44, 101. See Frandon, Autour de 'Germinal', 67-68; Ewald, L'Etat providence, 255-56.

33 Roger Des Fourniels, Floreal (Paris, 1886), 92, 267 (quoted). 34 Simonin, La Vie souterraine, 261, praises the company-controlled coal towns because the

institutionalized benefits they offered had done away with degrading charity and alms. When the economist Adolphe Blanqui undertook his famous investigation of the French working class in 1848 (Des Classes ouvrieres en France pendant l'annie 1848 [Paris, 1849]), he fixed on Anzin as the antithesis of the discontented, misguided community of workers in nearby Lille (from which, in Germinal, Etienne had been fired for striking his foreman before coming to Montsou).




French novels about mining. In preparation for writing Les Indes- Noires, published in 1877, Jules Verne visited Anzin and read Simo- nin's La Vie souterraine.35 Les Indes-Noires takes place in an underground Scottish "Coal City," which is so pleasant that its residents feel little desire to leave: "This population having the same interests, the same tastes, approximately the same living standard, truly made up one big family. They knew each other, rubbed shoulders with one another, and felt little need to go look for pleasure outside."36 Verne's miners are the antithesis of Zola's; they are strong and healthy.37

Mine company welfare benefits figure prominently in Elie Berthet' s popular Les Houilleurs de Polignies, which appeared in 1866.38 Near the beginning of the novel, the mineowner's daughter, Amelie Van Best, descends into the pits to try to convince miners not to strike. She admits that wages at her father's mine are lower than those paid by other companies in the area. Her answer is not better pay, however:

As soon as the situation improves, M. Van Best would hasten to have workers profit from it. She traced a glowing picture of the housing which would be built for them and their families, the institutions which would be given them to procure the necessities of life, the pension funds which [the firm] wanted to set up to assure their well- being and repose in old age.39

By the end of Les Houilleurs de Polignies, Amelie's father is able to offer his miners these amenities. The novel concludes, "Let us hope that such institutions multiply, in France as everywhere, for the well- being and prosperity of patrons and workers!"40

Zola's portrayal of company welfare institutions in Germinal differs radically from that presented by Berthet and other sympathetic observers of mining firms.4' The fact that Maheude and her children beg from the Gregoires even before the outbreak of the strike gives the lie to paternalist descriptions of the physical and moral well-being which company institutions were supposed to ensure for their em-

35 Henri Marel, 'Germinal.' Une Documentation integrate (Glasgow, 1989), 249-5 1. 36 Jules Verne, Les Indes-Noires (Paris [1894]), 100. 37 Marel, 'Germinal,' 253-59. 38 Zola had written a review of Les Houilleurs de Polignies in 1866. Ibid., 231-32. 39 Elie Berthet, Les Houilleurs de Polignies (Paris, 1904), 62. 40 Ibid., 302-3. 41 An article by Georges Grison in the 26 February 1884 issue of Le Figaro laid out in detail

Anzin's interpretation of the benefits it offered workers. "Le Mineur d'Anzin," in La Fabrique, 454-58. See also "Lettres &conomiques" in Le Semaphore de Marseille, 19 March 1884, in ibid., 461-62; "Notes Dormoy," in ibid., 351, 352; and an article by Duhamel in Le Temps of 4 April 1885. Emile Zola, Correspondance, ed. B. H. Bakker (Montreal/Paris, 1985), 5:255 n. 5. Des Fourniels takes writers like Zola to task for failing to appreciate the extent of company welfare benefits and their success in creating a contented labor force. Floreal, 92-93, 96-97, 110.




ployees. Maheude' s trip to the Gregoires is juxtaposed to Mme. Henne- beau's visit to the pit village.42 Any affective component of the welfare institutions which the company offers workers is undercut by having Mme. Hennebeau ("ce montreur de betes") present them to visitors: "she just repeated bits of things she had heard, without ever worrying herself further about the population of needy and suffering workers around her."43 "Une Thebafde! Un vrai pays de Cocagne!" a guest re- sponds (1223).

Zola minimizes the value of specific company benefits at Montsou. The coal offered for heating is of poor quality; the housing is cramped; the medical care is useless. The former company supervisor Maigrat runs a store attached to the manager's house at which he offers credit in exchange for sexual favors.44 Bonnemort's need to continue working in order to obtain his pension (1 139), makes the pension seem more a form of punishment than a paternal reward for a long career of service. For Bonnemort, achieving a full pension is a form of struggle with the firm, far more explicit than that over wages or working conditions.45

Zola selectively interpreted his readings so as to undercut the importance others gave to social welfare benefits. One of his major sources on mining conditions was Georges Stell's Les Cahiers de doleances des mineurs franfais, published in 1883. Yet Zola never refers to Stell's belief that the miners of southern France needed to unionize in order to win the special benefits which northern mining companies like Anzin already provided their workers.46 Zola also made extensive use of Si- monin's La Vie souterraine, especially for the mining disaster at the end of the novel. In Simonin's account of an accident at a mine near Saint-Etienne,

a man was found alive after an explosion. . . . Roof-falls had trapped him; he had no light and didn't dare move. Not hearing any

42 Henri Mitterand, "Le Roman et ses 'territoires': L'Espace prive dans Germinal," Revue d'histoire litteraire de la France 85 (1985): 414-15.

43 Zola indicates that some of Mme. Hennebeau's incomprehension of the miners' lives came from her being the child of a "spinner" (1305) whose relationship with his workers would have been closer to the Deneulin than the Montsou model: "the memories of her father's spinning mill, what went on there with the workers." "Blanche Hennebeau," in La Fabrique, 317.

44 Zola may have borrowed the character of a shopkeeper who sleeps with a young miner girl from Guyot's Scenes de l'enfer social. Frandon, Autour de 'Germinal', 73-74. Maigrat's store bore little resemblance to the Anzin company cooperative (founded in 1865, before Germinal is set), which strictly forbid purchases on credit and was touted by the coal industry as a model institution.

45 The pit horse Bataille who descends into the mines and emerges only after his death is clearly intended as a symbolic counterpart to aging miners like Bonnemort. Where they differ is in the horse's greater success as a striker: when Bataille "had done the required number of trips he refused to start another and they had to take him to his manger" (1182).

46 Georges Stell, Les Cahiers de doleances des mineurs fran~ais (Paris, 1883), 44, 52-53.




sound for fifteen hours, despairing of ever seeing the light of day again, he patiently awaited death. He consoled himself by thinking- and these are his very words- 'that his wife and children would re- ceive pensions from the mine mutual aid fund'.47

This idea of a dying man thinking of the company social welfare pro- gram appealed to Hector Malot, who incorporated it into his account of miners trapped after an accident in his 1881 novel Sans Jam ille: "What consoles me, as I lie here, said Bergounhoux, is that the company will give an annuity to my wife and my children; at least they will not be dependent on charity."48 In Germinal this thought occurs not to trapped accident victims, but to the engineer Paul Negrel when he chastises miners for poor timbering: "Let's get a move on! When your head gets crushed, are you going to have to bear the consequences? Not at all! It'll be the company that will have to give pensions to you and your wives" (I177).

The purpose of social welfare institutions in mining communities like Montsou was to assure a continuous supply of docile labor: reproduction, not production, dominates the novel. The Gregoires express shock at the Maheus' seven children (1211), but as shareholders their prosperity is based on the constant replenishment of a large labor supply.49 No one who reads Germinal forgets Zola's descriptions of the miners' sexual lives. Montsou depends on its miners' sexuality but is unable or unwilling to control this sexuality in the manner prescribed by paternalist rhetoric. Zola's naturalist predilection to interpret lower- class behavior in light of social conditions makes miners' sexuality the perfect vehicle for him to reveal the failure of paternalist management to create a suitable moral and material environment for workers. Told by informants at Anzin that the company stopped auctioning veins when workers began bidding too low for the work, that workers did not complain of the fines, which were meted out moderately, and that miners' mores left something to be desired, he flatly contradicted the first two points in Germinal, while amplifying the last.50 The point is not

47 Simonin, La Vie souterraine, 176. Frandon, Autour de 'Germinal,' 49, notes that the sec- tion of La Vie souterraine in which "the company appeared as dispensing safety and happiness to miners finds no echo" in Germinal.

48 Hector Malot, Sans famille, 2 vols. (Paris, 1881), 2:107. This is followed by a brief discussion of whether the accident was of such gravity that it might bankrupt the company and therefore threaten its ability to pay these benefits.

49 It was only in the 1880s that miners' sons became the primary source of mine labor. Gerard Noiriel, Les Ouvriers dans la soci&te franfaise (Paris, 1986), 89.

50 Becker, Emile Zola, 33. Commenting on Zola's description of the "instinctive rutting around the pithead," Becker rightly remarks that it "is not taken from any precise information. This lyrical amplification which does not seem to respect the miners' more modest morals, is pe-




the veracity of any one of these observations but what Zola's choices reveal about his understanding of mine management and miners' behavior.

Zola read Dr. Hubert Boens-Boisseau' s comments on miners' morality in Traite pratique des maladies, des accidents et des difformites des houjileurs, published in 1862, and did not question the doctor's de- duction that a certain milieu necessarily led to a certain morality:

When you pass by a group of these young girls you can easily judge the level of their morality by the dirty comments and the lasciv- ious gestures they make to one another in their joking about. It cannot be otherwise when girls and boys, from their tenderest youth, find themselves together continually on and off the job.5'

Zola's notes on his trip to Anzin echo Boens-Boisseau's remarks: "The girls are very wanton; they don't marry until the second or third child. At the sorting center they boast of what their lovers did to them. They go out in the fields, in dark corners."52

For Zola, unbridled sexuality was not only a condition of lower- class life, it also gave the lie to the paternalist claims of mining companies that they looked after their charges.53 Boens-Boisseau argued that keeping immoral behavior in check was one of the primary tutelary tasks of mine management:

It is necessary that enlightened philanthropists devote themselves to curbing libertinage everywhere it spreads. It is necessary that indi-

culiar to Zola." "Notes et variantes" in Emile Zola, Germinal (Paris, 1979), 564. See also Becker, EmileZola, 79, and Lejeune, 'Germinal,' 182-83. Zola was prone to exaggerate his immersion in the miners' world. While he spent at most ten days at Anzin and went down in the mines after two days, Zola told an interviewer that he had already been living in the miners' midst more than a month before he descended into a pit. "Le Grisou et Germinal," in Entretiens avec Zola, 65.

51 Hubert Boens-Boisseau, Traite pratique des maladies, des accidents et des difformites des houilleurs (Brussells, 1862), 23.

52 "Mes Notes sur Anzin," in La Fabrique, 379. Anzin miners generally understood French, but they spoke the patois "rouchi." (Pierre Salvat referred to the strike leader Basly as "un Clemen- ceau ne sachant pas le francais," in La Fabrique, 476).) Zola's inability to communicate directly with the miners-he used a translator-almost certainly reinforced his predeliction to project miners' sexual lives from what he could see of their environment. According to his notes, Zola did discuss miners' mores with a "Laurent," but if this individual could speak French, he was likely a supervisor whose information about the miners' behavior is suspect. Marel, 'Germinal,' 163-64. None of Zola's informants were women. Thus Zola was dependent on male interpretations of sexual behavior.

53 See, for instance, the unsigned review of Germinal in Le Petit Journal (3 March 1885) which argues against Zola that as a result of company social programs, miners need not succumb to "bestiality" and "revolt." Zola, Correspondance, 5:238 n. 1. For an interpretation similar to that presented here of Zola's Assommoir as a critique of the bourgeoisie for creating the conditions that led to alcoholism among the lower classes, see Susanna Barrows, "After the Commune: Alcohol- ism, Temperance, and Literature in the Early Third Republic," in Consciousness and Class Expe- rience in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. John Merriman (London, 1979), 205-18.




vidual company managements and the heads of firms look after their workers en bons pe'res de famille; that they redouble their efforts so that the rules of morality are strictly observed during work; and that they show an exemplary severity for those of their subordinates, men or women, whose private conduct is notoriously scandalous.54

However, while Mme. Hennebeau speaks in Le Playite terms of the "patriarchal mores" of the mining community (1224), Zola reveals that these could hardly be attributed to management. Her husband, the mine director, envies the apparent sexual freedom of his workers (1440-41). In an emblematic scene, Hennebeau sees the miners heading out to the woods to hold a strike meeting, but thinks they are going off to enjoy the sexual pleasures denied him (1375). Zola employs the familiar ironic coupling of economic power and sexual frustration to pene- trate the facade of Leroy-Beaulieu's tutelary bourgeoisie: the miners' seemingly uncontrolled sexuality refers back to the real absence of a paternal head.

Two powerful forces structure life at Montsou: the company's drive to impose hierarchical order and the sexual urges that threaten this order and dissipate the energy necessary to overturn it. Germinal is infused with incestuous challenges to the familial idiom of paternalism. Paternalism by extension enacts its own taboos: just as parents may not sleep with their children at the cost of total social anarchy, so the company strictly forbids sexual liaisons between super- visors and women from mining families (1428). Large firms like Anzin which recruited from within the real and metaphorical family of miners expressed great fear of uncontrolled affective relations between su- pervisors and workers.55 Zola, in Germinal, gives this apprehension a sexual dimension that is lacking, for instance, in Guyot's Macreux, who treats sexual relations with a miner's daughter like any other transaction.56

While Hennebeau represses his desire to sleep with the pit girls, he is cuckolded by his wife who treats his nephew, the engineer Negrel, with "maternal concern" (1307) before taking him as her lover. The miners' widespread knowledge of this incestuous relationship weakens

54 Boens-Boiseau, Traite pratique, 24. 55 See Reid, "Industrial Paternalism," 594-95. Zola suggests this potential conflict between

the paternalist company and the company-created authority of the foreman when Richomme "paternally" warns miners of company informers (1158).

56 Macreux, "father" of his workers, had selected a six-year old miner's daughter, Fanny, and had her raised in Paris to be his mistress. When she turned sixteen, he told her, "You are an investment to be amortized. So understand me well. As long as I do not think the investment amortized by a sum of orgasms which I will determine as I see fit, you will remain my debtor." Guyot, Scenes de Venfer social, 298.




Hennebeau's authority. Mme. Hennebeau teases Negrel about affairs with pit girls, but arranges his marriage to Cecile Gregoire, the daughter of stockholders (what she chides her husband for not being). The man who is castrated by an angry crowd of women was originally not to have been the former supervisor Maigrat, but a boss who slept with the miners' women.57 After the strike, the company sacks the head foreman Dansaert for having taken as his mistress Pierronne, wife of the miner Francois Pierron. It turns to the cuckolds Hennebeau and Pierron to restore order.

The inter-hierarchical "incestuous" liaisons in Germinal are ster- ile. By contrast, mining couples are quite fertile. Over the generations towns like Montsou produced a "race" (1299) of miners ("houilleurs- nes" to use Boens-Boisseau's term).58 In Lamarckian fashion, miners developed certain traits as a result of their work and passed them on to their children. Zola's description of "the white butterflies, flies and spiders of snow, a bleached population, which never knew the sun" (1370) living in the pits evokes his repeated descriptions of the miners' white skin. Zola accepted the contemporary view that company- controlled mining communities bred psychological as well as physical traits, and in particular, passivity:59 "the resignation of the race" (1317); "this heredity of discipline" (1586). When Etienne Lantier tells Catherine that he had been fired from his last job for striking his boss, "she stood there stupefied, bowled over in her hereditary ideas of subor- dination, of passive obedience" (1170). Etienne never develops this passivity. From the time he arrived, Etienne "did not feel at all the resignation of this flock" (1185); "he found the miners trop bons en- fan ts" (1179). A different set of hereditary imperatives than those of the miners determines his behavior.

The social order of the mining community is rooted in the inter- play of sexual gratification and sexual taboo, in the need to provide for large families and in a hereditary passivity reinforced by generations of authoritarian management. Yet the dialectical relationships of work

57 "Ebauche," in La Fabrique, 263. 58 Boens-Boisseau, Traite pratique, 20-21. 59 Zola's innovation was to graft heredity on to commonplace evocations of the miners' plac-

idity, docility, and stoicism. Boens-Boisseau comments, "We do not know of any physiognomy more impassive, more immobile, than [the miner's]; his life is regular and unvaried; his job demands neither a great deal of intelligence nor any mental effort; there is nothing more mechanical and routine than the miner's job. The miner is a kind of automaton who does not even concern himself with our civil strife and our political agitations." Traite pratique, 33. See also, Simonin, La Vie souterraine, 157,258,269; Armand Audiganne, Les Populations ouvrieres et les industries de la France, 2 vols. (Paris, 1860), 2:97, and especially Reybaud's emphasis on miners' passivity in Le Fer et la houille. Georges Duveau made Reybaud's comments the key to his interpretation of the miners of Anzin in his La Vie ouvrihre en France sous le Second Empire (Paris, 1946), 430,442,525.




and heredity and of intercourse and reproduction threaten social order at those times when the male-coded "paternal" firm is unable to contain women's expressions of popular rage.60 The crowd of women cas- trate Maigrat; Mouquette displays her buttocks to the troops in an inversion of Delacroix's bare-breasted "Liberty Leading the People" (1506).61 And while the miners' fecundity keeps them in thrall, it will ultimately bring about the company's demise: Germinal concludes with an evocation of a "black avenging army" (1591) germinating underground, which will settle scores with those who had made it what it was. The strike in Germinal is itself a form of birth. The male outsider Etienne penetrates the closed mining community of Montsou in March 1866; nine months later, in December 1866, Montsou goes on strike.

Does Zola offer an alternative to the failure of paternalist management in Germinal? The reformist socialist Rasseneur points to a future reconciliation of the familial idiom and the aspirations of labor: profit-sharing would make the miner "l'enfant de la maison" (1382).62 Negrel's direction of the rescue efforts at the end of the novel suggests that in exercising technical expertise, the engineer may reveal an inde- pendence and authority he had not heretofore shown. And any republican would recognize the import of Maheude's prophetic comment on the legalization of unions at the end of Germinal: "That would be the big blow: to sign up quietly, to know what they were doing, to join together in unions, when the laws allowed it" (1590-9 1). The French par- liament legalized unions in March 1884, in the midst of the Anzin strike.

Yet little in the novel suggests the possibility that workers were truly capable of liberating themselves. Zola described the ending of Germinal as "the expression of a disillusioned hope, a belief in evolu- tion, but neither in progress nor in possible happiness."63 Workers' pros- pects were circumscribed by environmental factors ultimately dictated by the competitive nature of the capitalist economy and by the heredi-

60 "Undoubtedly, [Germinal] is perhaps not for the ladies, but families should read me," Zola wrote in a "preface" to Germinal. In the novel, the detachment of the paternal metaphor from individual male figures of authority and power allows the mining community-endowed with the feminine traits of passivity and hysteria-to wreak havoc. Zola suggests that the novel itself, read in the absence of male members of the family, could have a similar effect on female readers. Letter to the Petit Rouennais in December 1885, reprinted in Gil Blas, 1 February 1886, 1.

61 For a perceptive analysis of contemporary views of the crowd, see Susanna Barrows, Dis- torting Mirrors: Visions of the Crowd in Late Nineteenth-Century France (New Haven, 1981); for a discussion of Mouquette's buttocks, see Sandy Petrey, "Discours social et litterature dans Ger- minal," Litterature 22 (May 1976): 71-73.

62 Stell's DolSances is the source of this phrase. "Doleances des mineurs," in La Fabrique, 438. 63 "Le Prochain Roman d'Emile Zola," interview with G. Stiegler (L'Echo de Paris, 20 Au-

gust 1892), in Entretiens avec Zola, 98.




tary elements embodied in the very nature of the mining community. In a letter to Georges Montorgueil, Zola defended his portrayal of workers in Germinal in terms of their deprivation:

Isn't the true socialist the one who proclaims the misery, the fatal moral decay of the environment, who shows the horror of the prison house of hunger! . . . If the people are so perfect, so divine, why try to improve their future? No, they are down below, in the ignorance and the mud, and it's from there that one must work to pull them out. 64

There was nothing in Zola's critique of the paternalist idiom from within, however, which indicated that socialists like Pluchart would pull workers from the mud. Nor did Zola align himself with liberal critics of paternalism like Louis Reybaud who drew repeatedly on the language of the family to criticize Anzin's paternalism for destroying workers' personal initiative: "Literally, it is a family of fifteen thou- sand souls for which the firm has taken responsibility for more than a century."65 Zola's miners, etched only in their negativity, were poor candidates for Reybaud's liberal individualism.

In Zola's world, the answer was neither socialism nor liberalism, but the strong father. No paternal metaphor could take his place. Zola's critique of Montsou might best be characterized as Le P layite in nature. The engineer and social theorist Frederic Le Play argued that the patriarchal family was the bedrock of society. He believed that directors of large industrial firms which developed in coalfields during the nineteenth century had a particular responsibility to become new "social authorities" new fathers-because the individuals who migrated to them were naturally those most rebellious to paternal authority in the countryside and necessarily lacked traditional family structures in the new environment.66

As Gabriel Ardant, a leading Le Playite and managing director of Vieille Montagne, recognized, the situation was somewhat different in an established coal-mining community like Anzin/Montsou. Writing at the time of the 1884 Anzin strike, he contended that the employment practices of mining companies undercut the father's authority within the family and were the source of miners' animalistic behavior:

The girls will marry and enter others' families; the boy will assist his parents from age twelve to twenty, but at that age he is lost to them.

64 Zola, Correspondance, 5:240-41 (letter dated 8 March 1885). 65 Reybaud, Le Fer et la houjlle, 192. 66 Frederic Le Play, La Reforme sociale, 2 vols. (Paris, 1864), 2:16-18. Zola did not, of course,

embrace Le Play's conservative politics.




Like the offspring of animals, the miner's children abandon him as soon as they are big enough to survive, and the most serious symptom of this periodic disorganization of the household is the resignation, I will say almost the fatalism, of the father, who does not even dream of complaining of being abandoned.67

Le Playites like Ardant argued most forcefully that only an indepen- dent, powerful manager could wield the power necessary to restore patriarchal order in large industrial firms.

Le Play had pioneered the "family monograph" as a means of studying family life. He opposed his analysis of individual families to aggregate statistical studies that implicitly accepted the liberal vision of the individual as the primary social unit. In the "Rougon-Macquart" novels, Zola too adopted the form of the family monograph; in Germi- nal, the Maheus' experience reveals the individual to be not a natural unit of analysis, but the product of the fragmentation of the patriarchal family in a system in which the paternalism of the "social authorities" was a sham. "That would be too much," cried Maheude, "to kill the father and keep on exploiting the children" (1516). And, in fact, what sets Zola off from Le Play is the novelist's belief that the crisis of the lower orders was equally a crisis of their superiors which no economic transformation alone could solve. In explaining his social philosophy to an interviewer in 1892, Zola singled out Hennebeau's misery:

I told the socialists: you will do away with poverty; that's not impossible. And then what? . . . Do you remember, in Germinal, the engineer who hears passing under his window the starving people demanding bread and who learns at the same time of his conjugal woes; he cries, 'I am more to be pitied than them! ' And yet he is rich. 68

It was with this problem in mind that Zola returned to the world of heavy industry in his last completed novel, the "anti-Germinal," Tra- vail, which appeared in 1901.69 Zola wrote Travail in a very different political environment than Germinal. In turn-of-the-century France, even the most ardent paternalist employers of the 1880s had largely abandoned their claims to fatherly authority,70 and depopulation had arguably displaced labor conflict as the most serious threat facing France.7' The dual identity of the father as master and procreator

67 Ardant, "Le Mineur d'Anzin," 195. See n. 6 above. 68 "Le Prochain Roman d'Emile Zola," in Entretiens avec Zola, 98. 69 Henri Mitterand, "Un Anti-Germinal: L'Evangile sociale de Travail" in Roman et socizte

(Paris, 1973), 74-83. 70 The locus classicus for this transformation was Montceau-les-Mines, namesake of Mont-

sou. See Jean-Baptiste Martin, La Fin des mauvais pauvres (Seyssel, 1983). 71 Karen Offen, "Depopulation, Nationalism, and Feminism in Fin-de-Siecle France," Amer-

ican Historical Review 89 (1984): 648-75.




shifted toward the latter. Events in Zola's life made him particularly re- ceptive to such a development. Near age fifty he fell in love with a seam- stress hired by his wife and had two children by her. While continuing to live with his wife, Zola visited his second household daily. Zola's changed personal situation clearly encouraged him to think in a new way about fatherhood and filial duty. 72 Now it was the fulfilled father rather than the loner Etienne or the hankering Hennebeau who re- tained Zola's attention. Furthermore, in the years before and during the writing of Travail, Zola was deeply engaged in defending his father's honor against efforts by top military officers (including Colonel Henry) and the right-wing press to avenge "J'Accuse" by publishing false charges based on forged documentation that Zola's father had em- bezzled funds while a military officer.73 This experience encouraged Zola to see the forces of reaction and injustice ranged against Dreyfus as antipathetic to paternal respect as well.

The plot of Travail is built on the competition of two steelmaking firms, L'Abime and La Crecherie, and the ultimate victory of the latter. In preparing to write Travail Zola followed his well-established routine: research and a visit to the Unieux metallurgical plant in the Loire.74 But the reader gets little sense that Zola absorbed nearly the range of knowledge about steelworkers or their industry that he de- ployed in his earlier novel on mining. Far more important to Zola was his selective reading of anarchist and Fourierist tracts75-and his own rewriting of Germinal. Travail begins where Germinal left off, at the end of a long, bitter strike at L'Abilme. Zola employs the same device he had used in the earlier novel to undercut the moral authority of bourgeois society. Seemingly every male bourgeois in Beauclair, site of L'Abilme, is an adulterer or a cuckold. In a variant on the incestuous affair of Mme. Hennebeau and Negrel, the owner Boisgelin's mistress is the wife of his cousin, the company director Delaveau.

Yet the novels differ in fundamental ways. In the L'Abilme of 1900, workers are no longer controlled by their sexuality; much to Zola's dis- gust, the worker Ragu uses birth control. And it is the bourgeoisie, not the working class, which is the locus of degeneracy, as evidenced in the

72 Alan Schom, Emile Zola: A Biography (New York, 1987), 139-45. In an important meth- odological article, David Schalk argues for the importance of Zola' s new relationship in interpret- ing Docteur Pascal. "Tying up the Loose Ends of an Epoch: Zola's Docteur Pascal," French Historical Studies 16 (1989): 202-16.

73 Schom, Emile Zola, 233-40. 74 For the details of Zola's visit, see Josiane Naumont, "Enquete sur une visite de Zola a Unieux

pour la preparation de Travail," Les Cahiers naturalistes 48 (1974): 182-204. 75 Luc, the hero of Travail, was arguably no more systematic a reader of social theory than

Etienne had been. Frederick Ivor Case, La Cite id ale dans 'Travail' d'Emile Zola (Toronto, 1974), 28-50.




repeated tellings of the total collapse of the industrialist Jerome Qurig- non's patriarchal dreams into a sordid litany of lust, murder, and fanat- icism among his descendants. While Germinal reveals the sham nature of Montsou's social welfare system and its paternalist rhetoric, Zola largely ignores these in his presentation of L'Abilme. By the turn of the century, a functioning pension system was no longer grounds for self- congratulation-Zola has the collectivist worker Bonnaire tell the reader about the one at L'Abime76-andZola's presentation of L'Abime follows the usage of turn-of-the-century industrialists in eschewing paternal references. Even La Crecherie sounds at first in Bonnaire's description like an exemplar of the new turn-of-the-century style of post-paternalist management: individual houses, a cooperative, profit sharing. 77

What sets La Crecherie apart is Zola's infusion of the paternal metaphor found neither in most turn-of-the-century management literature of the period nor in the Fourierist and anarchist texts he read in researching the novel.78 The hero of Travail, the engineer Luc Froment, is referred to as "le Pere," and he and his companion Josine as "the patriarchs of labor."79 Whereas the woman of the people, Catherine, dies before she can found a new familial order with Etienne in Germinal, Luc wrests Catherine's counterpart Josine from the brute Ragu-her Chaval-and in so doing opens a new era for the people she repre- sents.80 The love which emanates from Luc and Josine is the basis of social harmony and even economic success at La Crecherie; the discovery of a rich vein of iron ore which assures the future prosperity of La Crecherie coincides with Luc's recovery from Ragu's effort to assassi- nate him and the birth of the couple's first child. The paternal world of La Crecherie finds its fullest natural counterpart in the discovery of an inexpensive way to draw directly upon the sun-"le fecondateur, le pere"-for power (while incidentally doing away with the need for coal mines, the site of conflict and misery in Germinal).8'

The incipient socialism of Germinal is realized in Travail not by a

76 Emile Zola, Travail (Paris, 1901), 7 1. Note, however the Bonnemort character Lunot is denied a pension after thirty years of service. Ibid., 72.

77 Ibid., 219. 78 It is possible that Zola found inspiration for his new appreciation of the paternal in the

language of the Saint-Simonians, led by "Pere" Enfantin. Becker describes Zola's father as "imbued with Saint-Simonian thought." Zola en toutes lettres, 5.

79 Zola, Travail, 616. 80 Travail recalls Enfantin's search for "la femme": Luc founds his city "by the woman and

for the woman." Ibid., 647. However, Zola retains the Manichean view of women as either the source of the inspiration or of the destruction of society. Ibid., 240.

81 On the sun as "father," see ibid., 124, 558, 559, 627, 665. Simonin's La Vie souterraine, 303-306, concludes with a vision of solar power replacing coal.




revolt of the sons, but through resurrection of the father. The dozens of references to the new fraternity emanating from La Crecherie come not from having killed the father-the event which bound the children of 1793-but from the shared relationship to the father.82 Uncontrolled sexuality goes the way of sedition: Zola evokes the orgiastic coupling of Germinal in idyllic terms in Travail.83The unsatisfied erotic desires which structure Germinal have no place in the satiated world of La Cre- cherie. Beginning with Luc and Josine, Travail presents a long celebra- tion of unions between members of different social classes and the large families which follow as definitively ending the hereditary caste of workers described in Germinal.

In Germinal, Zola had engaged with the highpoint of the paternalist language of the late 1 860s by constructing a literary world which revealed the contradictions of that language. The novel does not so much repeat texts or reflect social experience as offer often disconcerting readings of them. The dissociation of paternal metaphors and father figures, of signifiers and signified, grounds a dark world of authorial irony and social tragedy. Yet Zola was skeptical that republicanism or solidarism or collectivism could bring about human happiness.84 He came to see the patriarchal family as the building block of society: the father rather than the capitalist, the worker, or the citizen was the lynch- pin of social order. We might in fact speak of Zola's industrial novels as expressions of a paternal discourse which limited the range of possible outcomes to those governed by the absence or presence of true father figures. In Germinal, Zola revealed the chaos attendant on the lack of a paternal head. He responded in Travail by producing a patriarchal system of governance which reconciled the paternal metaphor and true paternity.

Travail differs fundamentally from Germinal in its understanding of texts and of language. The earlier novel grounds its authority in

82 Zola uses fraternal and its cognates in two senses in Travail. In addition to relations between men, Luc's relationship to Boisgelin's wife Suzanne and to the inventor Jordan's sister Soeurette are also "fraternal." Travail, 127, 315, 372, 434. Both women love Luc but repress these feelings when they realize that he has chosen Josine and that their role is to be loyal helpmates. Therefore, not only is "fraternal" not exclusively male-coded, it also carries within it both the incest taboo and female devotion to male authority. While the frequent references to fraternal, fraternellement, andfraternite in Travail might suggest an unordered world of equality, these are given meaning within the novel by terms connoting self-discipline and hierarchical order.

83 Zola, Travail, 560. 84 Travail offers a refutation of collectivism and a scathing attack on the repressive nature of

republican education. The frequent references to "fraternity" and the virtual absence of references to "solidarity" (other than in the title of a book on Fourierism) suggest an implicit rejection of the substitution by republicans from Georges Clemenceau to Emile Durkheim of "solidarity" for "fraternity." Marcel David, Fraternite et Revolution fran(aise (Paris, 1987), 286-87.




a naturalist verisimilitude-authorities explain this happened; the author saw or heard that. Whether paternalist or religious or socialist, texts and the languages which compose them are misused or ill- digested, unable in the mouths of men and women of a decaying society to make sense of the world- to do more than echo that world's brutality and prejudices. Who, upon finishing Germinal, believes La Maheude that a new world may be dawning or that the germination underground will produce a harvest any different than that just mowed down?

Travail rejects this despairing naturalism. The victory of Luc- named for a gospel writer like the heroes in each of Zola's "Quatre Evangiles" is the victory of the new people of the book. (It is signifi- cant that those who cannot shed their old ways find it impossible to live in the nursery of the new society, La Crecherie.) Christian and paternalist metaphors and socialist schema are not revealed as hollow in Travail; the natural and material world conform to them.85 It is in this sense that Zola conceptualizes his final novels, including Travail, as a "poem."86 What makes Travail utopian is not a particular set of social relations, but the existence of a world in which language is not simply transparent-fathers are fathers-but in which what Zola believes to be the positive virtues of central metaphors like paternity give meaning to social experience rather than being questioned, thwarted, and inverted as in Germinal.

85 From the "old world" vantage point of a Marxist like Case in La Cite ideale, Zola's appropriation of Christian eschatology and Fourierist economics to describe the "new world" limits the degree of liberation attainable in La Crecherie. From Zola's perspective, however, the new relationship of language to human nature and the material world in the "new world" of La Crecherie reveals the liberating potential of such "old world" discourses of religious and economic repression.

86 "F&undit&," interview with Xavier Mlet in Le Temps, 13 October 1899, in Entretiens avec Zola, 196.



Metaphor and Management- The Paternal in Germinal and Travail Author(s)- Donald Reid

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