Essential Novelists - Émile Zola. August Nemo
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Author
ÉMILE-ÉDOUARD-CHARLES-Antoine Zola was born in Paris, France on April 2, 1840. After having moved the family to the Aix-en-Province of southern France, Zola’s engineer father died in 1847, with the youngster and his mother thus facing economic challenges.
By 1858, Zola had moved back to Paris, continuing his studies at the Lycée Saint-Louis but failing twice to receive his baccalauréat due to low grades on his exams. He struggled tremendously for a time, barely getting by, before getting a job as a clerk in 1862 with the publishing company Louis Christophe Francois Hachette. Zola had a passion for writing and worked as a freelance journalist while developing his fiction. He published his debut novel in 1865, La Confession de Claude, an autobiographical work that chronicled a man falling in love with a sex worker. The book was banned in certain circles, attracting the attention of authorities and causing Zola to lose his job.
Undeterred, Zola continued to be adventurous with his writing, publishing the grisly tale Thérèse Raquin in 1867 and Madame Férat the following year. Zola came up with the notion of writing an interconnected series of novels that would follow the lineage of a particular family during the time of Napoleon III and France’s second empire. Originally intended to run for 10 volumes, the monumental work that would be known as Les Rougon-Macquart ultimately consisted of 20 volumes, with the first book published in 1871 after being serialized and the final installment arriving in 1893. Standout titles from the series included L’Assommoir (1877), which catapulted Zola to fame, and the acclaimed Germinal(1885).
Zola was also known for being the founder of naturalism, a movement which aimed to apply scientific doctrines of the time to fictitious literary forms and relied on strict documentation of the lives and surrounding circumstances of characters, among other tenets. Zola used much of his work to give voice and substance to the miseries endured by the poor.
In 1898, Zola penned a newspaper letter “J’Accuse,” which condemned his country’s military for trying to cover up the wrongful conviction of Jewish army captain Alfred Dreyfus on espionage charges. But Zola himself ended up being put on trial for libel. He was convicted and then sentenced to a year’s imprisonment. Zola left France for England in July 1898, a man in exile, and returned to his home country in June 1899, with Dreyfus having been pardoned.
Zola died in Paris on September 28, 1902 of asphyxiation from coal gas resulting from a blocked chimney. Zola was greatly mourned and his work has inspired continued literary/scholarly analysis and an outpouring of artistic interpretations, with scores of screen adaptations having been made of his novels.
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Germinal
BY ÉMILE ZOLA
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Introduction
by Havelock Ellis
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'GERMINAL' WAS PUBLISHED in 1885, after occupying Zola during the previous year. In accordance with his usual custom—but to a greater extent than with any other of his books except La Débâcle—he accumulated material beforehand. For six months he travelled about the coal-mining district in northern France and Belgium, especially the Borinage around Mons, note-book in hand. 'He was inquisitive, was that gentleman', miner told Sherard who visited the neighbourhood at a later period and found that the miners in every village knew Germinal. That was a tribute of admiration the book deserved, but it was never one of Zola's most popular novels; it was neither amusing enough nor outrageous enough to attract the multitude.
Yet Germinal occupies a place among Zola's works which is constantly becoming more assured, so that to some critics it even begins to seem the only book of his that in the end may survive. In his own time, as we know, the accredited critics of the day could find no condemnation severe enough for Zola. Brunetière attacked him perpetually with a fury that seemed inexhaustible; Schérer could not even bear to hear his name mentioned; Anatole France, though he lived to relent, thought it would have been better if he had never been born. Even at that time, however, there were critics who inclined to view Germinal more favourably. Thus Faguet, who was the recognized academic critic of the end of the last century, while he held that posterity would be unable to understand how Zola could ever have been popular, yet recognized him as in Germinal the heroic representative of democracy, incomparable in his power of describing crowds, and he realized how marvellous is the conclusion of this book.
To-day, when critics view Zola In the main with indifference rather than with horror, although he still retains his popular favour, the distinction of Germinal is yet more clearly recognized. Seillière, while regarding the capitalistic conditions presented as now of an ancient and almost extinct type, yet sees Germinalstanding out as 'the poem of social mysticism', while André Gide, a completely modern critic who has left a deep mark on the present generation, observes somewhere that it may nowadays cause surprise that he should refer with admiration to Germinal, but it is a masterly book that fills him with astonishment; he can hardly believe that it was written in French and still less that it should have been written in any other language; it seems that it should have been created in some international tongue.
The high place thus claimed for Germinal will hardly seem exaggerated. The book was produced when Zola had at length achieved the full mastery of his art and before his hand had, as in his latest novels, begun to lose its firm grasp. The subject lent itself, moreover, to his special aptitude for presenting in vivid outline great human groups, and to his special sympathy with the collective emotions and social aspirations of such groups. We do not, as so often in Zola's work, become painfully conscious that he is seeking to reproduce aspects of life with which