Metaphor and Management

Duke University Press
Society for French Historical Studies

Metaphor and Management: The Paternal in Germinal and Travail
Author(s): Donald Reid
Source: French Historical Studies, Vol. 17, No. 4 (Autumn, 1992), pp. 979-1000
Published by: Duke University Press
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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 reDonald 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 disembodied 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 original contribution of an overtly encyclopedic novel like Germinal. Far
more than a compilation of facts and observations, Germinal constitutes 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 complement 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 antipeuple (Paris, 1978). Henri Marel, Emile Zola: 'Germinal' (Paris, 1973). Philippe Van Tieghem,
Introduction a l'&tuded'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 IdWesde 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 Miners in Nineteenth-Century France," Theory and Society 14 (1985): 403-17; Elinor Accampo, Industrialization, 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 breakdown 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 affront 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 conjuncture of the creation of the Third Republic and the Long Depression.9 Such gendered language structured the efforts by all parties
during the Third Republic to establish their legitimacy. 10An 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 confusion 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 Protest: 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.
10Among 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, Psychology and Style (Berkeley, 1989); and Mary-Lynn Stewart, Women, Work, and the French State: Labour Protection and Social Patriarchy, 1879-1919 (Montreal, 1989).
982
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' selfcongratulatory 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, LouisLaurent 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 immemorial, in the fullest sense of the word, the idea of patronage
which makes the miners consider him their father.'5
Becker, Zola en toutes lettres, 138.
Jdiscuss 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
1'
12
983
The questions such references to paternal managers, maternal companies, and familial firms left unanswered were whether the anthropomorphized 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 explanatory force from deployment of the paternal metaphor in different
situations, each of which endowed the others with meaning. In Germinal 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 capitalism, 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 occupation of mining "from father to son" (1140).17The veteran miner
Bonnemort Maheu vainly seeks the full pension which is the equivalent 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 engendered by firms like Montsou.
Simard, "Situation 6conomique de l'entreprise et rapports de production: Le Cas de la Cornpagnie 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 Germinal, 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.
984
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 consequence 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 Hennebeau) 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 Germinal 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.
985
enough for him to consider with due respect the companies, these abstract 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, foresight, 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 conceive 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 Anzin 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-
Leroy-Beaulieu, La Question ouvrizre, 31.

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.
20
21
986
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 intentions," but "are only cogs in a machine."28While 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 liberalization 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 subordinate 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).30His position as salaried employee undercuts his authority as husband as well as manager. Hennebeau'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'nesde 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 defender of small business, Guyot's aim was to reveal the necessary imIbid.
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.
27
28
987
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 purveyor, 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 Etiennecharacter 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 eliminated 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).
988
French novels about mining. In preparation for writing Les IndesNoires, published in 1877, Jules Verne visited Anzin and read Simonin'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 wellbeing 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 wellbeing 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 emHenri Marel, 'Germinal.' Une Documentation integrate (Glasgow, 1989), 249-5 1.
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.
35
36
989
ployees. Maheude' s trip to the Gregoires is juxtaposed to Mme. Hennebeau'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 responds (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.44Bonnemort'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.46Zola also made extensive use of Simonin'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
trappedhim; he had no light and didn't daremove. Not hearingany

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.
990
sound for fifteen hours, despairing of ever seeing the light of day
again, he patientlyawaiteddeath.He consoledhimself by thinkingand these are his very words- 'that his wife and children would receive pensions from the mine mutual aid fund'.47
This idea of a dying man thinking of the company social welfare program 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
supply.49
is based on the constant replenishment of a large labor

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 lowerclass 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.50The point is not
47 Simonin, La Vie souterraine, 176. Frandon, Autour de 'Germinal,' 49, notes that the section 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&tefranfaise (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-
991
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' mor-
ality in Traite pratique des maladies, des accidents et des difformites

des houjileurs, published in 1862, and did not question the doctor's deduction 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 lascivious 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 lowerclass 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 indiculiar 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 referredto the strike leader Basly as "un Clemenceau 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: Alcoholism, Temperance, and Literature in the Early Third Republic," in Consciousness and Class Experience in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. John Merriman (London, 1979), 205-18.
992
vidual companymanagementsand the headsof firmslook aftertheir

workers en bons pe'resde famille; that they redouble their efforts so
that the rules of moralityare strictlyobservedduring work;and that

theyshow an exemplaryseverityfor thoseof theirsubordinates,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 penetrate 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 supervisors 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 supervisors 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
Boens-Boiseau, Traite pratique, 24.
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 Venfersocial, 298.
54
55
993
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 castratedby 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 sterile. By contrast, mining couples are quite fertile. Over the generations
towns like Montsou produced a "race" (1299) of miners ("houilleursnes" to use Boens-Boisseau's term).58In 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 companycontrolled 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 subordination, 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 enfan 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 interplay 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
"Ebauche," in La Fabrique, 263.
Boens-Boisseau, Traite pratique, 20-21.
59 Zola's innovation was to graft heredity on to commonplace evocations of the miners' placidity, 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.
57
58
994
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 castrate Maigrat; Mouquette displays her buttocks to the troops in an
inversion of Delacroix's bare-breasted "Liberty Leading the People"
(1506).61And 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 independence 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 parliament 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 evolution, but neither in progress nor in possible happiness."63Workers'prospects were circumscribed by environmental factors ultimately dictated
by the competitive nature of the capitalist economy and by the heredi60 "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, Distorting 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 Germinal," 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 August 1892), in Entretiens avec Zola, 98.
995
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 thousand 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.
Zola, Correspondance, 5:240-41 (letter dated 8 March 1885).
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.
64
65
996
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 independent, 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 Germinal, 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 en-
gineer 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," Travail, 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
Ardant, "Le Mineur d'Anzin," 195. See n. 6 above.
"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 Montsou. See Jean-Baptiste Martin, La Fin des mauvais pauvres (Seyssel, 1983).
71 Karen Offen, "Depopulation, Nationalism, and Feminism in Fin-de-Siecle France,"American Historical Review 89 (1984): 648-75.
67
68
997
shifted toward the latter. Events in Zola's life made him particularly receptive to such a development. Near age fifty he fell in love with a seamstress 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.72Now it was the fulfilled father
rather than the loner Etienne or the hankering Hennebeau who retained 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 embezzled 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 deployed 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'Abilmeof 1900,
workers are no longer controlled by their sexuality; much to Zola's disgust, 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 methodological article, David Schalk argues for the importance of Zola's new relationship in interpreting 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.
998
repeated tellings of the total collapse of the industrialist Jerome Qurignon's patriarchal dreams into a sordid litany of lust, murder, and fanaticism 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 selfcongratulation-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 Crecherieapart 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.78The hero of Travail, the engineer Luc Froment,
is referred to as "le Pere," and he and his companion Josine as "the patriarchs of labor."79Whereas 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 represents.80The 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 assassinate 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.
999
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.82Uncontrolled
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 Crecherie. Beginning with Luc and Josine, Travail presents a long celebration 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 1860s 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 lynchpin 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.
1000
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 illdigested, 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 Lucnamed 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 significant 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.85It is in this
sense that Zola conceptualizes his final novels, including Travail, as a
"poem."86What 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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Duke University Press

Society for French Historical Studies

Metaphor and Management:

Our management is wholly paternal.

Germinal, first published in 1885, has earned canonical status both as

FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

search, observation, and imagination in the conception and writing of

to examine the workings of a particular historically situated language

FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

METAPHOR AND MANAGEMENT

FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

The Gregoires' cousin Deneulin, engineer-owner of a single pit,

"Ebauche," in La Fabrique, 256.

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

METAPHOR AND MANAGEMENT

Leroy-Beaulieu, La Question ouvrizre, 31.

FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

METAPHOR AND MANAGEMENT

FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

METAPHOR AND MANAGEMENT

trappedhim; he had no light and didn't daremove. Not hearingany

FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

is based on the constant replenishment of a large labor

miners' sexual lives. Montsou depends on its miners' sexuality but is

at Anzin that the company stopped auctioning

METAPHOR AND MANAGEMENT

ality in Traite pratique des maladies, des accidents et des difformites

FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

vidual companymanagementsand the headsof firmslook aftertheir

that the rules of moralityare strictlyobservedduring work;and that

However, while Mme. Hennebeau speaks in Le Playite terms of the

a sexual dimension that is lacking, for instance, in Guyot's Macreux,

METAPHOR AND MANAGEMENT

Hennebeau's authority. Mme. Hennebeau teases Negrel about affairs

FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

and heredity and of intercourse and reproduction threaten social order

METAPHOR AND MANAGEMENT

tary elements embodied in the very nature of the mining community. In

. . . If the people are so perfect, so divine, why try

FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

Like the offspring of animals, the miner's children abandon him as

METAPHOR AND MANAGEMENT

FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

METAPHOR AND MANAGEMENT

FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

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