MOSENDE, Karen D.

May 8, 2017
PhD Literature Sociology of Literature (LITT 609)

MOB ACTION: A TRAGEDY IN A CAPITALIST SOCIETY

A Sociological perspective of Zola’s Germinal

Early collective behavior theories by LeBon (1895) and Blumer (1969) focused on the
irrationality of crowds. Mob action is one form of a collective behavior, and it is characterized by
a crowd easily persuaded to take aggressive or violent action in order to gain attention or solve
their problem. Illustrating how the proletariat provokes the rise of the mob action, this paper
would also try to examine how this kind of behavior from Zola’s Germinal becomes a tragedy
where the society is characterized by French capitalism, in a social milieu of a 19th century
mining company.

The novel incorporates the rise of the mob action through presenting a picture of Etienne
Lantier’s intellectual development. When Etienne started to read about technical treatises on
political economy, and some anarchist pamphlets, it made his head spin, and outlines of co-
operative societies “about a universal exchange system which abolished money and based the
whole of social life on the value of labor.” All of these materials are lent to him by Souvarine, a
Russian anarchist, who thinks that true social change can only be achieved through violent social
revolution. However, Souvarine is a hardened cynic who dismisses the potential of the strike as
“nonsense”. He would rather see all of civilization razed to the ground if it meant the realization
of freedom on earth.

When the mining company disguises a lowering of the salaries as a new mode of
payment, the miners take offense as it adds insult to injury. Etienne discusses a new movement
he has heard about from his friend Pluchart, a Lille mechanic. It is a Marxist movement to free
the workers. Etienne comes to loathe the working conditions and the lives of the miners and their
families. Etienne, with his hereditary rebellious temperament, transforms into a powerful catalyst
and decides to lead a strike. The mob action is precipitated by the strike; the strike caused by the
company’s new regulations. Etienne’s echoes to his group the Marx’s suggestion that the
proletariat would eventually overthrow capitalism and emancipate humanity.

The novel portrays the Marxist worldview, and for the most part, presenting the social
system of Capitalism. Capitalism is seen as destructive through Marxist worldview, because
it creates an inevitable class struggle. More specifically, capitalism creates a war between
the proletariat, or the working class, and the bourgeoisie, meaning the business-owning class or
even upper middle class. Marxists see the proletariat as being oppressed by the bourgeoisie,
which inevitably leads to war.

In the novel, it shows how the bourgeoisie through the mining company, oppressing the
proletariat, represented by the coal miners. More specifically, the mining company is oppressing
its workers by lowering amounts paid to the workers due to the fact that coal prices have dropped
as a result of overproduction. However, decreasing the amount paid to the workers puts them in
even more desperate straights, leading to, just as Marx predicted, a mob through a strike.
Ultimately, capitalism goes by devouring human flesh, just like the mine in Germinal. This
effectively represents the mine as the site of destructive capitalism where labor is transformed
into money at the expense of the worker.

To illustrate, the miners undergo a transformation from individuals into a collective mob,
and the narrator describes their three thousand voices as a ‘tempest … filling the heavens’ (Zola,
[1884-5] 1993, p.291). This striking metaphor intensifies the destructive effect that capitalism
can produce, and such devastating consequences are observed in the confrontation between the
miners and the shopkeeper, Maigrat. Maigrat’s power to give and refuse credit, coupled with his
commodification of women as adequate payment for goods, directly links him to capitalism.

However, Lukacs (1946) attacks Zola pretty harshly. According to him, Zola seems not
to condemn the bourgeoisie and rather imply that proletariat will not always work in a capitalist
society. Etienne as the leader, was blamed for the failure of the mob action. Miners go back to
work, with many dead workers left behind, and a lot of suffering; their plight has even worsened
than ever before. In the novel, Zola does not aver that rich are bad because of their wealth; nor
are the members of the working class neccessarily angels. He leaves the reader with the
characters and let him think and decide for himself. As a matter of fact, this is why Lukacs is
lambasting Zola: that he does not participate in the struggles of his time, that the writer is
reduced to the role of a mere spectator and chronicler of public life, and that he is never
conscious of this degradation of the writer.

Ironically, despite the failure and tragic outcome of the mob action, Germinals
successfully challenges and destabilizes the values of a bourgeois capitalist society. Its final lines
leave the reader with conflicted feelings:

‘belly swelled with a black and avenging army of men, germinating slowly in its furrows,
growing upwards in readiness for harvests to come’ (Zola, 1993, p.524),

which emanates a sense of optimism. On the other hand, the final line again echoes the
Marxist notion that the:

‘ripening’ of the proletariat would eventually ‘burst open the earth itself’ (Zola, 1993,
p.524).
 This hyperbolic imagery shares a striking parallel with Etienne’s initial aspiration of
‘conquering the earth’ and, by evoking the memory of the devastating consequences of the failed
mob action. The novel then causes the reader to question the optimistic closure.

As the title of the novel itself points to the idea of germination in plants, Zola has an
analogy that social and political ideas behave much like wild seeds in the natural world: sowed in
a fertile soil and given the right conditions and, ideas will grow and develop into something
much bigger and stronger than their initial state might suggest. Ideas will also spread around
them and contaminate their surroundings, and eventually take a life of their own.

References:

Blumer H. (1951). Collective Behavior, in A. M. Lee, ed., Principles of Sociology, New York,
Barnes & Noble, 1951, pp. 67–121.

LeBon, G. (1895). The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. Atlanta: Cherokee Publishing
Company.

Lukács, G. (1946). The Zola Centenary. Reprinted in Regan, S. (2001) The Nineteenth- Century
Novel: A Critical Reader, London, Routledge, pp. 379-387.

Marx, K. The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation. Das Kapital. Chapter 25.

Zola, E. (1885). Germinal. G. Charpentier Publishing, France.