The ensuing drama and the long wait for rescue are among some of Zola's best scenes, and the novel draws to a dramatic close. Beware the Nice Ones: Étienne is generally polite, kind and helpful. Étienne Lantier. A sensation upon original publication, it is now by far the best-selling of Zola's novels, both in France and internationally. The concept comes from Ancient Rome. Étienne is eventually rescued and fired but he goes on to live in Paris with Pluchart. The thirteenth novel in Zola’s great Rougon-Macquart sequence, Germinal expresses outrage at the exploitation of the many by the few, but also shows humanity’s capacity for compassion and hope. View the profiles of people named Etienne Lantier. Zola keeps his theorizing in the background and Étienne's motivations are much more natural as a result. Étienne's simplistic understanding of socialist politics and their rousing effect on him are very reminiscent of the rebel Silvère in the first novel in the cycle, La Fortune des Rougon (1871). The young migrant worker arrives at the forbidding coal mining town of Montsou in the bleak area of the far north of France to earn a living as a miner. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available from thestaff@tvtropes.org. Étienne is portrayed as a hard-working idealist but also a naïve youth; Zola's genetic theories come into play as Étienne is presumed to have inherited his Macquart ancestors' traits of hotheaded impulsiveness and an addictive personality capable of exploding into rage under the influence of drink or strong passions. Under enough provocation, he is capable of homicidal rage. Étienne Lantier walks along the highway which cuts through a field of beets. The mine scenes are especially vivid and haunting as a result. Roger Pearson’s lively and modern new translation is accompanied by an introduction that examines the social and political background to Zola’s masterpiece, in particular the changing relationship between labour and capital. Germinal!". The rioters are eventually confronted by police and the army that repress the revolt in a violent and unforgettable episode. Often considered Zola's masterpiece and one of the most significant novels in the French tradition, the novel – an uncompromisingly harsh and realistic story of a coalminers' strike in northern France in the 1860s – has been published and translated in over one hundred countries and has additionally inspired five film adaptations and two television productions. The complex tangle of the miners' lives is played out against a backdrop of severe poverty and oppression, as their working and living conditions continue to worsen throughout the novel; eventually, pushed to breaking point, the miners decide to strike and Étienne, now a respected member of the community and recognized as a political idealist, becomes the leader of the movement. A number of modern translations are currently in print and widely available. Etienne Lantier, an unemployed railway worker, is a clever but uneducated young man with a dangerous temper. While this is going on, Étienne also falls for Maheu's daughter Catherine, also employed pushing carts in the mines, and he is drawn into the relationship between her and her brutish lover Chaval, a prototype for the character of Buteau in Zola's later novel La Terre (1887). Literally "propertyless." Compelled to take a back-breaking job at the Le Voreux mine when he cannot get other work, he discovers that his fellow miners are ill, hungry and in debt, unable to feed and clothe their families. He is the author of critical works on Voltaire, Stendhal and Mallarm and has translated Voltaire, Zola and Maupassant. Environmentally Sustainable Business: A Local and Regional Perspective, Zivilisation und Leidenschaften: die Masse im bürgerlichen Zeitalter. He embraces socialist principles, reading large amounts of working class movement literature and fraternizing with Souvarine, a Russian anarchist and political émigré who has also come to Montsou to seek a living in the pits. His research had been typically thorough, especially the parts involving lengthy observational visits to northern French mining towns in 1884, such as witnessing the after-effects of a crippling miners' strike first-hand at Anzin or actually going down a working coal pit at Denain. TVTropes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Compelled to take a back-breaking job at the Le Voreux mine when he cannot get other work, he discovers that his fellow miners are ill, hungry and in debt, unable to feed and clothe their families. [2] At his funeral crowds of workers gathered, cheering the cortège with shouts of "Germinal! In Socialist terms this means that they derive their income from labor, especially unskilled manual labor. Sacked from his previous job on the railways for assaulting a superior, Étienne befriends the veteran miner Maheu, who finds him somewhere to stay and gets him a job pushing the carts down the pit. His principal work, Les Rougon-Macquart, is a panorama of mid-19th century French life, in a cycle of 20 novels which Zola wrote over a period of 22 years. When conditions in the mining community deteriorate even further, Lantier finds himself leading a strike that could mean starvation or salvation for all. Humanity is the real hero of Germinal. In the Blood: As a Macquart, Étienne has a weakness for strong drink and a tendency toward violence when drunk. View the profiles of people named Etienne Lanthier. The novel has been filmed a number of times, including: Learn how and when to remove this template message, http://www.ibiblio.org/eldritch/ez/g76.html, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Germinal_(novel)&oldid=961682586, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, This page was last edited on 9 June 2020, at 20:58. Accordingly, Zola ends the novel on a note of hope and one that has provided inspiration to socialist and reformist causes of all kinds throughout the years since its first publication: Beneath the blazing of the sun, in that morning of new growth, the countryside rang with song, as its belly swelled with a black and avenging army of men, germinating slowly in its furrows, growing upwards in readiness for harvests to come, until one day soon their ripening would burst open the earth itself.