Unearthing the Subtext of Slavery in Zola’s Germinal

Abstract

Abstract On the surface, Zola’s Germinal (1885) has little to say about France’s non-European ‘others’, despite the facts that the coal industry and late-nineteenth-century imperial expansion were linked and the rise of the beet-sugar industry in Europe led to the eventual call for labourers of colour in France. Nonetheless, the subtexts of colonialism and slavery surface in the text via the tropes of colonial metaphor and metonymy. When Zola suggests the material oppression of his miners is ‘like’ the suffering of enslaved and colonized peoples, he is participating in a nineteenth-century rhetorical tradition shared by both the realist novel and French socialist discourse: one that frequently analogized the subjugation of France’s wage labourers to the abject suffering of its colonial subjects. The presence in the novel of colonial products and exotic goods points synecdochically to France’s colonies and their systems of exploitative labour even as those objects circulate within metropolitan milieus. This essay excavates the colonial referents of Germinal, examining how the novel represents domestic and colonial servitude within a single novelistic ‘economy’.