The industrial revolution in Europe brought about a transition from feudalism to capitalism, in other terms the proletarianization of peasants and serfs who became factory and mine workers. The class contradiction between serfs and landlords then gradually became one of proletariat against the bourgeoisie. The former, like today, seeked to improve their material conditions, and ensure a life in dignity for themselves and their families. The latter wished to maximize their profits, to extract as much value from the labor-power they bought to produce commodities, in an era before any substantial gains regarding worker protection – men, women and children were forced to work 12 to 16 hour days in atrocious conditions. Though for most people it was a matter of survival above all, without much free time to question their conditions. And believe them, conditions were abominable. Unions – being the association of workers to demand concessions from the owning class – were illegal in most of Europe in that time. The bosses had all the power for a few reasons: First, the reserve army of labor was massive: millions of landless peasants who flooded the cities had to beg employers for work to afford housing. This made it nearly impossible for workers to individually demand better conditions or do anything about them. No matter what, there were tons of unemployed workers just competing for that same spot. So if someone was a nuisance in the bosses’ eyes, they’d get booted immediately and many people were ready to take their spot. Secondly, when conditions were especially brutal and workers managed to organize and demand better working conditions, the boss would simply call the State’s special body of armed men – the police – to shoot and kill the protesters, propagating fear of rebelling in the masses of workers, and replacing them with the tons of unemployed people. So back then union-busting was literally that, shooting anyone who dissented. Now, back to the specific topic of coal mining: Naturally, different regions of Europe specialized in industries where resources were abundant on their given territory. In Germany, the iron and steel industry were dominant, while in France coal extraction was more dominant. And most of that coal mining happened in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais Mining Bassin on the border with what is now Belgium. This is the setting for the book and movie recommendation I have for you today: Germinal. Initially published by Émile Zola in 1885 as a sort of allegoric exposé of the great strike of Anzin of 1884 – it was then adapted into many movies, notably in the one I watched back in 2021 when I initially wrote this analysis: the 1993 adaptation by Claude Berri, starring notable French actors the likes of Gérard Depardieu, Renaud and Miou-Miou. Regarding the specifics of the setting: The fiction was based on a revolt of 10,000 miners in the Fosse Renard in that previously mentioned great coal basin, exploited by the Anzin Miners Company. This happened in February 1884, which inspired Émile Zola to write this novel. It’s not so much fiction as it is an amalgamation of the experience of all miners of this time. Ultimately, in the real world, this strike was incredibly brutal, lasting 56 days and ultimately leading to the legalization of worker unions by minister of interior Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau. We’ll talk later about why this happened and how unions became tools of controlled opposition. For the time being let’s continue with the analysis. The movie begins with the arrival of a former machinist at the mine, Étienne Lantier, whom another worker, Toussaint Maheu, welcomes into his group and his home where he could temporarily stay. The mine, “Le Voreux”, belongs to rich shareholders who, like today, only care about economic output, to the detriment of the abysmal wages of the workers. They rarely visited the mine and lived away from that misery, in rich neighborhoods of Paris. Étienne Lantier, a socialist the likes of Marx and Engels of his time, though not a theorician at all, took advantage of the insanely brutal conditions to organize the workers and demand better conditions. Rasseneur, another miner, is more moderate, and seems to be seeking an agreement between the workers and the bosses despite the obvious power dynamic at play. We see the ole’ revolutionary-reformist divide here. The scientific versus the utopian. Then at the mine they meet Souvarine, a sort of nihilistic anarchist who wanted to see all industry and all society destroyed. Souvarine and Étienne do not agree at all on the methods to achieve the emancipation of the workers. If Souvarine even wanted that. The former wanted the destruction of industry and society, while the latter “leaned towards the Socialist International” and argued for the creation of a provident fund to finance the workers in the event of a strike, to keep up good material conditions and keep the masses’ morale high during a revolt. Conditions worsened, wages were cut when the director of the Voreux lowered the price of the Mane coal sedan to stay competitive with other firms (shoutout to Karl Marx he was right as always), and imposed the payment of the ‘boisage’ – being the work of laying timber supports in the mine - separately. Workers long tried to negotiate with the managers, in vain. The company held their position and refused any concession. They then went on strike, which lasted for more than a month. Remember the 56-day timeframe from earlier. Truly grueling. The workers of the Voreux mine then headed for the Jean-Bart mine, where they burnt the facilities and destroyed most of the machinery. The bosses sent in the police, who chased the workers back to town. Étienne, seen as the head of the workers’ movement and the instigator of the strike, went into hiding. Upon his release, he learned that tons of workers had been replaced by the ole’ Belgian reserve army of labor, and that the mine occupied by thousands of police officers. The miners had a conflict with those officers, who massacred a ton of people, unfortunately including Maheu. Étienne went back into hiding, and after a while he abandoned the strike, seeing it as vain. They went back to work in the same conditions. Then, Souvarine, in true adventurist anarchist manner, sabotages the mine, flooding it with water and making many parts of it crumble. This kills a shit ton of people, and notably trapping Catherine, Étienne and Chaval at the bottom. There’s a weird part Where Chaval ragebaits Étienne, prompting him to murder him and finally become Catherine’s lover. Though she died in his hands as he was carrying her back to the top. Whoopsie.

A little later, the workers returned to work, and Étienne leaves to Paris for a job where he can focus his energy on syndical organizing. Ultimately in the movie this is not a union victory, but revolutionary optimism persists for Étienne Lantier and for the broader masses of the mines who saw that they held real power and collectively agreed that they had a brighter future ahead of them, without their greedy bosses. As said earlier, real life impacts of this long and brutal strike was a big concession from the French government to allow worker unions. Note that all this happened a decade following the Paris Commune. Workers knew there was a better world possible. This, surprising for a book and a movie this “mainstream” is explicitly Marxist in its conclusions.

Regarding the director of this 1993 movie: Claude Berri presents Germinal in a way that really exposes the class struggle and terrible misery of the French workers of the 1800s. There is an obvious dichotomy between the bright and airy scenes in the clean houses of the capitalists and bourgeois, throughout the whole movie, and in the dark and suffocating mines where the workers labour for meagre wages. It also highlights the hypocrisy of the bourgeois social democrats who claim that their interests are aligned with those of the proletariat. This sort of cinematography which puts Marxist dialectics into practice is very reminiscent of soviet cinemast Sergueï Eisenstein: it’s done very naturally as well, making us grasp contradictions in a way even Mao couldn’t dream of. It’s so peak.

The plot also contains a very clear of critique of anarchism, exemplified by Souvarine, who claims that the destruction of industry and blood will be the key to the liberation of the masses, and who ends up drowning his comrades by destroying equipment. His unprincipled adventurism is ultimately very anti-worker. No wonder the French trotskyist Boris Souvarine took his name got expelled from the PCF for anti-bolshevik propaganda. Étienne is represented as a respectable character, a socialist and trade unionist, who rallies the masses for a strike. He ended up being held responsible for the death of those shot by a lot of workers – even though it was realistically the fault of those behind the barrels of those guns. Zola and Berri portrayed him as a Marx-Engels type, inciting the organization of the whole proletariat, in order to achieve the liberation of the workers, rather than negotiating without weapons in the face of capitalists whose property was protected by armed soldiers. Capitalists depend on the exploitation of the working class, but workers without resources or massive organization eventually must accept exploitation out of necessity, for their immediate survival. The main point is therefore the importance of the workers’ organisation in order to emancipate themselves and escape from misery and the power of the bourgeoisie. The necessity for ‘better conditions’ isn’t just immediate but demands systemic change. The situation was presented as rather deplorable, resulting in unnecessary deaths, for a return to work with conditions as poor as before. He didn’t really seem to give a point of view on the “sadness” of this event, which was both sad and joyful, since it was a pillar of the early trade union movement and the legalization of unions in France. A historical necessity of the class struggle. To sum up, the themes illustrated by Claude Berri are those of the class struggle, perseverance, courage in the face of the bourgeoisie, misery and trade unionism. Zola and Berri didn’t really have to try to argue a certain line, the events did all the work. Now back to Zola, he himself attended part of the strike he based Germinal on, from February 23 to March 3, 1884, which he described as “relatively calm, despite a few explosions with dynamite against the workers’ houses.” Very calm indeed. Another article by Henri Mitterand describes Zola’s experience with the miners in more detail: “He took some notes, of unknown origin, on the conflict that had broken out in Denain in 1880. And he was told about the strike of October 1866 in Anzin and Denain. […] Under the direction of the polytechnic engineer Louis Mercier [..] he descended to the bottom of the Renard pit, at least six hundred and seventy-five meters, and visited it down to its narrowest galleries. Zola spared himself nothing. He wanted to retrace the miners path on his own account, minute by minute.” (Mitterand, H. (2002). P.43) So Zola really had experience of the mine, the production process as well as the conflicts and strikes that occurred over the years. It is this very experience of the material conditions that gave rise to such a good exposé. According to Diana Cooper-Richet: “Until 1886, miners targeted what they saw as symbolizing daily oppression, mining plants, shafts, workshops, boilers, company management, offices, the homes of directors or engineers, clerical power and law enforcement, the army and the police”. (Cooper-Rochet, D. (1998), p.62) Claude Berri’s interpretation of events is therefore consistent with events that have occurred; The miners actually sabotaged the equipment [1:34:00] and went after the directors, like in the scene in the movie where they surround the mine owner’s home [1:42:00], which ends with an implication that he committed suicide using some poison. (Womp Womp) According to the enumeration mentioned earlier, it can be concluded that the strikers attacked for several years the economic base described by Marx; the means of production, the bourgeoisie and its variants, capital and private property. As seen prior, the tension between the miners and the capitalists erupted in a strike: “144 were sent back to Anzin in 1884 after 55 days of vain union resistance” (Trempé, R. (1981). P.147) enraged the conflict even more, and at the end of which the workers had to return to work, and 2000 were dismissed. However, this strike, although a failure, led to victories, and a great surge of unionization of workers, especially miners: the union of the Pas-De-Calais basin in northern France unionized 21,000 of the 26,000 miners. (Trempé, R. (1981) p. 149). As I said, these events also resulted in the legalization of trade unions in France, although this did not calm the workers already in a mass movement. Most of the events are true and verifiable by historical works, including the shooting near the end of the film [2:00:00] which resembles the historically correct one: the Aubin shooting, which has a similar record; 14 dead and 22 injured. Then, a scene where a director and engineer tries to convince miners that he is not like the other directors and shareholders [1:16:00] is also based on what Zola learned during his research for his novel: 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 – using the argument of risk, and presenting himself as a weak and benevolent figure to the workers, who only rather than protifiting, he asserts that for owning the mine, he is depending as much on the survival of his mine as his workers. There are two last themes I want to analyze: syndicalism and anarchism. First, as we’ve seen earlier Souvarine’s character has several aspects: he is an anarchist and a nihilist [58:00]. He presents similar ideas to Bakunin, especially when he laughs at the discussion of the International between Étienne Lantier and Rasseneur [40:24] - He is anti-Marxist just like Bakunin, who “fought” against this tendency in the first socialist international, since he considered the policies of the Marxists to be “authoritarian”’, especially democratic centralism and the vanguard party. Souvarine is therefore a realistic example of an anarchist of the First International, by his nihilism, his total refusal to collaborate or discuss with the establishment and his destructive means of achieving his ends. His adventurism led to unnecessary deaths and no concrete gains. Great success! It really exemplifies how being commandist and adventurist isn’t a good tactic at all. The proper way to go about reaching proletarian emancipation is rather to first propagate class consciousness, then as a vanguard lead a revolution and overthrow the system. You don’t just get to kill workers and pretend it’s praxis. Then, the topic of worker unions is a good question that really captivated the minds of thousands of Marxists throughout the years. I suggest you read “On the International Situation” by Stalin on the Marxist Internet Archive for a good overview of severe problems that plagued worker unions and to which we can still draw parallels today. Worker unions are tolerated by the capitalist system because they allow for a degree of organization to which the bosses can give concessions. They are also a means for worker organizing to be channeled in legal and controlled entities which must be recognized by the state. Here in Québec today, union laws are extremely moribund, and the neoliberal government is actively trying to repress any political activity by union leaders. They want strictly a subservient entity that signs agreements with the bosses. A bunch of class collaborationists! Unions like the CSN are also the exemplification either of a cuck, or a reformist, or a bureaucrat. Whatever you may like. They are alienated from the actual workers and do purely administrative tasks, often punishing union delegates simply doing their job of informing their colleagues of their rights. We must therefore work as parallel organizations to revitalize unions and kick out those reformist cadres. But this is a discussion for another time.

To conclude this pretty scattered analysis, Germinal is as historically correct as fiction novels go. Germinal is a work based on parts of real events, and which reflects very well the reality of miners’ life under the capitalism of the Industrial Revolution – and unfortunately the condition of millions of workers in the global south today, I suggest you watch documentaries on the condition of Indian miners getting silicosis working for 3 dollars a day and getting debt trapped by their rich alienated employer. It also covers well the class struggle and the different currents of thought at the level of workers’ organization, whether scientific socialism, syndicalism or anarchism. The research work that Émile Zola has done is fantastic, as is Claude Berri’s adaptation, for a final result that is quite realistic and appreciable. This piece is thus very enriching; to know part of the history of the workers and the trade union movements that have brought us acceptable working conditions in the global north, unfortunately at the expense of the oppressed populations. The lesson to be learned is that the class struggle will not stop, that the contradictions between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie will not be resolved as long as the capitalism exists. So, thanks for watching, this is a bit of an oddball for me, first time I’ve made a movie analysis. I have two more in the works, one on the Farmers of the Richelieu valley in Québec and its relation to super-exploitation of migrant workers, as well as another on the Rivière-Au-Renard uprising of 1909 near Gaspé. I hope I can bring to my more anglophone audience some masterpieces of French and Québécois working class history as we have many great pieces that deserve a watch! Thanks to MalleeMate for supporting this channel on buymeacoffee, if you want to do the same the link is in the description. Next up on the channel: decolonization talk. Hope to see you there.