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about humanity’.
    The term ‘naturalist’ was first used in the literary context by the Positivist philosopher and cultural historian Hippolyte Taine (1828–93), who applied it to Balzac as a term of praise for his quasi-scientific appraisal of the human animal kingdom. Zola adopted the term as a label for the newer and more thoroughgoing brand of Realism which he (and, as he saw it, the Impressionists) were evolving. Like Balzac he, too, wanted to enhance the prestige of the novel by conferring on it the intellectual status of scientific inquiry; and he borrowed Taine’s own Positivist categories of
race
,
milieu
and
moment
as his blueprint for the Rougon-Macquart saga. While he compared his novels to experiments (in the essay ‘The ExperimentalNovel’, first published in 1879), the role of the novelist was as much that of a demonstrator as of a discoverer. He recognized quite explicitly that, unlike the experimental scientist, the novelist cannot let the ingredients in his test-tube take over and react independently of his intervention. Rather, the novelist infers the ‘truth about humanity’ from his observations of the world about him and then creates a story which will demonstrate his conclusions in action. If he considers, for example, that human mental processes are physiologically determined, he will depict the revolutionary zeal of a man like Étienne Lantier as the result of an innate aggression which is exacerbated by the circumstances of arduous labour and sexual rivalry. Even where the evidence of the real world is against him – sexual promiscuity, for example, is not attested in any of the contemporary accounts of mining communities – he may yet posit a phenomenon in order to ‘demonstrate’ a larger truth: here, that cramped living conditions and financial hardship combine to dehumanize and uncivilize, reducing men and women to the level of animals rather than raising them up to a level where ‘finer feelings’ might plausibly exist.
    For it is all very well believing that human beings have a soul and that we are complex psychological entities who ‘fall in love’ and enjoy all sorts of intricate emotional and intellectual experiences. But we also eat and drink, wake and sleep, defecate and copulate. And we fear, we hate. How better to highlight these realities than to set your novel in a world of poverty where the most essential and not at all straightforward activity is finding something to eat; where drinking (alcohol) is at once paradise and hell; where sleeping is no antidote to exhaustion; where accommodation is so limited that bodily functions must be performed without privacy; where copulation is the only pleasure that doesn’t cost money (at least initially). All the basic features of human existence which the bourgeois novel so gaily takes for granted are here, quite literally, a matter of life and death. Human beings are animals, in need of warmth and rest and safety; and the opening pages of
Germinal
offer an arresting portrait of one human being who is completely
deprived
, on the verge of ending up ‘like a stray dog, a dead carcass lying behindsome wall or other’. Homeless, jobless, penniless, friendless, he has nowhere to go and nowhere to hide from the bitterly cold winds blowing across the empty plain. Life itself is a
tabula rasa
on which we must construct shelter and purpose.
    Throughout
Germinal
, as elsewhere in
Les Rougon-Macquart
, Zola constantly dispels our fond illusions by making a concerted attempt to break down the barriers between human beings and other animals, and between animals and plants or objects. The miners display the dumb submissiveness of the herd; the mob is like a river in spate. Horses like Battle and Trumpet are best friends, with memories and longings every bit as powerful as those of their supposed masters. The mine itself is a voracious beast, or a living network of veins and