Through the generosity of the late Professor Benedict Anderson and Ajarn Charnvit Kasetsiri, the Thammasat University Library has newly acquired some important books of interest for students of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) studies, political science, literature, and related fields.

They are part of a special bequest of over 2800 books from the personal scholarly library of Professor Benedict Anderson at Cornell University, in addition to the previous donation of books from the library of Professor Anderson at his home in Bangkok. These newly available items will be on the TU Library shelves for the benefit of our students and ajarns. They are shelved in the Charnvit Kasetsiri Room of the Pridi Banomyong Library, Tha Prachan campus.

Among them is a newly acquired book that should be useful to TU students who are interested in literature, French culture, history, political science, sociology, labor movements, business, industrialization, and related subjects.

Germinal by Émile Zola is a novel about a coalminers’ strike in northern France in the 1860s. The TU Library collection includes other books by and about Émile Zola.

The title refers to the name of a month in the spring from the French Republican Calendar that was instituted briefly after the French Revolution.

An appreciation in the Guardian newspaper praised the novel as a timeless cry of protest against oppression and the misery of the poor who never inherit the Earth.:

After extensive research and a trip down the working mine at Denain in Valenciennes, Zola wrote Germinal in 10 frenzied months from 2 April 1884 to 23 January 1885. The finished work appeared that spring in a single volume and was sensationally received.

Germen is the Latin for sprout or bud, and Germinal was the seventh month (late March to late April) in the revolutionary calendar that France adopted from 1793 to 1805. “We could not go on reckoning the years during which we were oppressed by kings as part of our lifetime. Every page of the old [Gregorian] calendar was soiled by the prejudices and falsehoods of the throne and the church,” the former actor and dramatist Fabre d’Eglantine explained to the National Convention as the terror swept over France in 1793. Fabre, together with André Thouin, chief botanist at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, drew their inspiration for the new calendar from the natural world. From the beginning, Germinal was a dramatic month: two revolutionary factions (the Hébertists and Dantonists) were guillotined in Germinal, Year II; starving Parisians stormed the National Convention in Germinal, Year III. Much later, mindful of its revolutionary heritage, the Paris Commune of 1871 reverted to the revolutionary calendar for 18 days, and found itself in Germinal, Year LXXIX.

Zola was in Paris during the suppression of the Paris Commune; his sympathies were republican; and the miners’ strikes of 1869 (in La Ricamarie and Aubin) and 1884 (in Aubin) inspired him to focus Germinal on revolutionary action. Despite this, Zola’s novel is no dry treatise on revolutionary or socialist theory. Instead we follow its protagonist Etienne Lantier on a journey through the working community that brings him face to face with violence and despair, without ever destroying his belief in a better world. […]

The Earth itself is the most powerful character in Germinal. Larger even than the voracious mine or “evil beast” that monstrously consumes human flesh, the Earth is at once beautiful and terrifying. Zola describes it variously as “a wicked stepmother who had killed her children at random in a state of crazed and wanton cruelty”; as a shuddering volcano; a landscape despoiled by “blast furnaces and burnt-out coke ovens” that show up tragically on the horizon; as a beautiful forest of lofty beeches “whose regular line of straight trunks made a white colonnade”. Love of the Earth is evoked most powerfully in the memory of the pit pony, Bataille.

Here are some thoughts by Émile Zola from his writings, some of which are in the TU Library collection:

• We are like books. Most people only see our cover, the minority read only the introduction, many people believe the critics. Few will know our content.
• If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud.
• When truth is buried underground it grows, it chokes, it gathers such an explosive force that on the day it bursts out, it blows up everything with it.
• The truth is on the march and nothing will stop it.
• When there is no hope in the future, the present appears atrociously bitter.

Émile Zola, Therese Raquin

• From the moment I start a new novel, life’s just one endless torture. The first few chapters may go fairly well and I may feel there’s still a chance to prove my worth, but that feeling soon disappears and every day I feel less and less satisfied. I begin to say the book’s no good, far inferior to my earlier ones, until I’ve wrung torture out of every page, every sentence, every word, and the very commas begin to look excruciatingly ugly. Then, when it’s finished, what a relief! Not the blissful delight of the gentleman who goes into ecstasies over his own production, but the resentful relief of a porter dropping a burden that’s nearly broken his back . . . Then it starts all over again, and it’ll go on starting all over again till it grinds the life out of me, and I shall end my days furious with myself for lacking talent, for not leaving behind a more finished work, a bigger pile of books, and lie on my death-bed filled with awful doubts about the task I’ve done, wondering whether it was as it ought to have been, whether I ought not to have done this or that, expressing my last dying breath the wish that I might do it all over again!

Émile Zola, The Masterpiece

• I have but one passion: to enlighten those who have been kept in the dark, in the name of humanity which has suffered so much and is entitled to happiness. My fiery protest is simply the cry of my very soul.

Émile Zola, J’accuse!

• These young people naturally grow up with ideas different from ours, for they are born for times when we shall no longer be here”

Émile Zola, Work

• Did not one spend the first half of one’s days in dreams of happiness and the second half in regrets and terrors?

Émile Zola, The Joy of Life

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)