Germinal

Emile Zola

Raise wages--how can you? They're fixed by an iron law to the smallest possible sum, just the sum necessary to allow the workers to eat dry bread and make children. If they fall too low, the workers die, and the demand for new men makes them rise. If they rise too high more men come, and they fall. It is the balance of empty bellies, a sentence to a perpetual prison of hunger.

And Souvarine, who was listening, exhibited on his pale, girlish face a silent contempt--the crushing contempt of the man who was willing to yield his life in obscurity without even gaining the splendour of martyrdom.

Who then was the guilty one? And this question which Etienne put to himself overwhelmed him more than ever. Was it in fact his fault, this misfortune which was making him bleed, the wretchedness of some, the murder of others, these women, these children, lean and without bread? He had had that lamentable vision one evening before the catastrophe. But then a force was lifting him, he was carried away with his mates. Besides, he had never led them, it was they who led him, who obliged him to do things which he would never have done if it were not for the shock of that crowd pushing behind him. At each new violence he had been stupefied by the course of events, for he had neither foreseen nor desired any of them. Could he anticipate, for instance, that his followers in the settlement would one day stone him? These infuriated people lied when they accused him of having promised them an existence all fodder and laziness. And in this justification, in this reasoning, in which he tried to fight against his remorse, was hidden the anxiety that he had not risen to the height of his task; it was the doubt of the half-cultured man still perplexing him. But he felt himself at the end of his courage, he was no longer at heart with his mates; he feared this enormous mass of the people, blind and irresistible, moving like a force of nature, sweeping away everything, outside rules and theories. A certain repugnance was detaching him from them--the discomfort of his new tastes, the slow movement of all his being towards a superior class.

For those of proper demeanor who respect the 19th Century as the days when people had values and morals, a perusal of any of Zola's works will help to dissuade you from your delusion. But then again, he was French, and they've always been degenerate perverts. But if you like, take a closer look, especially at Germinal and you'll see that the perverts might actually not be quite what we of cleaner fingers claim. In fact, Germinal might just convince you that those with the pointing fingers are much more nearly perverts.