At the front, facing down the slope, stood Étienne with Rasseneur and Maheu. A row was going on, and raised voices could be heard in snatches. Close by, other men were listening to them: Levaque with his fists clenched, Pierron with his back towards them, very worried now that he could no longer plead reasons of health for staying away; and Bonnemort and Mouque were there too, sitting side by side on a tree-stump deep in thought. Behind them were the jokesters, Zacharie, Mouquet and others, who had come for the laugh; whereas many of the women, on the contrary, were standing about in respectful groups and wearing an earnest expression as though they were at church. La Maheude nodded in silent agreement as La Levaque muttered her imprecations. Philomène was coughing, her bronchitis having returned with the winter months. Only La Mouquette was laughing, hugely amused by the way La Brûlé was tearing into her daughter and saying how it was just not natural, sending her own mother off like that so that she could stay and stuff herself on rabbit: a whore she was, who’d grown fat on her husband’s cowardly collaborations. Meanwhile Jeanlin had installed himself on top of the pile of logs, pulling Lydie up beside him and ordering Bébert to follow, so that now the three of them were sitting way up high above the entire crowd.
The row had been started by Rasseneur, who wanted to elect a committee in the proper fashion. He was still smarting after his defeat at the Jolly Fellow; and he had sworn to have his revenge, fondly believing that he would be able to regain his authority once they were in front of the whole community of miners and not just the delegates. Étienne was outraged by the idea of a committee, which he considered ridiculous out here in the forest. They had to act like revolutionaries, like wild men, since it was as wolves and wild animals that they were being hunted down.
Seeing no end to this argument, he took control of the crowd at once by climbing on to a tree-trunk and shouting:
‘Comrades! Comrades!’
The hubbub of the crowd died away like a long sigh, as Maheu silenced Rasseneur’s protests. Étienne continued in a rousing tone:
‘Comrades, we are having to meet here because they have forbidden us to talk to each other and because they have sent the gendarmes after us as if we were common criminals. Here we shall be free, here we shall be on home ground, and nobody will be able to come and tell us to shut up, any more than they can tell the birds and the animals to shut up!’
This brought a thunderous response of cries and exclamations.
‘Yes, yes, this is our forest! It’s our right to speak!…Give us a speech!’
Étienne stood still for a moment on his log. The moon was still too low in the sky and shone only on the uppermost branches of the trees, so that the crowd remained plunged in darkness as it gradually settled and fell silent. Above them, at the top of the slope, the equally dark figure of Étienne stood out like a stripe of shadow.
Slowly he raised one arm and began; but the voice of righteous indignation had gone, and he now spoke in the cold, dispassionate tone of a simple envoy of the people delivering his report. At last he was able to give the speech that the police superintendent had interrupted at the Jolly Fellow; and he began with a brief history of the strike, presenting it in the style of a fluent and informed analysis: facts, nothing but the facts. First he said how he didn’t like strikes: the miners hadn’t wanted one, it was management who had driven them to it with its new timbering rate. Then he recalled the first meeting the deputation had sought with the manager and how the Board of Directors had acted in bad faith, and then the delegates’ second approach and the manager’s belated concession, with the Company being prepared to restore the two centimes it had earlier tried to steal from them. That was how matters presently stood. He provided figures showing that the provident fund was exhausted, described how the financial help they had received had been used, and said a few words by way of excusing the International, Pluchart and the others, for not having been able to do more for them, preoccupied as they were with their plans to conquer the world. In a word, things were getting worse by the day: the Company was sacking people and threatening to recruit workers from Belgium. Not only that, it was intimidating potential blacklegs and had already persuaded a certain number of miners to return to work. Étienne said all this in the same, even tones as though to insist on the gravity of the bad news; hunger had beaten them, he said, all hope was lost, and they were now in the death throes of their courageous struggle. Then abruptly he ended, as matter-of-fact as when he had begun:
‘That is the situation, comrades, and tonight you must decide. Do you want to continue the strike? And, if so, how do you intend to defeat the Company?’
A deep silence fell from the starry sky. The invisible crowd made no reply from out of the darkness, sick at heart after what they had just heard; and the only sound among the trees was its long sigh of despair.
But then Étienne continued, in a different voice. This was no longer the local secretary of the International speaking, but the leader of men, the apostle of truth. Were they going to be cowards and go back on their word? What? Had they suffered to no purpose this past month? Were they going to return to work with their tails between their legs, return to the same endless poverty? Would they not do better to die here and now in the attempt to destroy the tyranny of capital that reduced the worker to a state of permanent starvation? Were they forever going to play the same stupid game of submitting to hunger and poverty only then to rise up when the hunger and poverty became too great to bear? That game could not go on. And he showed the miners how they were exploited, how they alone had to bear the consequences of industrial crises and were brought to the point of starvation the moment the demands of competition led to a reduction in prices. No, the new timbering rate was unacceptable, it was nothing but a concealed pay-cut, they were trying to rob every man of an hour of his daily work. This time they had gone too far, and the day was now approaching when the poor would take no more, when they would demand justice, when they would obtain justice.
He stood there with his arms raised. At the word ‘justice’ a long shudder ran through the crowd, and a burst of applause rippled away into the distance like rustling leaves.
Voices cried out:
‘Justice!…The time has come! Justice!’
Gradually Étienne warmed to his theme. He did not have the smooth articulacy of Rasseneur’s effortless delivery. He was frequently at a loss for a word, and he would get tied up in his sentences and struggle to finish them, reinforcing his point as he did so with a forward jerk of his shoulder. But in the course of these repeated hesitations he would chance on ways of saying things that struck home with immediate force and gripped the attention of his audience; while his gestures also had an extraordinary effect on the comrades, the gestures of a man at work, elbows back one minute and then released the next, as he brandished his fists and stuck out his chin as though he were ready to bite someone. Everyone said the same: he wasn’t a great speaker, but he made you listen.
‘The wage-system is a new form of slavery,’ he continued in even more rousing tones. ‘The mine should belong to the miner as the sea belongs to the fisherman or the land belongs to the peasant…Do you understand what I’m saying? The mine belongs to you, to every one of you. You’ve paid for it with your blood and suffering these past hundred years!’
Unabashed, he launched into discussion of various recondite legal questions, the whole panoply of laws that applied specifically to mining, but he soon lost the thread. What was beneath the land belonged to the nation just as much as the land itself; but, following the granting of a vile privilege, the companies now had sole rights to it. The situation in Montsou was even less acceptable because the alleged legality of the concessions was compromised by earlier agreements made with the owners of what had once been fiefdoms, in accordance with ancient Hainaut1 custom. For the miners, therefore, it was simply a matter of taking back what belonged to them; and with outstretched hands he gestured beyond the forest to the country at large. Just then the moon, which had
risen in the sky and was gleaming through the highest branches, shone on him. When the crowd, who were still standing in darkness, saw him like this, bathed in white light and bestowing riches with his open palms, they burst once more into prolonged applause.
‘Yes, yes, he’s right. Bravo!’
Then Étienne turned to his favourite subject, the collectivization of the means of production, a barbarous mouthful of a phrase, which he loved to trot out when he could. His own political education was now complete. Having begun with the neophyte’s sentimental taste for solidarity and a belief in the need to reform the wage system, he had come to the view that it should be abolished as a matter of policy. At the time of the meeting in the Jolly Fellow his idea of collectivism had been essentially humanitarian and unsystematic, but it had now evolved into a rigid and complex programme, each article of which he was knowledgeably ready and able to discuss. First, he took it as axiomatic that freedom could not be achieved other than by the destruction of the State. Second, once the people had taken power, the reforms would begin: namely, the return to an earlier form of community life in which a family structure based on oppression and the moral code would be replaced by a family whose members were free and had equal rights; absolute civil, political and economic equality for all; guaranteed independence for the individual, based on the ownership of, and the right to enjoy all the fruits of, the means of production; and finally, free vocational training paid for by the collective. All this required a complete overhaul of a society that was old and rotten to the core; and he duly attacked marriage and the rights of inheritance, talked about regulating the amount of money each person could have, and grandly abolished all manner of entrenched and time-honoured iniquity with a single sweep of his arm, like a reaper scything ripe corn to the ground. Then, with his other hand, he would set about the process of rebuilding, constructing the humanity of the future, the great edifice of truth and justice that would rise with the dawn of the twentieth century. In the course of his mental journey the claims of reason faltered and gave way to sectarian obsession. Any scruples prompted by common sense or normal feelings were swept aside: nothing could be simpler than the realization of this brave new world. He had it all planned, and he talked about it all as if this were simply some machine he could assemble in a matter of hours come what may.
‘Our day has dawned,’ he proclaimed in a final flourish. ‘It is our turn to have all the power and the wealth!’
The roar of acclamation rolled towards him from the depths of the forest. The whole clearing was now bathed in the pale light of the moon, and the sea of faces resolved itself into sharply delineated rows that stretched away beyond the tall grey tree-trunks into the darker recesses of the forest. Here in the freezing cold there swirled a tide of angry expressions, of shining eyes and bared teeth, a pack of starving humanity, of men, women and children unleashed upon the rightful pillage of ancient property that others had taken from them. They no longer felt the cold, for this fiery oratory had warmed them to the cockles of their hearts. They were borne up on a wave of religious exaltation, filled with the feverish expectancy of the early Christians living in hope of the new age of justice. Many obscure phrases had passed them by, and they understood little of all the more technical and abstract arguments; but the very obscurity and abstraction of the speech simply enhanced the vista of a promised land and dazzled them into agreement. What a vision! To be the masters! To know an end to suffering! To live and enjoy life at last!
‘That’s the way, by God! Our day has come!…Death to the oppressors!’
The women were hysterical. La Maheude was no longer her usual calm self, for hunger had made her light-headed; La Levaque was yelling; La Brûlé was quite beside herself and waving her arms about like a witch; Philomène was coughing her lungs up, and La Mouquette was so carried away that she started shouting endearments at the speaker. As to the men, Maheu was now persuaded and shouted his anger, flanked by Pierron who was trembling and Levaque who kept talking too much. Meanwhile the jokesters, Zacharie and Mouquet, tried to make fun of everything but were put off their stroke by their comrade’s astonishing capacity to say so much at once without having a drink. But up on the log-pile Jeanlin was making even more of a racket, egging Bébert and Lydie on to action and brandishing the basket that had Poland in it.
The crowd was in uproar, and Étienne savoured the heady joy of his popularity. It was as if his power had here assumed human form, since one word from him now sufficed to set the pulse racing in three thousand hearts. If Souvarine had deigned to come, he would have applauded his ideas – once he had made out what Étienne was saying – and he would have noted happily his pupil’s progress towards anarchism and agreed with his programme, except for the article about vocational training, a piece of sentimental foolishness, for the sacred and salutary ignorance of the people was to provide the very waters for their cleansing and renewal. As for Rasseneur, he was shrugging his shoulders with angry contempt.
‘Will you finally let me speak!’ he shouted at Étienne.
The latter jumped down from his tree-trunk.
‘Speak, then, and let’s see if they listen to you.’
Already Rasseneur had taken his place and was appealing for silence. But the noise continued unabated as his name was passed from those at the front who had recognized him to those at the back beneath the beech trees; and they all refused to listen to him. He was like a fallen idol, and the very sight of him was enough to make his former followers angry. His gift of the gab and his easy, good-natured manner had charmed them for so long, but what he had to say now seemed rather tepid stuff, suitable merely for reassuring the faint-hearted. He tried in vain to speak through the noise, intending to deliver his usual message of moderation about how you couldn’t change the world just by passing a lot of laws, how you had to give society time to evolve: but they just laughed and hissed and shouted him down. It was the defeat at the Jolly Fellow all over again, only this time much worse – and definitive. Eventually they started throwing lumps of frozen moss at him, and a woman shouted in a shrill voice:
‘He’s a scab!’
He explained why the mine could not belong to the miner in the same way that the craft of weaving belonged to the weaver, and he stated his preference for profit-sharing, with the worker having a stake in the company, like one of the family.
‘He’s a scab!’ a thousand voices repeated, as stones began to whistle through the air.
Rasseneur turned pale, and his eyes filled with tears of despair. For him this meant the end of everything, the fruits of twenty years of power-seeking comradeship swept away by the ingratitude of the crowd. Cut to the quick and without the strength to go on, he climbed down from the tree-trunk.
‘You think it’s funny, don’t you!’ he stammered to a triumphant Étienne. ‘Very well. But I just hope it happens to you one day…And it will happen. Just you wait!’
And as if to disclaim all responsibility for the disasters that he could see about to happen, he gestured the end of his involvement and departed alone across the white and silent countryside.
There was a sound of jeering, and everyone looked round in surprise to see old Bonnemort standing on a tree-trunk and trying to speak above the noise. Until then Mouque and he had appeared preoccupied, with that air they always had of thinking back to the old days. No doubt he had been taken with one of his periodic fits of garrulousness in which his memories were so strongly stirred that they welled up inside him and poured out of his mouth for hours on end. A deep silence fell and people listened to the old man, who looked as white as a ghost standing there in the moonlight; and as he talked of things that had no immediate bearing on the recent debate, long tales that no one could quite follow, so their amazement grew. He was talking about his youth and about his two uncles who had been buried alive in Le Voreux, and then he moved on to the pneumonia that had carried off his wife. But he kept to his point all the same: things had never been good, and they never would be. They, too
, had met like this in the forest, five hundred of them, because the King had refused to reduce the number of working hours; but then he stopped and began to talk about another strike. He had seen so many! It always ended up with them meeting here under the trees at Le Plan-des-Dames, or over at La Charbonnerie, or even as far away as Le Saut-du-Loup. Sometimes it was freezing cold, sometimes it was hot. One evening it had rained so hard that they had had to go home again without a word being said. And always the King’s soldiers would come, and always it would end in a shooting match.
‘We raised our hands like this, and we took an oath not to go back down. And I took that oath! Yes I did, I took that oath!’
The crowd listened open-mouthed, and it was beginning to have misgivings when Étienne, who had been attending keenly, leaped on to the fallen tree-trunk and stood beside the old man. He had just recognized Chaval among the people he knew in the front row. The thought that Catherine must be there had put new fire in his belly and a strong desire to be acclaimed in front of her.
‘Comrades, you’ve just heard what he said. Here is one of our oldest miners, and this is what he has suffered and what our children will suffer, too, if we don’t have done with these thieves and murderers once and for all!’
He was awesome: he had never spoken with such vehemence before. With one arm he held on to old Bonnemort, displaying him like an emblem of misery and grief and baying for vengeance as he did so. Speaking very quickly, he went back in time to the first of the Maheus and described how since then the whole family had been worn out by the mine and exploited by the Company and now found itself, after a hundred years of toil, even hungrier than it had ever been before; and then he compared them with the fat-bellied directors, men who oozed money from every pore, and with all those shareholders who had spent the past century living like kept women with nothing to do but delight in the pleasures of the flesh. Wasn’t it terrible? A whole lineage of human beings working themselves to death down the mine from father to son so that government ministers could have their kickbacks and generations of noble lords and gentlemen could give grand parties or sit and grow fat by their firesides! He had studied the occupational diseases of miners, and he regaled them with the full panoply in gruesome detail: anaemia, scrofula, the bronchitis that made them spit black coal, the asthma that choked them, the rheumatisms that stopped them walking. The miserable devils were no better than machine-fodder, they were penned in villages like livestock, and the big companies were gradually absorbing them all, regulating their slavery and threatening to enlist every worker in the country, millions upon millions of hands, in order to make the fortunes of a thousand idle men. But the miner was no longer the ignorant brute who could be crushed underfoot in the bowels of the earth. An army was taking root in the depths of the mines, a crop of citizens whose seed was slowly germinating under the surface of the earth and who would, one fine sunny day, finally break through to the light. And then they’d learn whether anyone would still dare to offer a pension of a hundred and fifty francs to a sixty-year-old miner after forty years’ service, a man who was coughing up coal-dust and whose legs were swollen with the water from the coal-faces he had worked. Yes, labour was going to call capital to account and confront this anonymous god that the worker never met, the god that squatted somewhere in its mysterious inner sanctuary and sucked the blood of the poor devils that kept it alive! They would go there themselves and they would finally see its face by the light of the coming conflagration; and then they would drown the filthy swine in its own blood, they would destroy this monstrous idol that had gorged on human flesh!