Good protestors are like good weeds. Weeds are just plants that grow where someone doesn't want them to grow. Good weeds are hard to get rid of: deep roots with multiple stems, networked, distributed, able to reproduce when attacked, growing in the midst of cultivated plants, having pretty flowers that discourage less determined gardeners and win them time to seed, and above all relentless. They also break up the soil and bring nutrients up, benefiting others.
Today in Labor History April 2, 1840: Émile Zola, French novelist, playwright, journalist was born. He was also a liberal activist, playing a significant role in the political liberalization of France, and in the exoneration of Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish army officer falsely convicted and imprisoned on trumped up, antisemitic charges of espionage. He was also a significant influence on mid-20th century journalist-authors, like Thom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer and Joan Didion. Wolfe said that his goal in writing fiction was to document contemporary society in the tradition of Steinbeck, Dickens, and Zola.
Zola wrote dozens of novels, but his most famous, Germinal, about a violently repressed coalminers’ strike, is one of the greatest books ever written about working class rebellion. It had a huge influence on future radicals, especially anarchists. Some anarchists named their children Germinal. Rudolf Rocker had a Yiddish-language anarchist journal in London called Germinal, in the 1910s. There were also anarchist papers called Germinal in Mexico and Brazil in the 1910s.
Hier soir, j'ai vu pour la première fois le film #Germinal qui passait sur France 5. Je n'avais pas non plus lu le livre de Zola. Évidemment pour un syndicaliste que je suis ça manquait à ma culture.
Et bien ça a été réellement une grosse claque. J'en suis encore tout retourné.
Today in Labor History June 16, 1869: In the small mining town of Ricamarie, France, troops opened fire on miners who were protesting the arrest of 40 workers. As a result, troops killed 14 people, including a 17-month-old girl in her mother’s arms. Furthermore, they wounded 60 others, including 10 children. This strike, and another in Aubin, along with the Paris Commune, were major inspirations for Emile Zola’s seminal work, “Germinal,” and the reason he chose to focus on revolutionary worker actions.