Page:Germinal - Zola - 1925.djvu/267

GERMINAL "Yes, yes, he's right. Bravo!"

Then Étienne trotted out his favourite subject, the assumption of the instruments of production by the collectivity, as he repeated it in a phrase of which the pedantry greatly pleased him. At the present time his evolution was completed. Having set out with the sentimental fraternity of the novice and the need for reforming the wage system, he had reached the political idea of its suppression. Since the meeting at the Bon-Joyeux his collectivism, still humanitarian and without a formula, had stiffened into a complicated programme which he discussed scientifically, article by article. First, he affirmed that freedom could only be obtained by the destruction of the state. Then, when the people had obtained possession of the government, reforms would begin: return to the primitive commune, substitution of an equal and free family for the moral and oppressive family; absolute equality, civil, political and economic; individual independence guaranteed, thanks to the possession and the integral product of the instruments of work; finally, free and professional education, paid for by the collectivity. This led to the total reconstruction of the old rotten society; he attacked marriage, the right of testament, he regulated everyone's fortune, he threw down the iniquitous monument of the dead centuries with a great movement of his arm, always the same movement, the movement of the reaper who is cutting down a ripe harvest. And then with the other hand he reconstructed; he built up the future of humanity, the edifice of truth and justice rising in the dawn of the twentieth century. In this state of mental tension reason trembled, and only the sectarian's fixed idea was left. The scruples of sensibiltysensibility [sic] and of good sense were lost; nothing seemed easier than the realisation of this new world. He had foreseen everything; he spoke of it as of an engine which he could get up in two hours, and neither fire nor blood cost him anything.

"Our turn is come," he broke out for the last time. "Now it is for us to have power and wealth!"

The cheering rolled up to him from the depths of the forest. The moon now whitened the whole of the glade, and cut into living waves the sea of heads, as far as the confused copses between the great grey trunks in the distance. And in the icy air there was a fury of faces, of gleaming eyes, of open mouths, [255]