+mile Zola's Germinal and Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy:
Overthrowing Hierarchy upon Principle
The famed twentieth century French writer, AndrT Gide, ranks +mile Zola's Germinal (1895) as one of the ten best novels ever written in the French language (Gide as quoted in Zola, 1954, p. 5). In tandem, Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy (1869), existing as one of Britain's most often challenged documents which intermingles politics and culture stands uncontested as "the most frequently cited non-fiction prose work in the English language" (Collini as cited in Arnold, 1993, p. ix). Germinal and Culture and Anarchy, juxtaposed as master nineteenth century revolutionary texts, explore the need to reassess the standards by which a civilization judges itself, artfully suggesting that sometimes the existing hierarchy needs to be overthrown allowing for the principle of revolt to supercede established order. Zola and Arnold can be viewed as if jointly conspiring to examine why freedom is continually at odds with modern industrial society, attempting to grapple with the elusive nature of liberty, and meditating upon how often its unrestricted expression is penuriously blocked.
These writings by Zola and Arnold led their respective societies to question their own civil management of freedom, forcing them to consider the legitimacy of liberty operating as an opportunity unequally available to its citizens. Together Zola and Arnold's oeuvres ask that societies name and debate the principles by which they are governed, insisting that re-evaluations occur which would question the mass exploitation of laborers such as the fictional miners at Montsou and the preordained rights of England's own aristrocracy. Zola and Arnold saw a need for the reordering of society and an establishment of an ethical governing principle based not on an absolute standard imposed by an alleged supernatural order, but one sufficiently flexible to co...