I was not a child, they said: I shouldn’t be playing with toys. But they eventually relented, handing me the amount they would have spent on presents — $200 — and telling me I could do whatever I wanted with it. So off I set for my spree, taking my six-year-old sister with me. We circled around the store again and again, arrived at a provisional list, deliberated carefully over what might be substituted for what, mystifying the employees — upon whom it slowly dawned that the pile of toys growing on the counter was intended not for my sister but for me. I asked for each one to be wrapped individually.

I have such a vivid memory of this experience — the avaricious thrill of thinking that almost anything in the store could be mine, the absurd freedom to possess things of which I had absolutely no need — but I do not remember what I ended up buying. I cannot name even one toy I purchased that day, and I do not know whether any of them are still with me. It was on this day, on the eve of adulthood, that I approximated the ideal of consumerism, the frenzied mania that is the pure joy of shopping.

Much later, I read some books by social scientists that sought to explain this phenomenon. In his Theory of the Leisure Class, for instance, Thorstein Veblen explains that “conspicuous consumption” is a way of signalling that one is above engaging in productive labour: “A detailed examination of what passes in popular apprehension for elegant apparel will show that it is contrived at every point to convey the impression that the wearer does not habitually put forth any useful effort.” In The Affluent Society, Kenneth Galbraith lays out what he calls “the dependence effect”, which is that capitalism reverses the relationship between production and desire. Instead of producing things in order to satisfy people’s antecedent desires and needs, a wealthy capitalist society has an antecedent commitment to production, which means: “It accords to the producer the function both of making the goods and of making the desires for them.”

All of that made some sense to me, but I was unsatisfied, feeling that phrases such as “conspicuous consumption” and “dependence effect” obscured as much as they revealed. They didn’t explain the powerful drive that animated me in the toy store, versions of which I continue to feel to this day when I shop. But then I read a novel by Émile Zola.

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By JOSIAH GOGARTY

The Ladies’ Paradise — Au Bonheur Des Dames — is named for the department store that is the novel’s true protagonist. It is described alternately as a monster, a machine, a colossus, a cathedral, and over the course of the novel it grows — in power and influence, in financial success, and in physical size, as it expands along the street to swallow up the small businesses that had flourished in the neighbourhood for generations. The fictional store and its fictional owner, Octave Mouret, are based, respectively, on Le Bon Marché, one of Paris’ first department stores, and the businessman Aristide Boucicaut, who grew a 3,000 square foot novelty shop with a handful of departments — buttons, lace, ribbons, umbrellas — into a 55,000 square foot colossus that sold everything. Zola carefully researched the business practices detailed in the novel: the replacement of haggling with fixed prices, the use of advertising, the introduction of returns and sales and discounts, the giant displays to encourage window-shopping, the routine rearrangement of the store to confuse customers into spending more time within its walls. The author’s journalistic eye for detail takes the reader back in time to watch something new coming into being — a new type of desire, a new set of human relationships, a new form of life. We witness the birth of shopping.

It is very hard not to be a moralist about capitalism. Veblen and Galbraith fall into the trap: one can hear the distaste in a phrase like “conspicuous consumption”. And these days, we are so accustomed to the word “capitalism” being followed by moralism that it comes as a shock to encounter Zola, who wants to talk to us about economic growth, about the lust for luxury goods, about the power of advertising and the many guises it can take, about the mannerisms of rich shoppers and the working conditions of the poor people who serve them — and yet doesn’t want to preach to us about any of those things. He wants to show you the splendours and the horrors of something; he wants to help you understand.

The novel is filled with lavish descriptions of stuff, ecstatic prose poems to fabric — silk, in particular — to colour — white, in particular — that awaken the reader’s own acquisitive impulses. These encomia are so compelling that I found myself thinking: wouldn’t it be nice to have those buttery soft gloves, that colourful parasol, some Alençon lace! And so, when one reaches the descriptions of the heated frenzy of the crowds that descend on the store to strip it of its wares like locusts, one doesn’t view these people from a refined, superior, judgmental distance; one locates oneself among the throng, having become, alongside it, one of the store’s fervent admirers.

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But of all the novelists I have read, Zola is least likely to hide the ugly truth. He is brutally direct in showcasing the damage wrought by The Ladies’ Paradise. You are introduced to the artisanal work of the umbrella store owner, who carves handles into animal shapes by hand — only to be forced to watch him squeezed out of existence as Mouret’s shop surrounds him. In a different subplot, a generations-long tradition of handing a shop down from parents to children is suddenly and permanently severed, and you see the violent effect on all those whose lives were predicated on its continuation. One by one, such people try to “stand up to” Mouret; one by one, they fail. One person attempts suicide; a second wastes away from sheer sadness, which causes a third to waste away, too. Even those shopkeepers who escape the net of death manifest such a strong insistence on “going down with the ship” that one cannot help but conclude: their lives are over.

If we turn our attention inside the store, to those who “benefit” from its existence, the horrors are equally many. The saleswomen are trapped inside it, forced to eat the terrible food offered in the cafeteria and sleep in unheated rooms where they nearly freeze to death in winter; if they wish to leave, even on a day off, they need permission. These women had few employment alternatives, so apart from room and board they were at first only paid on commission, and lived in terror of being fired — turned out onto the street, with nowhere to go. The result is a cut-throat, competitive atmosphere among the sales force, which contrasts sharply with the atmosphere of the small family shops, where the good of one is the good of all. When it comes to the customers, Zola shows you how the store’s irresistible attractions inflame their greed, inducing them to spend more than they can afford, and driving even “respectable” women to shoplifting.

For all the suffering it causes, the Ladies’ Paradise is a place of passion, filled with energy. The people inside of it may be a bit crazed with the desperation to buy, or the desperation to sell, but they are noticeably alive, when juxtaposed with the surrounding neighbourhood, which reeks of darkness and decay. And this, in the end, is the sharpest contrast in the novel: between the lively, colourful world of the department store, and the stagnant and despondent world outside of it. As much as you empathise with the umbrella store owner, there is no question as to which way the future lies. What Zola showcases about capitalism is that it is a powerful source of optimism, of momentum; and that people, once they become wealthy enough to attend to something other than survival, need some such engine. The difficulty that he implicitly raises for any alternative to capitalism is not the usual one, about efficiency: how will the system be organised in such a way as to avoid poverty for all? It is instead a motivational difficulty: assuming it does avoid poverty for all, what will move and inspire and incite those people?

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Zola wrote the kinds of novels critics love to trash, which is to say, the kinds of novels people actually enjoy: a contemporary journalist described him as “the most violently attacked and the most widely read author of his generation”. Zola understood that ordinary readers read for the plot: for romantic tensions, reversals of fortune, character-testing crises. The Ladies’ Paradise comes complete with a plucky heroine — and a will-they-or-won’t-they love story that keeps you turning the pages.

Nonetheless, all of that is secondary. Zola, who lived at the time when social science was beginning to come into its own as a field of research, could be described as the novelist who moonlit as a social scientist. This is why Havelock Ellis, a pioneer in the study of sexuality, wrote: “To look at Zola from the purely artistic standpoint is scarcely to see him at all.” When Zola is telling a story, he’s not only telling a story. While he has your attention, while you’re held in suspense over the heroine’s fate, you find yourself examining the inner workings of this colossus, this department store; you become captivated by its power. And slowly, over the course of the novel, you find yourself confronted by an uncomfortable thought.

The thought is precisely what the TV adaptation of the novel steers you carefully away from. The BBC’s attempt is remarkable chiefly for how systematically it erases the brutal truths that saturate Zola’s text. The store is a fraction of the size depicted in the novel; we never see frenzied crowds; there is no shoplifting, no seasonal firing of employees; no one is driven to purchases she cannot afford; apart from a few “bad seeds”, the employees are loyal and friendly to one another; and when the neighbourhood shops stand up to Mouret (here renamed “Moray”), they retain their dignity and achieve some measure of success. The show is set not in Zola’s rapidly changing world, but our fantasy of the time that preceded it.

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We are living in the world Mouret made, but we don’t want to accept it. We like to imagine ourselves surrounded by hand-carved umbrella heads; we continue to find the image of that artisanal old world comfortable, appealing and familiar. In other words, we find the real world — the one we actually live in — somewhat terrifying and alien. We don’t have an intuitive understanding of capitalism, of the desires it creates in us, of the relationships it throws us into. We don’t understand why we like shopping, and often pretend that we don’t. We will come up with an excuse as to why we “have to” buy something. Dating profiles tell us that people love to travel, or read, or hike, never that they love to shop. When a hobby requires expensive gear, this often makes it secretly more appealing — a reason to shop! — not less. The fact that these secret urges are now driving the show: that is the uncomfortable thought.

For all the imaginative pleasure we take in the reassuring smallness of Moray’s shop, when it comes to actual shopping, we choose more and more of Mouret. After rejecting the small store in favour of the department store, we rejected the department store in favour of the shopping mall, and the mall in favour of Amazon. We willingly move deeper and deeper into a world that doesn’t feel like home, that maybe never will. And it is Zola who offers us a front row seat to the opening act of this drama, a chance to watch the new world rising from the ashes of the old, a chance to come to terms with the creatures that we have become.

With this exclamation, Zola’s letter transformed une affaire judiciare into l’affaire Dreyfus or, more simply, the Dreyfus Affair. It catapulted the French novelist onto the world stage at a critical moment in the history of his country, which was reeling from the forces of globalisation and industrialisation and riven by opposing understandings of its revolutionary heritage. It is thus hardly surprising that Zola’s fame rests more heavily on the letter than on his sweeping 20-volume masterpiece of literary realism, the Rougon-Macquart. It took a novelist to heave the facts of this affair into a narrative which, more than a century later, thrums with equal urgency. Moreover, as with the novels of the Rougon-Macquart, the letter thrusts onto centre-stage a lone individual swept up, and all too often swept under, the political and social, irrational and ideological forces of the modern age.

It all began with the contents of a rubbish bin. In September 1894, a cleaning woman at the German Embassy, in the pay of France’s military intelligence service, delivered her nightly harvest to her employers. Buried in the mound of discarded papers was a memorandum, known as the bordereau or note, revealing top secret advances in French artillery technology and tactics. In a frantic scramble to find its author, the war ministry’s suspicion settled on Captain Alfred Dreyfus, an officer in the High Command who stood out for his standoffishness and Jewishness.

Upon being arrested and charged, a bewildered Dreyfus denied the charges, pointing out several things mentioned in the bordereau he could not possibly have known. The seven members of the military tribunal, ignoring these inconsistencies as well as the insistence of their own graphologist that Dreyfus’s handwriting did not match the bordereau’s, unanimously found him guilty. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in solitary confinement on Devil’s Island, a malarial rock off the coast of French Guyana.

But first came a remarkable ritual of public humiliation. Dreyfus was marched into the courtyard of the École militaire, the renowned military academy a short distance from the recently erected Eiffel Tower. In the shadow of that monument to modernity, an officer preceded to snap Dreyfus’s sword — broken and soldered back together with tin the night before, to make the gesture seem effortless — and tear off his insignia — whose threads were already loosened — while a dense crowd howled with calls for the death of the “Jewish traitor!”

Two years later, as Dreyfus wasted away in solitary confinement, Colonel Georges Picquart, the newly appointed head of military intelligence, found that another missive about French military plans had ended up in the rubbish bin at the German Embassy. Moreover, the handwriting on this new document, which matched that of the bordereau, also matched the hand of Ferdinand Esterhazy, an officer notorious for his womanising and gambling.

Picquart disliked Jews as much as his many of his fellow officers did. But when his commanding officer asked him why it mattered if “this Jew remains on Devil’s Island”, Picquart replied: “Because he is innocent!” The answer earned Picquart a rapid transfer to a desert outpost in North Africa. Before he was packed off, though, Picquart vowed that he would not “carry this secret to my grave”. He then shared what he knew with Auguste Scheurer-Kestner, the leader of Dreyfusards, a small but growing coterie of politicians and writers seeking a retrial for Dreyfus.

In late 1897, Zola met with Scheurer-Kestner, who told him about Picquart’s discovery. As the mesmerised novelist listened, he glimpsed the theatrical as well as moral dimensions of the affair. “It’s thrilling!” he gasped. “It’s frightful! But it is also drama on the grand scale!” It took Zola to scale it to greatness by flipping Oscar Wilde’s sly quip that anyone could make history, but only a great man could write it. Instead, Zola showed, a man becomes truly great only by, in every sense of the word, making history.

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But to make history, one must first master its details. For his novels, Zola spent weeks cramming before he began writing. Preparing his epic Germinal, he toured northern France, interviewing miners and managers, plunging into libraries as well as down mine shafts. Zola followed the same approach for “J’Accuse”. Like the Dreyfusards, he was appalled by the yawning gaps in the prosecution’s case — gaps that a clique of officers had frantically filled with forged documents. But as Zola knew, it was not enough to make the facts public. He also had to make them compelling. “Our factual accounts became poetry for Zola,” recalled Scheurer-Kestner. But Zola did not do poetry; instead, he did tragedy. And truth to say, Dreyfus’s case did resemble the tragic stuff of Zola’s fiction, peopled by fully realised characters who are eventually flattened by what Zola’s predecessor, Honoré Balzac, called the social machine.

Thus, after preparing the stage with a series of articles punctuated with the prophetic words, “Truth is on the march, and nothing will stop it,” Zola published his climactic letter. The lion’s share is devoted to a merciless exposé of the many inconsistencies in the military’s case, but what readers remember is the peroration. With incantatory cadence, Zola names names in the highest reaches of the military, preceding each of his criminal charges by the phrase “I accuse”. He then concludes with striking flourish that circles back to his earlier leitmotif: “The act I accomplish here is but a revolutionary means for hastening the explosion of truth and justice.”

Explosive, indeed. Deferring to its military, the government charged the novelist with libel and hauled him into court. Howling for the death of Zola (as well as Dreyfus, and the Jews), anti-Dreyfusard mobs clashed with police on the boulevards of Paris while squads from the Anti-Semitic League ransacked stores in the Jewish quarter of Le Marais. While Zola left France for the start of a year-long exile in England, Esterhazy left the military court that, despite overwhelming evidence of his guilt, had just exonerated him of the charge of treason, to be greeted by a cheering crowd.

None of this, however, was enough to prevent a new trial for Dreyfus. After more than four years of solitary confinement on Devil’s Island, the man who had been transformed into a symbol returned to France in 1899 and accepted a presidential pardon. An expended country tried to put The Affair behind it, and an exhilarated Zola returned to Paris. Yet his return was short-lived: on September 28, 1902, he died from asphyxiation while asleep in his bedroom. Investigators found the chimney was blocked, giving rise to rumours, never confirmed, that someone had acted on the countless death threats made by Right-wing nationalists against the writer.

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But this was not the end of The Affair. In fact, it has no single ending, and “if you want a happy ending,” as Orson Welles once remarked, “that depends, of course, where you stop your story”. Stories of The Affair usually stop at the 50,000 mourners who accompanied the carriage carrying Zola’s casket to Montmartre Cemetery in 1902. Or they stop at the legal exoneration of Dreyfus in 1906, followed by his receipt of the Légion d’honneur and his reinstatement in the army. Or they stop in 1908, with the transfer of Zola’s remains to the Pantheon where, under the eyes of Captain Dreyfus, Prime Minister Clemenceau and War Minister Picquart, he was extolled for “descending from the ivory tower” and confronting “the passions of the crowd”. Zola was reborn — sacralised, really — as a public intellectual, that uniquely French creature who, armed with the certainty that comes with science and reason, offered his moral guidance to the nation.

There are, however, many other potential endings that retellings such as the Oscar-winning 1937 film, The Life of Zola, left on the cutting room floor. (Among the cut scenes were those that mentioned the words “Jew” and “antisemitism”.) Rather than concluding with the largely fictitious speech the actor Paul Muni gives in the courtroom, or the actual oration over Zola’s remains at the Pantheon, we could instead declare “It’s a wrap” with Louis Anthelme Grégori, the fanatical nationalist who shot Dreyfus at the end of the oration but succeeded only in grazing his arm. Or we could snap the clapperboard with the trial of the same would-be assassin, acquitted by a jury that accepted his claim that he had only wished to wound, not kill Dreyfus. Why not, in fact, sign off with the institutionalisation and banalisation of movements like Action française, which slapped an intellectual veneer on a virulent antisemitism that persists to this day in France’s extreme Right-wing?

And, for that matter, on France’s extreme Left-wing. Tellingly, reactionary ideologues at the turn of the century could not claim exclusive dibs on antisemitism; many socialist and anarchist thinkers were no less eager to embrace it. The founder of French syndicalism, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, insisted that the Jews, “always parasitical and fraudulent”, controlled the levers of capitalism, while the socialist firebrand Auguste Blanqui branded them as “the incarnation of swindling, usury, and rapacity” who were waging a “war to the death with the human race”.

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Most telling and disturbing, though, is how the laudable passion for truth and justice soon became, as the Oxford historian Ruth Harris brilliantly traces, a lamentable passion for Truth and Justice. Not only did The Affair unify the previously warring parties on the Left — which, upon forming a government, launched a crusade against the Catholic church, expelling hundreds of orders and convents, many of which had nothing to do with politics. It also led to yet another affair, a sorry event known as the affaire des fiches. In 1904, the Ministry of Defence, with the help of Masonic lodges, secretly created files on more than 25,000 officers who, because of past involvement with the Church — including charitable activities — were now considered suspect.

This affair, which eventually led to the collapse of the government, also collapsed what remained of the idealism of those who rallied to Dreyfus. As Charles Péguy, who was both a Catholic and Dreyfusard, concluded, everything that begins in mystique ends in politique. This includes the politics of the Left no less than the Right. The French Left, Harris rightly notes, was as prone to the “dangerous dynamic” of absolutism as its opponents on the Right. What this suggests — and a glance as any news site confirms — is that The Affair, rather than having no single conclusion, is a never-ending tale. How could it be otherwise in a world where communications technologies, whose algorithms drive passions and damper reason, make the newspapers and pamphlets of fin-de-siècle France look positively fin-de-néolithique?

Seventy years ago, another novelist who moonlighted as a journalist made this point in his essay The Rebel. In a world framed by opposing ideological extremes, Albert Camus concluded, the rebel is someone who insists upon limits and refuses to surrender the centre. In a line that could serve as Zola’s epitaph — or, for that matter, his own — Camus declared: “The logic of the rebel is to want to serve justice so as not to add to the injustice of the human condition.” In the end, the rebel is a radical moderate — a phrase that is certainly oxymoronic, but even more importantly tragic. Yet it is a role whose logic is as pressing today as it was in Zola’s day.

But by the end, it was the book’s swirling, ambiguous politics which struck me the most: its class tensions, militant worker rebellion, and aborted revolutions. It spoke to the emotional, often interpersonal motivations behind political actions, the pitfalls of mob anger, and the futility of uprisings against larger, overseeing forces that go much deeper than we could ever see.

Written between April 1884 and February 1885, and published serially starting in December of 1884, Germinal tells the story of a young man, Etienne, who shows up to a mining village one night looking for work. He’s been sleeping out, is broke and hungry. Despite initially getting denied, he’s given a job by Maheu, the leader of the workers. He’s offered lodging under Maheu’s roof, sleeping alongside Catherine, Maheu’s daughter, who also works in the mines, and becomes Etienne’s love interest. But they are prevented from consummating their love due to an almost incestuous, taboo-like proximity caused by their living arrangement, and because Catherine gets taken by another man, Chaval, Etienne’s rival. As the novel progresses, we see Etienne gradually get accustomed to the job. We see what life for these workers looks like, their festivals, how they turn up, how they bathe — each household member taking turns in a single big tub.

But before long, Etienne starts wanting more. He starts reading about revolutionary ideas. He starts asking his fellow workers if they are content with the life they’re living. Some, like Souvarine, an anarchist extremist who was part of an uprising back in Russia, are all about it. Others, like Maheu’s wife, who has a household of children to consider, are more apprehensive to get riled up about a life they could be living. They talk it out at the pub, at Maheu’s before going to bed each night. Etienne starts giving speeches to increasingly receptive crowds of workers. Then the Company docks their pay, and they decide to strike.

What we see next is the gradual frenzy of the mob. Of how ugly things can turn when a single employer monopolises an area’s available work. The striking workers first mob to Hennebeau’s, the local bourgeoisie manager’s house, presenting their demands. When they’re rejected, they mob, on foot, from mine to mine in the area, attempting to prevent other workers from returning to work. They surround and try to break into Hennebeau’s house. When that fails, they turn on the local shopkeeper, Maigrat, attempting to raid his store. Maigrat climbs onto the roof, attempting to protect his goods with projectiles from above, only he slips and falls, bashes his head open. His corpse gets mutilated by the mob in a stomach-turning scene and even Etienne looks on with horror.

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It has long been debated whether Germinal is a revolutionary or a reactionary work. On the one hand, how Zola describes the bleak conditions of these workers aligns him squarely on their “side”. Under constant risk of getting crushed underground by rock falls, or asphyxiated by firedamp, and coughing up huge hunks of phlegm their whole lives, they’re given just enough bread to survive, have no horizon of hope, and “life’s only pleasures [are] getting drunk and giving your wife a baby”. But Zola, interestingly, also shows the other side. After the striking workers surround the bourgeoisie manager Hennebeau’s house, Zola switches to Hennebeau’s point of view, giving the reader a contemporaneous rundown of his day.

We learn that a) Hennebeau doesn’t even have the power to meet their demands — he’s only answering to the higher-up stockholders in Paris, and b) he’s not even thinking about the workers, he’s just discovered that his wife, who hasn’t slept with him for years, has been sleeping with his nephew. Hennebeau spends the day, when workers are rioting and throwing rocks at his windows, feeling silently cucked and in fact deeply envious of the shameless, visceral way these workers live, rioting and drinking and fucking at will. Even Etienne, as soon as he starts getting some power as the leader of the uprising, starts buying new clothes and dreaming of becoming a political leader in Paris. He, too, is looking out for himself.

Are Zola’s visions of what happens once a crowd becomes a mob, what happens when the leader of an uprising gets some power, assertions, or simply true reflections of the world that he’s merely reporting? That is up to the reader to decide. The difficulty the reader has deciding this, in fact, is what makes Zola’s storytelling so strong. What jolts the reader out of empty political theorising.

In the end, the strike does, for a time, seem to work, if backhandedly. The conflict culminates in a clash when the Company brings in foreign scabs and troops, and the local workers surround the mine, throwing rocks at the armed gendarmes. Shots are fired — as, we’re told in a footnote, happened at a mine near where the novel is set, in 1869. It’s only at this point, when news gets out to the rest of the country that troops are shooting workers, that the stockholders do something. Attempting to save face, they abandon their plan to implement foreign scabs and invite the local workers back, promising, in cold corporate speak, that all is forgiven. Most of the workers, beaten down, demoralised, and starving, return to work.

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Only, the night before the miners return, Souvarine, the extremist anarchist, commits a destructive, terroristic act against the Company, sneaking into the mine and rupturing its already compromised main vein. The mine explodes, water bursting through the barriers, swallowing all the mining equipment underground, and trapping Etienne and a few dozen workers down there. Etienne eventually gets rescued — by Hennebeau’s nephew, Negrel, the engineer, who, in a rare subversion of the worker-bourgeoisie binary, risks his life to do so — and ends the book bathed in sun one morning, recovered from his injuries, seeing off his coworkers, who are back working at the mine with pre-strike wages. He’s off to Paris to take an entry-level political job. A type of class mobility, for the few seeds able to make it through winter, is possible. But otherwise: people fight, people die, and those who don’t die, according to cycles beyond our control, endure, continuing their endless striving upwards, out of the earth, into the sun and clean air.

That’s the political conclusion. A sense of futility in the face of larger natural forces. The mine explodes when it wants to, things calibrate once spring comes, everything returns eternally according to its own timetable.

The emotional climax, however, comes during the armed standoff, when it appears that Catherine has been shot. The engine of the book — what pushed me, in any case, to finish it — are the interpersonal threads. The erotic desires, or internal biological forces, driving characters to act. Early on, Etienne accidentally witnesses Chaval taking Catherine behind a shed, despite her not being a woman yet. “You know I’m too young,” Catherine pleads. “Wait till later on, at least till I’m grown up.” Chaval ignores this, continues onto her, and she lets him. Witnessing this fills Etienne with “a kind of jealous excitement”, “together with a furious desire to get his revenge”.

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When Etienne is first getting ideas about striking, he sees the way Catherine looks at him in that position of leadership. When he speaks to crowds, he keeps an eye out for if Catherine is there. These internal, libidinal energies, like the larger, external cyclical forces, drive and orient his political actions. And that intersection between internal, biological forces and external, political ones culminates when, during the armed standoff, Catherine appears to be one of the casualties, passed out on the muddy field out front of the mine, her stomach soaked in blood. Only she hasn’t been shot; she’s finally become a woman. Her mother, discovering this, scoffs at the cosmic irony of starting menstruation the minute the world has gotten too fucked to bring children into. But it seems significant that Catherine, once the Company invites the workers back, is the first to go. She tells Etienne she can’t sit around doing nothing. She’s got to do what she can for the future.

This seems like a more optimistic acceptance of the cyclicality of the world: it’s not just that we’re deterministically led along paths we can’t see or control, according to larger natural rhythms. But each of us are driven by interpersonal motivations within ourselves, to impress a prospective lover, to protect a family, or even, like Souvarine, who lost his wife to public execution back in Russia during a revolt he himself led, to find nihilistic expression for heartbreak. This insight doesn’t resolve any political conflicts we might have, nor justifies terroristic political acts, but could open the door to having compassion for where political differences might stem from — might emotionally, interpersonally, in unseen, cyclical ways, be driven by.