Octave Mirbeau: Le Journal d'une femme de chambre | The Diary of a Chambermaid (1900)

Octave Mirbeau's Le Journal d'une femme de chambre (1900) is perhaps well known not directly as a result of the author's book, but via Buñuel's 1964 cinematic adaptation of it, although the film is only loosely based on the book. Mirbeau's Le Journal d'une femme de chambre – a wonderful sprawling, digressive work of 400 pages – contains many memories of the maid writer Célestine, of a large number of other families she has worked for, and the details of their avarice, the sexual assaults she has undergone, the insults, the denials, the slavery, the fact that she has no one to complain to because – automatically, she is a powerless entity in a world where the rich always win. This isn't the place to argue about how much or how little the situation has changed today, but it's interesting to reflect that Célestine, as she realises, in a sense stands in a kind of mid-position between the rich and the poor because she has direct experience of both poverty and wealth.

Buñuel's film is more linear than Mirbeau's book, which might at first appear a little odd, but then both Buñuel and Mirbeau are anarchists. Nevertheless, we can very easily tweak out a general story from this book: Célestine, a maid, arrives at the house of the Lanlaire family, one which owes much of its wealth to ill-gotten gains, and she discovers a horrendous world. Her mistress dominates the family, especially her husband (who makes pathetically sexually frustrated overtures to Célestine), and only very reluctantly parts with any money. The place is engulfed in misery.

But the gardener Joseph, who has been with the family for fifteen years and is highly respected by his employer, will wield a very heavy influence on Célestine. An anti-Dréfusard, in other words an anti-Semite, Joseph is an odious individual who is not only cruel to animals but may well have raped a young girl and killed her. Célestine is well aware of this, as well as Joseph's theft of the Lanlaire silver, but all the same goes on to join Joseph in his thriving café in Cherbourg.

Mirbeau criticises religion, the bourgeoisie, the class system, the nature of work itself, politics in even its most narrow sense, and comes up with a hugely powerful weapon against general right-wing enslavement of the vast majority of the population. This book is a deadly political weapon.