Germinal

“For half an hour the shaft continued to gorge itself in this way, with greater or lesser voracity depending on the level to which the men were descending, but without cease, ever famished, its giant bowels capable of digesting an entire people.” 

Le Voreux’s depth both mesmerizes and frightens Étienne when he observes cages of “meat loads”—workers on their way to the pit-bottom—descend the shaft. Le Voreux is a giant beast, an “ogre whose hunger could never be satisfied” (72). It requires hundreds of miners working nearly around the clock in order to function. Although the work takes great physical endurance and tolerance of extreme temperatures, it pays so little that many families live on the verge of starvation. By describing Le Voreux as an insatiable beast that swallows people whole, Zola establishes that it consumes them figuratively as well as literally. The miners’ lives revolve around their work, but to the Company, they are mere fuel to feed the fires that sustain their bottom line. 

“Only their sense of hierarchy held them in check, the quasi-military hierarchy from overman down to pit-boy, which made them each subordinate to the person above.” 

This quotation describes the resignation of Maheus’ team after Négrel fines them for timbering. Rather than argue, they ruefully accept their punishment. They live in a “habitual state of inbred acquiescence” (216), accepting that they work to provide for the Company, even at the expense of their own lives. Characters frequently express hesitation to join Étienne’s rebellion. When their paychecks are cut due to timbering fines, Maheu says they must “[k]nuckle down and be grateful” (183). In his speech in the woods, Étienne explains how generations of Maheus have been “exploited by the Company” (291), resulting in miners being resigned to living “down the pit like an animal, like a machine for extracting coal” (169). The miners are conditioned to believe in the hierarchy that oppresses and subordinates them.

“Was it possible that people could work themselves to death at such terrible labour, down here in this mortal darkness, and still not earn even enough for their daily bread?” 

Étienne is angered when Maheu’s team is fined for timbering. He has spent the day working in unbearable heat and dangerous conditions and is incredulous that such difficult work does not even support the miners’ meager lives. He decides that he will not return; unlike the miners, he is an educated man, and “he didn’t share their herd-like sense of resignation” (63). He believes he is better off dying of starvation without a job than barely having enough to eat while working in such horrid conditions. However, after talking with Maheu and Rasseneur that evening, he decides to stay, eager “to suffer and struggle” (72) to help the people.

“It was like a private god whom they worshipped in their egotism, a fairy godmother who rocked them to sleep in their large bed of idleness and fattened them at their groaning table.” 

The Grégoires feel “a profound sense of gratitude” (80) toward their stock in the Montsou mine because it sustains them in their comfort and idleness. M. Grégoire prides himself on living a stable lifestyle; he does not speculate with his money but lets his stock support him. M. Grégoire and his family believe “[t]he easiest way to make money is to let other people make it for you” (83). They feel safer with their money “in the ground, from whence a race of miners, generation after generation of starving people, would extract it for them, a little each day” (80). This quotation illustrates the contrast between the bourgeois and the workers who support them. While the poor perform endless hours of backbreaking work and worry over their next meal, the bourgeois enjoy brioche in chocolate and lounging in dining rooms until the late hours of the morning. M. Grégoire is oblivious to the exploitative origins of his fortune.

“‘With such sentiments as those, my good woman, one can rise above misfortune.’” 

When La Maheude visits the Grégoires to receive a donation, the Grégoires ask her questions about her family and express consternation when she says she has seven children. They tell her they never give money to the poor because the poor always spend it on alcohol. M. Grégoire suggests that if miners’ families are hungry, miners should put “a few sous to one side the way countryfolk do” (95). M. Hennebeau echoes this sentiment later when he tells his lunch party that the miners are having trouble going “back to their frugal ways” (209). The suggestion is that the miners’ poverty is their own fault, that their lack of discipline and responsibility has led to their dire circumstances. They do not realize that La Maheude, like most miners, has barely enough to feed her family, much less save each month.

“‘We’ve got to bring the whole lot down, or the hunger will simply start all over again. Yes, anarchy! All gone, a world washed clean by blood, purified by fire! And then we’ll see.’” 

Étienne is mesmerized by Souvarine’s “cult of destruction” (245) and yearns to understand it; however, “[t]here was something in his blood that made him reject this dark prospect of global destruction” (245), and he is frightened as he listens. Souvarine exhibits frustration with gradual revolt, believing the only way to achieve justice is to destroy society and rebuild it in a new, better image. He believes strikes and the International are “nonsense” and tells Étienne that eventually everyone will go back to work because they are cowards. Souvarine advocates for this new society at the expense of people’s lives, even his own. 

“‘You used to be so peaceable before. That’s it, isn’t it? Somebody’s been saying you can have jam today, that it’s your turn to be the masters.’” 

When the deputation of strikers visits M. Hennebeau at his home, M. Hennebeau condescends to and infantilizes them. He wonders why they are insubordinate and suggests that someone promising them treats has led them astray. He laments that the miners are no longer content to accept their passivity. He also suggests that the people are thoughtless, easily enticed and manipulated by leaders. M. Hennebeau also drastically underestimates the seriousness of the people’s needs. They interested in survival, not luxuries. 

“‘While their workers are feeling the pain, so are they. Do you not think that the Company has got just as much to lose in the present crisis as you have?’” 

M. Hennebeau tells the deputation of strikers that the Company is suffering just as much as they are in the industrial crisis that has closed factories and led to layoffs. M. Hennebeau’s equating the Company’s suffering with the workers’ suffering illustrates the bourgeois’ insensitivity and naiveté. While he complains to the workers about the Company’s stresses, the workers look around his drawing room “at all this expense” and contemplate how “the price of the smallest ornament would have kept them in soup for a month” (223).

“They had been promised the new dawn of justice, and so they were ready to suffer in the pursuit of universal happiness.” 

Étienne has inspired the people by describing a more just world “in which each citizen would be paid the rate for the job and have his share of the common joy” (171). As the strike continues, the people grow hungrier and more frightened. What sustains them in these times is their “absolute confidence in the outcome,” and they continue “blindly offering up the gift of their own selves” (228). The people make dramatic sacrifices for the common good, selling their possessions and enduring starvation and cold. Despite this suffering, they endure without complaint, believing their personal sacrifices will improve the lives of generations of workers to come.

“Didn’t they realize it was just plain daft to think you could change the world overnight, to think the workers could take the place of the bosses and share out the cash as if it were an apple or something.” 

Rasseneur, once a miner himself, and now an establishment owner, represents a more moderate approach to protest. He worries that drastic action will antagonize the Company and thus make improvement for the workers that much more difficult to achieve. Although Étienne at one time relies on his judgment, he eventually grows frustrated with Rasseneur’s moderation. Rasseneur finds himself “defending the Company and forgetting his resentment at having been sacked” (177). In Rasseneur, Zola presents a character whose perspective changes as does his socioeconomic status. He also demonstrates how rifts within the movement threaten to hamper progress.

“His ideas had matured now, and he liked to think that he had a system which would work.” 

Étienne spends much of his time reading books and newspapers about government, revolution, and socialism. He takes prides in his education and devises plans based on his learnings in history and political theory. His diversion from Rasseneur is directly related to his self-education: As he reads theory that is increasingly extreme, he finds Rasseneur’s moderate approach insufficient. Étienne does not always fully understand everything he reads. He sometimes struggles to take what he has learned and translate it into a practical plan. He also remains naive, imagining that the people will dutifully follow his lead. He fails to predict the mob that results from the people’s pent-up fury. By the end of the novel, Étienne’s education will be complete, and as he travels to Paris, he is armed with a spectrum of learning that gives him faith in the revolution.

“And to think that these fools complained about life, when they could have love, the one and only happiness, and as much as they jolly well pleased!” 

. Hennebeau, who has never been intimate with his wife and who yearns for her affection despite her infidelity, rides past Réquillart where young miners have sex in the field or ditches. He is envious of their “sexual freedom” (268) and believes he would “gladly starve” if he could have “a woman who would give herself to him on the bare ground, unreservedly, body and soul” (281). M. Hennebeau similarly expresses incredulousness at the workers’ complaints when the mob shouts for bread outside his home. Watching them from the window, he wishes he could “have been the lowliest among his own employees” (356). He thinks them “fools” to complain about their lives because “[t]hings didn’t go right just because you had bread” (357).

A less generous reading of M. Hennebeau’s envy is that it illustrates the bourgeois’ lack of understanding about the extremity of the miners’ suffering. A more generous reading is that it suggests that all people, no matter their station, suffer in their own way and that suffering is what binds people. 

“‘I just hope it happens to you one day… And it will happen. Just you wait!’” 

Rasseneur attempts to speak to the 3,000 miners gathered in the woods the night before the strikers attack the mines. Inspired by Étienne’s talk of taking back what is theirs, the people are unimpressed with Rasseneur’s more “tepid […] message of moderation” (289). Rasseneur leaves dejected, having once held the popularity that Étienne now enjoys. However, before leaving, he warns Étienne that one day, the people will turn on him, too.

Rasseneur’s prediction comes true after the shootings at Le Voreux, when the people accost Étienne as he walks through the village, blaming him for the deaths of their comrades. Rasseneur then regains the people’s support. The significance of the people’s vacillating allegiance is twofold. First, it reinforces the image of the mob mentality that makes the people vulnerable to anger and violence. Second, it illustrates that Étienne continues to be naive about the nature of mobs and protests. Although Rasseneur falls temporarily from favor, he is more perceptive than Étienne and more accurately foresees consequences.

“Minds emptied of all thought by hunger now saw red and dreamed of burning and killing, of a glorious apotheosis that would usher in the dawn of universal happiness.” 

Étienne speaks to the people in the woods the night before the protests at the mine. The miners, burdened by generations of starvation and oppression, are worked into a frenzy imagining a world free from suffering. Étienne has awakened them to the realization that they deserve to benefit from their own labor; he convinces them they need not adhere to the hierarchy that subordinates them to the bourgeois.

In the absence of hope or sustenance, the people cling to visions of a better world with “the impatience of a religious sect that has tired of waiting for the expected miracle and has decided to bring one about by itself” (293). This quotation illustrates how the people have nothing left to lose and how after suffering “[y]ear after year of hunger,” they are now “ravenous for a feast of massacre and destruction” (336).

“And as the young ladies climbed into the carriage on the Vandame road, everyone was in high spirits because of the fine weather, little realizing that far off in the countryside there was a stirring and that it was slowly gathering pace.” 

This quotation refers to the party of bourgeois women—Mme. Hennebeau, Cécile Grégoire, and Deneulin’s two daughters—and how they embark on their pleasant journey to Marchiennes without realizing the mob is on the move mere miles away. Their gleeful unawareness is indicative of their general obliviousness to the people’s suffering. The wealthy enjoy their easy lifestyles and plentiful meals while the people starve. It is this discrepancy that infuriates the people. Later, however, as the women watch the mob pass, they fearfully imagine the day when the poor will take their homes and fortunes. After the collapse of Le Voreux, the bourgeois never feels safe again, seeming to sense that “one day the whole tottering edifice would collapse” (531). 

“And in the middle of this accursed moor of Le Tartaret, La Côte-Verte rose as though miraculously blessed by an eternal spring, with grass that was forever green, beech trees that were continually producing new leaves, and fields that yielded as many as three crops a year.” 

Throughout Germinal, natural scenes represent the human world. In this quotation, Zola describes an idyllic scene of eternal spring that is made possible by continually burning fires below the ground. By looking at La Côte-Verte, one would never know the nightmarish “hell-fires” (306) just beneath the surface. This “natural hothouse” is “warmed by the combustion taking place in the deep strata beneath,” and as a result, “[s]now never settled there (306). Even in December, an “enormous bouquet of greenery rose beside the bare trees of the forest” (306). Just as unseen fires beneath the surface make possible this scene of endless beauty and growth, the backbreaking work of a faceless mass of miners makes possible the idle, luxurious lifestyle of the bourgeois, who never experience hunger or suffering.

However, it is indicated that beneath the surface, “the miner was waking from his slumber and germinating in the soil like a real seed,” and that one day, “a whole army of men, would spring up from the earth, and justice would be restored” (169). The fact that the miners work beneath the surface suggests their anonymity as well as their oppression. Étienne’s describing how one day, they will rise to the surface like plants growing from seeds, suggests that the untroubled world of the bourgeois, represented by La Côte-Verte, will not last forever.

“She had taken up position in front of her man, ready to defend him, forgetting how he hit her, forgetting their life of misery together, mindful only that since he had taken her she belonged to him and that it brought shame on her that he should be abused like this."

Despite his mistreating her, Catherine defends Chaval as the mob attacks and humiliates him. Catherine’s loyalty to Chaval shows how women are subordinate to men. By accepting that Chaval’s having raped and coerced her entitles him to possess her, Catherine demonstrates how she has internalized this patriarchal system. Catherine does not expect happiness in love. After Chaval tells her not to return, Étienne suggests they begin their own romance; Catherine, though in love with him, refuses, saying, “Chaval is my man” (415).

Catherine frequently justifies her relationship with Chaval by reminding herself that most women are not happy. Catherine’s acquiescence to Chaval is reminiscent of her acquiescence to the socioeconomic hierarchy that oppresses miners. This quotation illustrates how poor miners, especially women, are trapped by this hierarchy not only for their lack of power but for their belief in the only system they have ever known.

“He felt a sense of superiority that set him apart from the rest of the comrades, as though in the process of educating himself he had acceded to some higher plane.” 

Étienne’s self-education helps him orchestrate his protest, but it also makes him less able to relate to the people he is fighting for. Ironically, the more he learns about government and protest, the more he identifies with those he seeks to displace. His growing “vanity at being their leader” creates in him “the soul of one of those bourgeois he so despised” (381). As time goes on, he finds the people’s lifestyle “revolting” and is disgusted by “all those wretched people living on top of each other and washing in each other’s dirty water” (381). He also laments that they are unable to discuss politics.

As he thinks back on the destruction at the mines, he is appalled by “the base nature of people’s desires” (381); simultaneously, he wants to show the people “the way to the life of comfort and good manners led by the bourgeoisie” (381). Étienne’s ambivalence about the bourgeoisie will be mollified when he reads Darwin, who teaches him that the people will “devour a bourgeoisie that had worn itself out in self-gratification” (530). At the novel’s end, the “bourgeois refinement that had taken him out of his own class had now made him hate the bourgeoisie even more” (529). 

“Étienne saw only too well how one man’s misfortune became another man’s gain, and once more it discouraged him deeply to think of the invincible power wielded by the sheer weight of capital, so strong in adversity that it grew fat on the defeat of others, gobbling up the small fry who fell by the wayside.” 

As the strike continues and the conditions in the mines deteriorate, circumstances grow especially dire for Deneulin, an independent owner without the backing of a large company like Montsou. Montsou has been trying to buy Deneulin’s mine Vandame, but he has always refused; when he again adamantly rejects the Company’s offer, the Company “returned to Paris to wait patiently for him to give up the ghost” (386). The selling of Vandame to the Company is inevitable. Just as Le Voreux swallows up the workers, the Company swallows up independent owners.

Étienne ponders how the survival of “capital”—represented by the Company—is dependent on the destruction of others. Capital is a “tyranny […] that reduced the worker to a state of permanent starvation” (285) and an “insatiable ogre” that “gobble[s] up” (455) small companies. Its destructive, indiscriminate nature is what draws Étienne to socialism. 

“Things never got better, ever since she could remember they had only got worse; and she broke the bricks and just threw them, wanting to destroy everything and anything, her eyes so blinded by rage that she couldn’t even see whose jaws she was smashing.” 

When the people protest the Belgians working at Le Voreux, they throw bricks at the gendarmes guarding the entrance. Catherine also throws bricks even though “[s]he could not have said why” (435). She feels “an absolute, desperate need to slaughter” as she thinks of “this filthy bloody existence of theirs” (435). She is weary of “being slapped and thrown out by her man” and of “starving to death” (435), and she takes her anger out on the gendarmes. Catherine’s uncontrollable desire to kill is reminiscent of the miners’ fury as they destroy the mines. It also foreshadows Bonnemort’s killing of Cécile, when he awakens “from half a century’s submissiveness” (364) to murder a girl who represents “long hours of idleness and the sated well-being of her sort” (497).

“[O]n the basis of his patchy understanding he had come to see revolution in terms of the struggle for survival, with the have-notes eating the haves, a strong people devouring a worn-out bourgeoisie.” 

Étienne discusses Darwin with Souvarine. While Étienne wonders over the possibility that the stronger, oppressed class will overcome the weaker bourgeoisie, Souvarine worries about a cycle of “everlasting poverty” (457). Étienne has been drawn to, but afraid of, Souvarine’s desire to burn systems to the ground and begin the world anew. At the end of the novel, he rejects Souvarine’s cynicism; he is on his way to Paris to join Pluchart on his mission, and he believes “his first speech would be devoted to his own version of Darwin’s theory” (530). Étienne’s long journey of education ends with his belief that Souvarine’s vision is too extreme. He has a more optimistic vision and is hopeful that, together, people can break the cycle of everlasting poverty. He believes that “the people, still young and hardy, […] would devour a bourgeoisie that had worn itself out in self-gratification” and that “[n]ew blood would mean a new society” (530). He feels “absolute faith” (530) in “the workers’ revolution” (530) and looks forward to joining Pluchart, “a leader who was listened to” (529).

“Every heart in the district was beating in time with those beneath the ground.” 

After the collapse of Le Voreux, the miners gather around the mine to offer Négrel help as he attempts to save those trapped underground. The miners think of how long the trapped have suffered “without food or warmth in that icy darkness” (491). This thought hardens their resolve to save the victims, and they sacrifice their own lives to find them. Their determination and sense of common good is reminiscent of their behavior during the strike, when they resolved to suffer if it meant helping the whole. When Étienne is released, he and Négrel, “two men who despised each other” (519), sob in each other’s arms, “both of them shaken to the very core of their humanity” (520). These scenes demonstrate the goodness in people despite the horrors and injustice they often perpetuate. Germinal offers a bittersweet message, in which humans are capable of greed and violence, but ultimately, shared humanity and hope are greater forces than evil.

“‘What can I do? They’re next… The job’s killed everyone else, so now it’s their turn.’” 

When Étienne goes to Jean-Bart to say goodbye to his comrades, he is dismayed to hear La Maheude tell him that Lénore and Henri will soon go to work in the mine like the rest of the family. La Maheude cynically speaks these words, in which she acknowledges the inevitability not only of their working in the mine but also of it destroying them. Most of the miners by now have returned to work; though they are angrier now, and embarrassed to be conceding to the Company, they are forced to accept “one master and one master only: the need to eat” (522). La Maheude, in this quotation, recognizes this master as well as the injustice of the workers’ lot. However, Étienne senses in her eyes tacit support for future protest, suggesting this cycle of suffering may end.