Germinal

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1885

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Part 7, Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 7, Chapter 4 Summary

M. Hennebeau goes to Paris to tell the Board what happened. The Company decides not to prosecute whoever was responsible because his “heroism would only serve to give others the wrong idea and breed a long line of incendiaries and assassins” (484). Dansaert, however, is immediately fired. In his new position as divisional engineer, Deneulin works on stopping the flooding from the canal.

Négrel wants to try to save the 15 trapped miners, and many miners volunteer “in an upsurge of fraternal solidarity” (485). Négrel consults with deputies. The group determines the victims must have fled to higher roadways within the mine, and they decide to try to search Réquillart. Négrel studies the plans for the pits and is “passionately committed to finding them” (487).

Négrel and his team explore Réquillart for three days to no avail. Zacharie, tormented by the thought that his sister is trapped, sneaks into the shaft himself and says that he hears the miners. When Négrel’s men also hear responses to their tapping, Négrel gives orders to begin digging.

Zacharie insists on going into the narrow shaft to dig, and he digs with such ferocity that he is oblivious to his own physical suffering. Progress slows as the coal becomes denser. The men are reduced to tears thinking about those trapped for 12 days without food or light. La Maheude sits by the pit every day. On the ninth day of digging, an explosion from Zacharie’s gas lamp, which he turned up against orders after he refused to end his shift, kills Zacharie and critically injures four other men.

The work continues even though the tapping has stopped. The Grégoires, like many bourgeois, decide to visit the mine and arrive in their carriage, as do the Hennebeaus and the Deneulin daughters. M. Grégoire is disappointed the mine isn’t much to look at. Cécile enjoys the fresh air. The men explain the damage to the mine. The women ask the men to speak of something else because “an upsetting scene like this only gave you bad dreams” (494).

Despite their belief that the Maheu family “partly deserved its misfortunes” (494), the Grégoires go to the Maheus’ house to offer food and a pair of shoes. No one is home but Bonnemort. When M. and Mme. Hennebeau go next door to the Levaques’, Bonnemort strangles Cécile. Back at Le Voreux, Négrel and Mme. Hennebeau grieve together. M. Hennebeau is relieved that Négrel and Cécile will not be getting married, as there is no chance his wife will have an affair with the coachman.

Part 7, Chapter 5 Summary

Back in the pit, Mouque lets Battle free after the shaft is blocked, and the horse runs off down a roadway. As the pit-bottom fills, the 20 trapped miners follow him. Mouque suggests they go to Réquillart. However, when they reach a crossroads, they argue over which way to go and head off in different directions.

Étienne and Catherine are blocked off from the others and continue moving up the incline to flee the ever-rising water. They watch as Battle drowns and hear rock-falls in every direction. Étienne tries to reassure Catherine in her fear.

Continually blocked, they make it to a roadway where they find Chaval. He says the road is blocked in the other direction. The three are now trapped together with no means of escape. While Étienne tries to be friendly with Chaval, Chaval continues their old hostility and teases Catherine. He offers Catherine some food but ignores Étienne.

When Chaval tries to force Catherine to have sex with him, Étienne rises, and the two intend to battle to the death. Overwhelmed with the desire to kill, Étienne grabs a rock and smashes Chaval’s head, killing him. He then drags his body down the other end of the roadway.

Étienne and Catherine go to the top of the blocked incline to escape the rising water. Their lamp extinguishes, leaving them in darkness. Catherine, leaning her head against the wall, hears the tapping of the miners’ signal. They realize their comrades are trying to save them and return the tapping with the heel of Étienne’s clog. In their hunger, they eat decayed wood and the leather from Étienne’s belt. Chaval’s body washes up; they try to move him away, but he keeps returning.

Days go by, and the water recedes. Catherine begins hallucinating. Finally, wanting to know happiness before they die, they have “their wedding night” (518). Shortly after, Catherine dies in his lap. Étienne finds comfort knowing he is the first to have had her as a woman and that she could be pregnant. He himself is on the brink of death, feeling as if he is drifting in nothingness. He continues to stroke Catherine’s body.

Étienne hears voices and sees light, and someone lifts him from the pit. He and Négrel, “two men who despised each other” (519), cry in each other’s arms, “both of them shaken to the very core of their humanity” (520). La Maheude grieves over Catherine’s body. Étienne is “no more than a skeleton” (520), and his hair is white. People stare with horror.

Part 7, Chapter 6 Summary

One April morning, Étienne, after six weeks in the hospital, walks to Jean-Bart, where the miners from Village Two Hundred and Forty are now working. The Company told Étienne he could not work for them and offered him a hundred francs, which he rejected because Pluchart invited him to Paris. As they did before the strike, miners trudge along like cattle, but now, they exhibit suppressed anger. They reluctantly obey “one master only: the need to eat” (522).

As his friends emerge from the pit, they are embarrassed to see him and explain that they need to feed their families. As they shake his hand, he feels “all their fury at having given in and all their fervent hopes of revenge” (523). Étienne is moved when Mouque shakes his hand “with the anticipation of future rebellions” (524). La Maheude emerges looking haggard. She tells him she has returned to work to prevent her family from being thrown out of the village. Étienne is saddened when she alludes to Lénore and Henri’s eventually working at the pit. She says “[t]he job’s killed everyone else, so now it’s their turn” (526).

La Maheude tells Étienne she bears him no grudge. She is “once again the calm, reasonable woman she used to be” (526); however, at her mention of how the bourgeois will one day pay for the deaths of the poor, Étienne sees that “[u]nderneath the blind acceptance inherited from previous generations […] a shift had thus taken place” (526). When they part, she signals silently to Étienne that she will support him when they “all try again” (528).

As Étienne walks to the train, he thinks that it is “good to be alive” (529). He feels that “[h]is education is complete” now that he has been “matured by his hard times down the pit” (529). He is excited to be like Pluchart and imagines himself speaking to the poor. His newfound “bourgeois refinement” makes him “hate the bourgeoisie even more” (529), and he wants to raise up the poor. He believes Darwin was right: The strong will “devour the weak” (530), and the people will devour the bourgeoisie. He has “absolute faith in the coming revolution” (530).

As he passes the pits, he thinks the destruction of property was pointless and that next time, they will organize and form unions. This will lead to “the instant demise of that squat and sated deity” (532). He imagines his comrades working beneath his feet and contemplates the new life of spring. He believes that there is “a black army of vengeance slowly germinating in the furrows” and that “soon this germination would tear the earth apart” (532).

Part 7, Chapters 4-6 Analysis

The miners are not concerned with how much they are paid to help save the victims; they only want to be “allowed to risk their own lives to save them” (486). Négrel refuses to give up the rescue, consulting the mines’ original plans and growing “passionately committed to finding them” (487). Zacharie, previously eager to avoid work in order to play games or go to the bars, commits to saving Catherine with “no thought for his own life,” as he “would have eaten the earth beneath him if it meant finding his sister” (488). In tragedy, the novel argues, people’s true spirit shines through.

Bonnemort’s killing of Cécile represents another way in which latent emotions are revealed in suffering. To Bonnemort, Cécile, “in her bloom, plump and fresh-cheeked from the long hours of idleness and the sated well-being of her sort” (497), represents the comfort he has never known and the wealthy people who have reaped the benefits of his toil. Bonnemort summons unknown strength to kill Cécile, and in doing so he avenges himself for five decades of subordination and pain.

The Grégoires’ exploitation of Le Voreux’s collapse for their own entertainment is precisely the kind of insensitivity against which Bonnemort rebels. The Grégoires visit the mine “to follow the fashion,” and while M. Grégoire is “disappointed” by the lack of excitement, Cécile spends her time “laughing and joking” (493) while the trapped miners fight for their lives beneath her feet. The Grégoires see the collapse of Le Voreux in relation to themselves, just as they accept the miners’ supporting their lifestyle.

Inside the flooded mine, a standoff between Chaval and Étienne finally takes place. Even in death Chaval haunts Étienne and Catherine, his body washing up against them and preventing them from being alone together. However, as the water recedes, Étienne and Catherine finally have “their wedding night” (519), not wanting “to die before knowing happiness” (518). Catherine’s dying in his arms shortly after suggests a bittersweet message: Even in this life of suffering, no obstacle can prevent love from blossoming. However, it comes with a price. Just as the gendarmes’ bullets kill Lydie and Bébert after their only night of happiness, Catherine and Étienne’s love is over as soon as it begins. Catherine’s holding out to die until she experiences this happiness suggests the determination of human spirit, which exhibits “a stubborn need to live life, and to make a life” (518-19).

Despite the elusive nature of happiness and the struggles of the people to achieve justice, Germinal ends with hope. The forces of capital seem to have won: The strike has failed, and even Souvarine’s destruction of Le Voreux seems futile, for the miners simply go to work at Jean-Bart instead. The miners once again walk to work in “long lines of men plodding along with their noses to the ground like cattle being led to the slaughterhouse” (521). La Maheude tells Étienne that soon Lénore and Henri will work at the pit—it is “the weight of destiny” (525), and it’s simply “their turn” (526). However, they work now with a new “suppressed anger, and quivering with the anticipation of future rebellions” (524). La Maheude’s comment that “the day of reckoning always came” tells Étienne that “a shift had thus taken place” in her “inborn sense of discipline” (526). In her handshake, Étienne senses “promised support for the day when they would all try again” (528).

It is for these reasons that Étienne ultimately rejects Souvarine’s dark cynicism in favor of Pluchart’s organizing and speech-giving. On his way to Paris on Pluchart’s invitation, Étienne is hopeful, having finally achieved the position in politics he has always desired. It is notable that he intends his first speech to be “his own version of Darwin’s theory” (530). Étienne has at last achieved full understanding and can interpret philosophies based on his own experiences. He now has “absolute faith in the coming revolution” that will “regenerate the old, decaying nations,” confident that “the people, still young and hardy, […] would devour a bourgeoisie that had worn itself out in self-gratification” (530). With this new understanding, his own “bourgeois refinement” (529) no longer threatens to separate him from the people; on the contrary, it makes him want to raise the people higher, and he “hate[s] the bourgeoisie even more” (529). With visions of assemblies and unions, he heads to Paris believing fully in “the new dawn of truth and justice” (532), no longer worried about the cycle of “everlasting poverty” (457) that had concerned Souvarine.

Zola brings us full circle in the final paragraphs of the novel, ending with a description of the “squat and sated deity” (532) who is aware of its inevitable demise. As he has done throughout Germinal, Zola uses nature to reflect the human condition, asserting that like this spring morning, “[n]ew men were starting into life” in a “germination [that] would tear the earth apart” (532). We are now where we began, with Étienne once more on the road and the miners trudging toward the pit like animals. However, the people have not struggled in vain, and justice is just over the horizon.