106 pages • 3 hours read
Émile ZolaA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1, Chapters 1-3
Part 1, Chapters 4-6
Part 2, Chapters 1-2
Part 2, Chapters 3-5
Part 3, Chapters 1-3
Part 3, Chapters 4-5
Part 4, Chapters 1-2
Part 4, Chapters 3-4
Part 4, Chapters 5-7
Part 5, Chapters 1-3
Part 5, Chapters 4-6
Part 6, Chapters 1-3
Part 6, Chapters 4-5
Part 7, Chapters 1-3
Part 7, Chapters 4-6
Character Analysis
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
The Montsou Mining Company is the invincible, elusive company that owns the pits in Montsou. Referred to merely as “the Company,” it represents unchecked, exploitative power. On his first day in Montsou, when Étienne asks Bonnemort who owns the mine, Bonnemort waves “toward an indeterminate point in the gloom, a remote, unknown place” (14). He speaks of the Company with “almost religious awe, as though he were talking about some forbidden temple that concealed the squat and sated deity to whom they all offered up their flesh but whom no one had ever seen” (14). It is large and impassive to the workers, who respect it for its grandeur, accepting their own lowly place as servants to its needs.
The Company provides luxuriousness and comfort for shareholders on the backs of the starving poor. The Grégoires see their share as “a private god whom they worshipped in their egotism” or “a fairy godmother who rocked them to sleep in their large bed of idleness and fattened them at their groaning table” (80). The Grégoires prefer investing in the mine, where generations of people “would extract it for them, a little each day, sufficient unto their needs” (80).
The Company does not value the lives of the workers, who it sees as faceless masses whose purpose is to fill Company coffers. That the miners’ villages are known by their numbers—Maheu’s village is Two Hundred and Forty—reinforces the lack of personal identity. The Company further illustrates the dehumanization of its workers by failing to acknowledge of their suffering. Négrel tells Maheu the Company would be the real victim if miners perish in a rock-fall; similarly, M. Hennebeau tells the deputation that the Company’s suffering in the industrial crisis is equal to their own. After a rock-fall permanently disables Jeanlin, the Company “resigned itself to making the family a grant of fifty francs” (195). The Company’s fining the miners for timbering is widely acknowledged to be an excuse for them to further cut their already meager pay. Étienne encapsulates their exploitation of the workers when he tells M. Hennebeau that “if the Company needs to make economies, it is very wrong of it to do so exclusively on the backs of the workers” (222).
The Company comes to represent cutthroat capitalism that blindly crushes anything in its path. On hearing that the Company is attempting to exploit Deneulin’s financial straits by strong-arming him into selling Vandame, Étienne is disgusted, seeing how “invincible power [is] wielded by the sheer weight of capital, so strong in adversity that it grew fat on the defeat of others” (386). When the Company finally manages to acquire Vandame, it is a sign of how individual mine owners are “being gobbled up one by one by the insatiable ogre of capital” (455). In this way, the people’s attack on the Montsou mine is a metaphor for the destruction of capitalism’s oppression.
The Company remains invincible even in the face of disaster. As the strike goes on and the mines suffer from lack of maintenance, the Company manages to avoid negative publicity by paying off farmers who lost fields to rock-falls. After gendarmes shoot strikers outside Le Voreux, the “Empire” controls the narrative in the papers, “putting on a show of calm omnipotence” and explaining that “[t]here had simply been an unfortunate encounter” (443).
In the final chapter, the Company, “out of compassion” for La Maheude, “permitted her to work underground at the age of forty,” performing “back-breaking” work for 10 hours straight “down at the end of a suffocatingly hot and narrow road” (524). Despite the tragedies, life goes on for the Company and the workers as normal, with people sacrificing their lives for their work. However, these tragedies have damaged the Company, and “the life-blood of the Empire would continue to drain from that unstaunchable wound” (530). Étienne believes that justice will prevail one day, leading to “the instant demise of that squat and sated deity” (532). Despite its strength and untouchability, the Company is vulnerable.
Le Voreux, the pit at the center of Germinal, is a living beast that consumes human beings. When Étienne first walks into Le Voreux, the enormous mechanisms and deafening sounds overwhelm him. The pit itself “could swallow people in mouthfuls of twenty or thirty at a time” (27), and in fact the workers in the cages on their way to the bottom are called a “meat load” (28). The pit “gorge[s] itself” on the workers, “without cease, ever famished, its giant bowels capable of digesting an entire people” (28). At the pit-bottom, the entrances to the roadways are like “mouths gaping” (35). Le Voreux is “gluttonous” as it swallows “its daily ration of men” (38). It is an “ogre whose hunger could never be satisfied” (72). This anthropomorphism—the attributing of human qualities to inanimate objects—illustrates how the mine figuratively swallows the people and eats them alive, draining them of their happiness, their health, and in many cases, their lives. The miners work long, difficult hours, often in the middle of the night, living lives of hunger and exhaustion with little opportunity for pleasure. Their lives revolve around the mine; they even live in Company-owned villages. In Le Voreux, the people are not individuals; they are faceless masses of prey. Le Voreux is a monstrous, destructive force, requiring endless human sacrifice.
Souvarine, in his desire to destroy the socioeconomic hierarchy and the capital that makes it possible, exacerbates a weakness in the shaft’s tubbing to “kill” Le Voreux, “this foul beast […] with its ever-gaping maw that had devoured so much human fodder” (463). When he leaves, Le Voreux is “wounded in its belly” (463); later, Négrel tells Hennebeau that Le Voreux “had its throat slit and was now breathing its last” (477). The death of Le Voreux, while not stopping the miners from working in other pits, is a metaphor for the “crumbling society” (531), in which the wealthy exploit and oppress the poor. As Étienne leaves Montsou for the last time, he ponders how “one day the whole tottering edifice would collapse and be engulfed like Le Voreux in one long slide into the abyss” (531). Souvarine’s killing of Le Voreux is symbolic of his desire to obliterate this edifice. It is auspicious of the obliteration of the whole oppressive system.
Early in the novel, as Étienne thinks about his family’s alcoholism, he sits “deep beneath the crushing weight of the earth” (47), the darkness of Le Voreux around him. He considers his “wild, drink-sodden inheritance” (47), one which makes him uncontrollably violent. His contemplation of this powerful inner force while surrounded by the “crushing weight” of Le Voreux suggests that the mine represents not only the oppressive socioeconomic system but also oppressive forces that rule us from within.
Étienne first comes upon Le Voreux in the dark of night. As he looks around, “[e]verything remained sunk in darkness” (9), making it “a melancholy sight” (10). As Étienne descends the shaft for the first time, the intense darkness frightens him. The darkness of the pit not only contributes to the gloomy, ominous mood of the novel but also reflects the dark hopelessness of the people’s lives.
As the novel goes on, Étienne frequently expresses fear of the dark. When he hides in Jeanlin’s lair deep inside Réquillart, the “interminable total darkness with its unhanging blackness” is “his greatest hardship,” seeming “to be crushing the very thoughts out of him” (380). In the darkness, his thoughts torment him; when the weight of his thoughts become too much, he lights his candle until he has “chased away the gremlins” (381). After the gendarmes shoot at the strikers at Le Voreux, Étienne believes he would rather go to prison than return to the “dark depths of Réquillart” (445).
Darkness is most frightening after the destruction of Le Voreux, when Étienne and Catherine are trapped in the roadways of Réquillart and their last light fizzes out. More than the water, they fear the darkness, “for it prevented them from observing the approach of death” (512). Darkness in Germinal is all-consuming; it literally consumes the workers in the pit, and it forces Étienne to ponder the darkest parts of himself. In the darkness, one is out of control, both of one’s thoughts and one’s life.
Germinal offers many examples of pathetic fallacy, a literary device in which human emotions project onto natural settings. The miners suffer their bitterest poverty during the cold winter months, with bare trees and gray skies. In contrast, in the final chapter, as Étienne walks to the train feeling hopeful that their fight for justice is not over, “[t]he sun was rising gloriously on the horizon” (529). Around him, “the warmth of life took hold, spreading out in a tremulous wave of vibrant newness and youth” (529).
The most elaborate comparison between the people and nature is Le Tartaret, “a stretch of barren, volcanic moorland, beneath which a coal-seam had been burning permanently for centuries past” (306). Although a hellish scene resides below, an idyllic field graces the land above; it is “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” (306). This “natural hothouse” is only made possible by the “combustion taking place in the deep strata beneath” (306). While the region freezes, “[s]now never settled there” (306). Just as unseen fires create the perfect beauty of the land above, the backbreaking work of the miners makes possible the luxurious life of the bourgeois.
Nature also reflects the smallness of the people. The night the miners gather in the forest, “the beech trees simply stood there, strong and tall […] and they neither saw nor heard the commotion of these wretched beings at their feet” (294). The stoic impassivity of nature contrasts with the people’s powerlessness: While the people are desperate and full of emotion, nature itself is unchanged.
The title itself refers to the seventh month of the French Revolutionary Calendar, the early spring spanning from March 21 to April 19. It is a time of germination, renewal and growth in nature. References to the title appear throughout the text. Spring comes, and Étienne grows more comfortable in the mine; outside, flowers bloom, and “the seeds of life [are] germinating and springing up out of the soil” (141). Later, in the Maheus’ kitchen, Étienne says that workers used to toil mindlessly for the Company but that now, they are “germinating in the soil like a real seed,” growing “a whole army of men” that would “spring up from the earth” (169). The word appears even in the final sentence of the novel, when Étienne considers that “[n]ew men were starting into life, a black arm of vengeance slowly germinating in the furrows” (532). He believes that “soon this germination would tear the earth apart” (532). The renewal of life is like the renewal of the people’s spirits, and Étienne has hope that with this new life will come justice.
By Émile Zola