Germinal

Émile Zola

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1885

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Part 5, Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 5, Chapter 1 Summary

Deneulin is awakened at four o’clock in the morning by a deputy shouting to him from outside his window. He tells him half his miners won’t work and that they’re preventing the others from working. Deneulin rises and reluctantly eats some biscuits at the demand of his daughters before heading to the Jean-Bart pit which, though smaller than Le Voreux, has been modernized and well renovated.

Chaval arrives early to convince the miners not to work. He is outraged when Catherine, concerned about her lack of income, refuses to strike. Deneulin arrives and attempts to kindly reason with the strikers, telling them he wants to “sort it out” (301) and that he’s listening to what they have to say. Chaval insists they need five centimes more per tub, like they are asking for at Montsou. Deneulin responds that he isn’t trying to cheat them on timbering like they are at Montsou. He explains that he believes they deserve the extra money but that he will “be ruined” (302) if he gives it to them. He says he conceded to their demands during the last strike and that “for you to make a living I’ve got to make a living first” (302). He says Montsou has been trying to buy Vandame for years and that the workers would be much worse off if Deneulin were forced to sell the mine. At Chaval’s insistence, the strike continues.

Deneulin speaks to Chaval privately to “get the measure of this character” (304). Realizing he is driven by ego, he compliments him and suggests he not “jeopardize his future” (304), and he offers him a promotion. Chaval, preferring not to play “second fiddle to Étienne” (304), takes the offer and decides to try to become one of the bosses instead. He is unconcerned that a group from Montsou is due to arrive to help him start the strike; they have not showed up yet, and Chaval figures that gendarmes have stopped them. He then encourages the others to return to work.

Mme. Hennebeau arrives at Deneulin’s house to pick up his daughters Lucie and Jeanne: The group, along with Cécile, is going to Marchiennes, escorted by Négrel. On the way, the group passes many miners. The women grow uneasy wondering what they are doing.

Part 5, Chapter 2 Summary

Catherine is working in a part of Jean-Bart where a combination of factors makes the temperature even hotter than usual. The air in this area is “dead air,” layers of methane gas and carbon dioxide, and is making her feel increasingly unwell. Yelled at through the tunnel by Chaval, she gradually strips until she is naked like the rest of the workers, feeling like she is about to faint. Finally, she falls unconscious. Chaval, wondering where she is, angrily calls for her and goes to find her when he receives no answer. Finding her unconscious, concern overcomes him. He carries her to a colder area of the pit and presses cold water to her face until she revives. He then dresses her. At her anxiety over whether anyone saw her naked, he promises he carried her out before anyone could.

Catherine is overcome with affection at his niceness and asks him to kiss her. She says he shouldn’t have yelled at her; he says he knows it’s hard for her to work that section of the pit. She begins to cry, telling him she wishes he were nicer to her. He tells her he loves her and that he will be nicer from now on.

As they return to work, they realize people are yelling up ahead. They learn that the Montsou crowd is cutting the cables of the cages, preventing those down there from leaving. There is a frantic scramble for the ladders. At first Chaval is worried about facing the Montsou miners but eventually follows the crowd. When Catherine refuses to go in front of him, worried he would shove her forward, he goes first, telling her, “Die if you want to. And good riddance!” (316).

The miners must climb one hundred and two ladders to the top. As she climbs, Catherine grows increasingly more panicked as pain and numbness overwhelm her. From above and below she hears people gasping and groaning. Rumors go up and down the line that the ladders above broke. Beginning to grow dizzy, Catherine feels she won’t make it to the top.

As they reach the top and people begin to scramble out, they shove past each other. When there are five ladders to go, Catherine falls, but the narrowness of the shaft saves her. She doesn’t know how she makes it to the surface, where people are laughing at her.

Part 5, Chapter 3 Summary

The Montsou miners intend to storm Jean-Bart, but gendarmes patrolling the plain detain them. At first, the miners believe the Company has sent the gendarmes to quell them, but they soon learn it’s merely a coincidence, as the gendarmes are there for a military exercise.

After the gendarmes are gone, the Montsou miners begin their walk to Jean-Bart, most of them not waiting for Étienne, much to his dismay. Deneulin comes to speak with them, and Étienne requests that he stop work at the mine. Indignant, knowing he can’t stop the mob and “trying hard to put a brave face on his defeat,” Deneulin tells him to “go to hell” and that the strikers are “no better than thieves and bandits” (323). He is forced away as the mob begins to flood into the buildings.

Maheu and Étienne are concerned that the mob will kill Deneulin. Étienne is “hurt by the way the mob has escaped his control and were running wild like this rather than coolly carrying out the will of the people in the manner he had expected” (324). A group of women goes to put out the fires in the boiler; other miners go to cut the cables. Étienne reminds them that there are workers still down there, but the strikers exclaim that “[t]hey shouldn’t have gone down in the first place” (325) and that they can use the ladders to escape.

As the mob causes destruction in the mine, the workers from the pit emerge at the top. The strikers yell, “Down with scabs! Down with false friends!” (327). They form two rows, so the Jean-Bart miners must face them to escape. As they do, the strikers yell vile insults at them. When Chaval emerges, Étienne is furious and forces him to come with them. Catherine’s parents scold her as she emerges, but Catherine follows Chaval as he is led away, worried the mob will kill him.

The mob leaves Jean-Bart to move on to other pits. Deneulin takes stock of the damage and acknowledges that “[h]is ruin was complete” (329). Rather than feel anger toward the Montsou strikers, he feels “a kind of complicity” (329), for he believes that though the strikers are animals, they are “animals who could not read and who were starving to death” (329).

Part 5, Chapters 1-3 Analysis

Étienne’s surprise at the ferocity of the strikers as they begin their siege of the mines is not unexpected. Étienne has taken an intellectual approach to his preparation for the strike, studying increasingly idealistic societies but without the practical knowledge to put these plans in place. The day of the protest, Étienne’s lack of practical knowledge is on full display. He is frustrated that so many of the strikers have gone ahead without him; his pride is wounded “by the way the mob had escaped his control and were running wild […] rather than coolly carrying out the will of the people in the manner he had expected” (324). He tries desperately to remind them that “they mustn’t put their enemies in the right by engaging in senseless destruction” (324), and he is horrified that they intend to cut the cables with workers in the pit. Étienne fails to anticipate the violence of the mob, which, spurred by his talk in the forest of “the coming conflagration” (291) and of “a complete overhaul of society” (287), is worked into more of “a frenzy” (326) with every act of violence. As the people destroy the mines and attack the workers, despite his calls for them stop, Étienne sees that he has underestimated human nature, which devolves into a basic animal state when the suffering grows to be too much to bear. His hope that they will “act in a revolutionary manner but without threatening anyone’s life” (321) proves naive and as impractical as Souvarine suggested. Even Maheu and La Maheude, who as of yet hope to “demand their rights without destroying people’s property” (326), eventually are “carried away by this feverish thirst for revenge” (327).

Germinal is a study in contrasts—between rich and poor, men and women, moderation and violence. These chapters offer a closer look at Deneulin, who—with his “paternal air” (301), willingness to listen, and frequent presence in the pit—contrasts with M. Hennebeau, a man invisible to the Montsou miners. As opposed to M. Hennebeau, who suggests the miners are presumptuous for asking for more money, Deneulin concedes that the workers deserve a raise and explains rationally why it benefits everyone for his miners not to strike. He deftly manipulates Chaval, flattering him and stroking his ego to entice him to his side. While devastated by the destruction caused to his mine, he cannot hate the strikers; instead he feels “a kind of complicity,” understanding them to be “animals who could not read and who were starving to death” (329). Chaval himself is contrasted with Étienne: While Étienne is sincere and dedicated to his cause, studying diligently to ensure its success, Chaval switches allegiance from the strikers to the bosses at his own convenience, immediately accepting Deneulin’s offer of a promotion so he can avoid “playing second fiddle to Étienne” (304).

In these chapters, Zola deftly contrasts the bourgeois women with the women of the pit. While on the way to Marchiennes, Mme. Hennebeau, Lucie and Jeanne Deneulin, and Cécile Grégoire pass Le Tartaret, a “volcanic moorland” above a coal-seam that “had been burning permanently for centuries past” (306). Legend says it is a place where sinners have been sentenced to burn for eternity, for the rock “had burned to a dark red,” and “[s]ulphur grew along the fissures like yellow flowers” (306). However, “in the middle of this accursed moor” is a field of “grass that was forever green” and “beech trees that were continually producing new leaves” (306). This field, where “[s]now never settled,” is the result of having been “warmed by the combustion taking place in the deep strata beneath” (306). This contrast in natural elements—eternal spring above, with hellfire supporting it from below—is not unlike the classes themselves, with the miners descending into nightmarish conditions so the bourgeois can exist in uninterrupted comfort. In the very next chapter, we see Catherine working in conditions akin to “hell itself” (307), where the coal burns red and the air is fatally toxic. As the upper-class ladies watch Le Tartaret from above, Catherine is enduring the fire below. Catherine’s misery with Chaval—her acceptance of the fact that “she would never be happy” (316), only serves to contrast her further with the bourgeois women who ride along in oblivious luxury.