Germinal

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1885

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Part 1, Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary

In the early hours of the morning, in pitch blackness, a young man braves the searing wind and cold to walk along a highway in northern France. All that he owns is in a small tied-up handkerchief. He notices three fires in the distance and turns to follow them. As other shapes form in the darkness, he realizes he’s walking through a coal-mine. He decides to ask for work, though he is not optimistic that there will be any.

Approaching an old driver with a crippling cough that produces black phlegm, he introduces himself as Étienne Lantier, a mechanic. The driver tells him the pit before them is Le Voreux. As Étienne looks around, he ponders “the vagrant life he had been living for the past week in search of work” (7), ever since he was fired from the railway workshop for hitting his boss. The driver tells him there are many factories around but that most of them are laying off men for lack of work and that “[t]hings are in a bad way” (8). Étienne has been to most of the factories, all of which turned him away. He feels the darkness is “imbued […] with misery and suffering,” and he can hear “the cry of famine” (9) in the merciless wind.

The driver, Vincent Maheu—whose nickname is Bonnemort, “good death,” because he’s almost died in Le Voreux three times—tells him he has worked in the mine since he was 8 years old, 50 years ago. In addition to his cough, which he attributes to a cold, he has bad legs—other than that, he says, he’s “fit as a fiddle” (11). Despite the bosses telling him to quit, he intends to work until he’s 60 so he can receive his full pension. His father, grandfather, uncles, and brothers all worked in the pits, and many died there. His son and grandsons now work there, too. Bonnemort tells Étienne the manager is Monsieur Hennebeau; nobody knows who owns the mine. As he speaks of the unknown people who own the mine, which is “rich all right” (13), he speaks of them with “a tone of almost religious awe” (14).

After Bonnemort leaves, Étienne, despite a vague fear of Le Voreux, decides to ask for work despite Bonnemort’s assertion that there are no jobs available.

Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary

The miners live in villages with numbered houses in geometric blocks. At four o’clock in the morning, the cuckoo clock chimes in Bonnemort’s house. He lives with his son, daughter-in-law, and their seven children, who range in age from 21 years to 3 months. Catherine, age 15, awakens first and rouses her oldest brothers—Zacharie, 21, and Jeanlin, 10—so they can get ready for work at the mine. Around them, through the thin walls of the “cheaply built” (18) houses constructed by the Company, they hear their neighbors going about their mornings, including the pounding steps of Bouteloup, a stone worker who rents a room from Levaque and whom the children joke sleeps with Levaque’s wife, and the coughing of sickly Philomène, Levaque’s 19-year-old daughter, who has two children with Zacharie.

Maheu, their father, has overslept, and he rises swearing when his infant daughter Estelle begins crying. From bed, his wife Maheude tells him they don’t have enough money to make it until pay day and that the cupboard is empty. Estelle’s crying infuriates Maheu; Maheude nurses her beneath the blanket. Maheu reminds his wife that the lady who lives at La Piolaine suggested she visit her. Maheude is skeptical that anything will come of it but promises to take Lénore, age 6, and Henri, age 4, to see her, as she gives clothes to poor children.

Downstairs, Catherine makes lunch for the four who are leaving for work, manages to make a “piece,” or sandwich, for each of them with a little bit of bread, butter, and cottage cheese. Since there is no more coffee, she makes coffee with yesterday’s grounds and brown sugar, then pours some into their flasks. Outside, candles are lighted and blown out as other families prepare for work. The Maheus leave the house and trek to work through the cold with the others, “a long line of shadows […] strung out like a straggling herd of animals” (25).

Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary

In Le Voreux, Étienne continues to ask if there’s any work to no avail. The darkness strikes him, and he must hold his arms out to feel where he is. He also notices the complex mechanisms that make the mine work. He watches as cages full of workers—“meat loads” (28)—are swallowed by the darkness below and then rise to the surface to collect new people.

As Étienne passes the Maheu party, Maheu, who feels sorry for him, tells the others they shouldn’t “grumble” because they are lucky to have “the chance to do an honest day’s work” (29). They go into the changing area, where people warm themselves by the oven. People laugh as they engage in raucous conversation with La Mouquette, a voluptuous woman known for her sexual dalliances. La Mouquette tells Maheu that one of his putters was found dead that morning. Maheu is distraught—losing a putter will affect his team’s productivity—until he remembers Étienne. He sends Catherine to fetch him. Étienne is delighted. Catherine laughs that he doesn’t realize she’s a girl.

Maheu helps an unnerved Étienne prepare for work. As they descend into the pit, the darkness overwhelms him, and he begins to lose “all sense of reality” (34). At the bottom, he is frightened by the noises, wondering if the earth is going to fall and crush them. He observes the horses pulling trains of coal tubs and the ventilation doors opening and closing. Unused to his surroundings, he frequently stumbles and bangs his head. He is surprised by the quick changes of temperature and by the pools of water on the floor.

At one point the group must climb up a shaft to reach a secondary road. Étienne scrapes his skin, and he feels “desperate for air” (38); his inability to keep up with the others also discourages him. When they finally arrive late, an irritated young man on their team named Chaval resents that Étienne has replaced the dead putter. Chaval and Étienne look at each other “with the kind of instinctive hatred that flares in an instant” (38). By now, 700 miners are inside the pit and are working like “human insects on the march” (38). Étienne winds up pressed close to Catherine and realizes she’s a girl.

Part 1, Chapters 1-3 Analysis

Zola masterfully uses imagery and figurative language to establish that the mysterious Company owners dehumanize the coal workers. The Maheus live in a mining village called Two Hundred and Forty, suggesting the Company sees its workers as faceless and identical. As the villagers walk to work in the early hours of the morning, they are described as “a long line of shadows” who “tramped along […] like a straggling herd of animals” (25). Depicted as yoked oxen or horses, the people become indistinguishable from the horses that pull the trains in Le Voreux. The word “shadows” paints a picture of people cast into the margins, suggesting their powerlessness. Inside the Maheu house, the children sleep in one room, which is warm “with its reek of the human herd” (15).

This dehumanization is also evident in the imagery of the pit, a “monstrous and voracious beast crouching there ready to gobble everyone up” (7) and “to digest its meal of human flesh” (15). “Meat loads” are sent up and down in cages for the pit to “devour” (28). At the bottom, four roadways sit with “their mouths gaping” (35). When the workday begins and “[t]he gluttonous pit had swallowed its daily ration of men,” the people work as if in a “giant anthill,” and the “teeming activity of human insects on the march” (38) can be heard throughout. By describing Le Voreux—literally “the voracious one”—as a living monster insatiably devouring its prey, Zola illustrates not only how the people are seen as less than human but also how small they are in comparison to the pit, to the Company, and to the world. That the pit swallows them without even “notic[ing] the moment of their consumption” (27) suggests the people’s insignificance.

Zola offers many examples to paint a picture of the miners’ poverty, as well as their acceptance of it. La Maheude complains to her husband that the cupboard is empty. The walls are so thin in the Company-provided houses that the children are aware of their neighbors’ sexual activity. In preparing lunch for her family, Catherine must make do with yesterday’s coffee grounds and the meager remains of a loaf of bread. The people rise early, exhausted, and trek through the cold to work a dangerous job in a place they describe as “Hell.” Despite these struggles, Bonnemort brags to Étienne that because generations of his family have worked in the mine, he can trace his ancestry more directly than most bourgeois. He speaks of the owners of the mine with “almost religious awe” as if they were a “sated deity to whom they all offered up their flesh” (14). Maheu reminds his family of how fortunate they are “to do an honest day’s work” (29). The miners know nothing other than this life of constant work and are indoctrinated into the acceptance of their place. That the Company issues to each house a portrait of the Emperor and Empress suggests their care in perpetuating the workers’ blind devotion to the system that enriches those at the top at the expense of those on the bottom.

Zola’s attention to the senses helps the reader feel immersed in the dark, hellish world of the mine and to imagine the suffering of the poor. The Maheus’ house smells not only of people: The “aroma of fried onion left over from the night before” hangs “in the stuffy, fetid air,” along with “the acrid smell of coal” (23). Darkness will be a motif in the novel, as is demonstrated in the swallowing blackness of the pit. In one particularly vivid image, Zola describes how among the darkness, an office lamp “glowed weakly, like a star on the verge of extinction” (26). Étienne’s fright at the massiveness and complexity of the operations is supported by detailed descriptions of the mechanisms that make the mine work.

One of the most important lines is uttered offhandedly at the end of Chapter 1, in which Étienne, in response to Bonnemort’s suggestion that he doesn’t know who owns mine, states somewhat randomly, “But if we at least had enough to eat” (14). There is, already, a sense of contrast between the wealthy mine owners and the poor faceless people who do the work that keeps them on their pedestal. The fixation on food in these chapters, as well as the connection between the owners of the mine and the people’s starvation, should signal to the reader that a conflict already is in the works.