Germinal

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1885

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Part 4, Chapters 5-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 4, Chapter 5 Summary

After another two weeks, resources run out and stores stop offering credit. People’s resolve begins to fade as they must sell their personal belongings to survive. The International had donated only four thousand francs, and other donations have not helped meet the needs of the starving people. Étienne, too, has sold his possessions and has stopped taking his secretary’s salary.

One day as he is walking outside the village, he sees an old woman collapsed with starvation. La Mouquette, who lives nearby, rushes out with gin and bread, and the old woman, after eating, walks away. La Mouquette invites Étienne inside. Étienne is impressed with the neatness of her room. After six months of her trying to seduce him, he finally relents.

When he returns to the village, he discovers that the Company may be willing to compromise with them: Not only have their stocks of coal run out, but the condition of the mines is greatly deteriorating without the miners to maintain them. Étienne and other delegates decide to go to M. Hennebeau’s house to see where the Board of Directors stands. M. Hennebeau proposes an unsatisfactory compromise; the strikers refuse, and M. Hennebeau throws them out. The women of the village go to Maigrat to beg for more credit, but he refuses. Despite their lack of hope, the people continue to support each other.

The Maheus have sold most of their belongings and are almost out of coal and paraffin for candles. Alzire is sent to scavenge for coal bits, but the Company has forbidden it. La Maheude is furious with Jeanlin for staying out. Étienne has an idea to obtain food and leaves. La Maheude goes to see La Levaque, who rails about Bébert, who has not come home. She goes to see La Pierronne, who tells her they have no food; however, the house smells of rabbit, and La Maheude sees wine and crumbs on the table. More depressed than ever, she goes home. The children are devastated that she has not brought any food.

Étienne returns with potatoes, which he has obtained from La Mouquette, presumably in exchange for sex. He lies and says he already ate so the family can have his share. He also tells them he has learned that the Company has convinced some miners at neighboring pits to return to work. The Maheus are furious. They plan a meeting the following night in the Vandame forest.

Part 4, Chapter 6 Summary

Jeanlin, who can still run fast despite his limp, hides with Bébert and Lydie by a shop until they have the opportunity to steal a dried fish. M. Hennebeau rides by on horseback; he hears people having sex and envies the “sexual freedom” (268). Étienne passes, speaking to a few other miners about how the meeting is delayed until the following night.

Jeanlin, Bébert, and Lydie have “become the scourge of the region” (269) with their stealing. When Bébert steals the fish, Jeanlin forces him to give it to him. Lydie and Bébert are terrified of him, for he beats them unless they do his bidding. Lydie and Bébert have developed affection for each other as a result.

Étienne waits at Réquillart for La Mouquette so he can break off their romance. As he waits, he sees Jeanlin sneaking into the shaft of the abandoned mine. Étienne follows him 30 ladders down and through narrow roadways until he finds him sitting in a hollowed-out room with a makeshift bed and table full of food, as well as random items stolen “for the sheer hell of it” (274).

Étienne reveals himself, calling, “You don’t give a bloody damn do you?” (274). Surprised, Jeanlin asks Étienne to join him. As they eat, Étienne asks Jeanlin whether he “ever think[s] about other people” (275). Jeanlin replies, “It’s not my fault if they’re stupid!” (275). Étienne decides not to reveal Jeanlin’s secret; instead, he will remember this hiding spot in case he ever needs it.

La Mouquette begs Étienne to continue seeing her, telling him he can slap her in public as if they’ve separated, and he can see her in secret. Catherine walks by, and Étienne is ashamed; La Mouquette tells him he is in love with someone else.

The next day, Zacharie and Mouquet have a game of crosse. Jeanlin, Bébert, and Lydie steal Rasseneur’s pet rabbit Poland and pelt her with rocks and drag her around on a string. They hear the group of miners collecting in the forest; Lydie wants to go home, but Jeanlin makes her stay. M. Hennebeau again rides by and, hearing the sounds of sex from the fields and ditches, wonders how the miners complain when “they could have love, the one and only happiness, and as much as they jolly well pleased” (281). He himself “would gladly starve” (281) if he could only have a woman who loved him.

Part 4, Chapter 7 Summary

Three thousand miners meet in the woods that night. Étienne stands on a tree trunk and offers a passionate speech to the crowd. He begins by saying it is fitting that they meet in the forest, where they are free. He summarizes the dire circumstances and the progression of their decision to strike. He then tells them they would be better off dying “in the attempt to destroy the tyranny of capital that reduced the worker to a state of permanent starvation” (285). The Company, he says, has “gone too far” (285), and now it is time for justice. Although he’s not a natural speaker, he captures the crowd’s attention.

Étienne says the mine belongs to the miners and that they must take back what is rightfully theirs. With his education “now complete” (286), having progressed through various philosophies of government, he has come to the conclusion “that freedom could not be achieved other than by the destruction of the State” (286). He believes they must rebuild “the humanity of the future” (287). When he concludes that it is the miners’ “turn to have all the power and the wealth” (287), the crowd meets him with wild applause. The people are “a pack of starving humanity” possessed by “a wave of religious exaltation” (287). Rasseneur attempts to speak, but he is “a fallen idol,” and the people, annoyed by his “message of moderation” (289), call him a “scab.” Defeated, he goes off alone, but not before telling Étienne the crowd will turn on him one day.

Bonnemort speaks to the crowd, telling them of the failed strikes he has seen. Étienne uses Bonnemort’s story as an example of a family sacrificing themselves for generations while “noble lords and gentlemen […] grow fat by their firesides” (291). He says the miner is no longer “the ignorant brute” (291) and that their revolt is blossoming. Labor, he says, is “going to call capital to account” (291).

The crowd decides to continue the strike and goes to the pits the next day to intimidate the men who have gone back to work. Étienne taunts Chaval, who still works at Jean-Bart, telling him all miners should strike in solidarity. Jealous of Étienne’s popularity, Chaval says that he is there to tell him the Vandame workers are with him, and they should go to Jean-Bart tomorrow to shut down the mine. The people, in a frenzy, shout, “Death to the scabs!” (294).

Part 4, Chapters 5-7 Analysis

As circumstances grow more dire, people either make sacrifices for those they love or shun others to look after themselves. When Étienne comes home with potatoes from La Mouquette, he declines to eat any himself; Maheu and La Maheude similarly eat less than they normally would so Bonnemort and the children can have more. La Mouquette generously rushes to give bread and gin to a starving old woman and gives Étienne food in exchange for his affections. Later, devastated when he tells her he can’t see her anymore, she offers to let him slap her so people think they have separated, as long as he will continue to see her secretly. These chapters establish love as the ultimate prize, something greater than food even when one is starving. M. Hennebeau’s musings that he “would gladly starve” (281) if he could only be loved shows his obliviousness to the people’s suffering and reiterates the importance of love when one has nothing else.

In contrast, Jeanlin hoards food in the abandoned pit Réquillart even though his family is starving. He tells Étienne that not only does he not have sympathy for them, but he blames them for being “stupid” (275). In Jeanlin’s view, one must do what one must to survive, and if his family is not willing to scheme and connive as he does, it is not his responsibility to help them. Jeanlin’s callousness toward his family is also seen in Zacharie, who drinks and plays games with his friends while his family scavenges for food, figuring he “[m]ay as well have fun since there was nothing else to do” (268). The toughest of times reveals one’s character.

In Chapter 4, Étienne moves on from Rasseneur’s moderate philosophy and turns to Souvarine, who intrigues but frightens him with his talk of fire and flowing blood. By Chapter 7, Étienne’s “political education” is “complete” (286), and he embraces a philosophy of destruction. Étienne now believes “freedom could not be achieved other than by the destruction of the State” (286); he advocates for “a complete overhaul” (287) of every system, including marriage, inheritance, and personal wealth. He advocates for the miners’ confiscating “all the power and the wealth” (287), and he rails against “the tyranny of capital that reduced the worker to a state of permanent starvation” (285). He asserts the mines belong to the people, who have “paid for it with […] blood and suffering” (286). Étienne’s once rational intellectualism gives way to Souvarine’s violence; he talks of seeing the face of capital “by the light of the coming conflagration” and of “drown[ing] the filthy swine in its own blood” (291).

Chapter 7 reinforces the theme of dehumanization as the people, in their hunger and despair, reach near madness, baring their teeth like “a pack of starving humanity” (287), and screaming like “wild animals” (283). Like animals, the people “dreamed of burning and killing” (293); they are a “heaving mass” (293) roaring in the moonlight. In Chapter 6, Jeanlin is “a degenerate throwback possessed of intuitive intelligence and native cunning who was gradually reverting to his former animal state” (276). Scavenging in the forests, basic survival the only concern, the people are reduced to the animals the Company believes them to be. The people’s powerlessness is further suggested by the fact that, as the strikers scream in fury, the trees “simply stood there, strong and tall […] and they neither saw nor heard the commotion of these wretched beings at their feet” (293-94). Just as the people were described as ants in the vastness of Le Voreux, they are unnoticed the forest, an indifference suggesting their insignificance.

In this light, Jeanlin’s torture of Rasseneur’s rabbit appears to be more than demented child’s play. Jeanlin’s tying a rope around the rabbit’s neck, letting it go and chasing it, and making it wait, terrified, in Lydie’s basket, is not unlike the Company’s treatment of the people. The narrative suggests that forced subversion is a feature of humanity.