Germinal

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1885

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Part 5, Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 5, Chapter 4 Summary

The mob, driven by years of starvation and anger, cries, “We want bread! We want bread!” (330), and moves from pit to pit attacking the workers and destroying the property. Étienne passed up his share of food that morning and is only drinking gin, growing more intoxicated. At the pit Mirou, the mob encounters Quandieu, an elderly deputy for whom they have respect. Quandieu tells them he will not let them attack the men in the pit, for he’s “just a worker, the same as you” and that he’s “been told to guard the place” (333). Their “soldierly obedience” (333) touched, the mob moves on to another pit, Étienne forcing Chaval with them. Étienne and Maheu tell Catherine to go home, but she refuses.

The mob goes through villages and picks up more people as it moves from pit to pit, beating up workers and destroying property. They pass a few mines where they hear there are gendarmes waiting. At one pit, they destroy a railway and lamp-room, and even La Maheude, “beside herself with rage” (337), partakes in the destruction. They pass La Piolaine and glare through the gates at the comfortable house with its “patriarchal aura” (338). The mob receives word that it hasn’t encountered any gendarmes because a farmer gave the gendarmes false information, so they headed in the wrong direction.

At the Gaston-Marie pit, Étienne tries to make Chaval take a hammer to the pump. La Levaque and others force Chaval to drink from a pool of frozen water. Étienne, spurred by drunkenness to “murderous fury” (340), tells someone to give Chaval a knife so they can fight. Catherine, feeling she belongs to Chaval despite his cruelty to her, slaps Étienne and screams that they are cowards. Étienne, stunned and momentarily sobered, lets Chaval and Catherine go.

The mob, still screaming for bread, decides to go to Montsou and the Hennebeaus’ house.

Part 5, Chapter 5 Summary

Dansaert visits M. Hennebeau to tell him about the meeting in the forest the previous night; M. Hennebeau, deducing that Dansaert heard about it from Pierron’s wife, warns him to be discreet.

M. Hennebeau is concerned that the strike has lasted two months. He is expecting a letter from the Board instructing him what to do. He continues to receive telegrams informing him about the destruction at the pits. He is confused why the mob would attack Deneulin’s pit, but is glad he can now acquire it easier.

He goes to Négrel’s bedroom to retrieve a draft of a letter. When he sees his wife’s ether vial on Négrel’s bed, he must acknowledge that the two are having an affair. He is furious thinking of his passionless marriage and his futile love for his unfaithful wife. He thinks her a “slut” (346) and wonders if she feels any passion for her many lovers. He also wonders if she will stoop so low as to take a servant as a lover when Négrel is gone.

He goes downstairs and absentmindedly listens to news of the mob. He reads a letter from the Board, which hopes for violence because it would be an excuse to retaliate. He sends telegrams instructing troops to support the pits. Soon, he hears the mob outside his house.

Meanwhile, Mme. Hennebeau and her party stop at a farmstead so Cécile can have a glass of milk. Hearing the mob approaching, they hide in the barn. Négrel jokes with the women, scaring them even more, though he himself is frightened by the crowd, which looks “like warriors going off to war” (351). The party sees “a vision of the revolution that would come and sweep them all away” (352), and they fear a time when the poor will take over their homes and fortunes.

Mme. Hennebeau is irritated that this is happening on the day she is giving a party; Cécile hides terrified in the hay. The mob passes, and Négrel remembers a back road past Réquillart that they can take home.

Back at the Hennebeaus’ home, M. Hennebeau watches from the window as the mob shouts that they want bread. Having calmed, and resigned to his unhappiness, he thinks them fools, believing he would give up his fortune to have love like “the lowliest among his own employees” (356) and that “[t]hings didn’t go right just because you had bread” (357).

Part 5, Chapter 6 Summary

Étienne doesn’t know how the mob has become so violent and marvels how they were “so slow to anger and yet, once roused, so fearsome” (359). As the mob arrives in Montsou, Rasseneur tells him he warned him; Étienne says Rasseneur is a coward.

The mob watches as the Grégoires walk to M. Hennebeau’s house for dinner, then scream, “Death to the bourgeois! Long live socialism!” (360). Inside, the cook is upset that the pastry shop delivery has not arrived. Maigrat has sneaked into the house to ask M. Hennebeau to help him protect his shop. Upon hearing that the women have not returned, the Grégoires grow concerned about Cécile.

Négrel and the rest of the party take the back route past Réquillart and encounter the mob outside the Hennebeaus’ house. Lucie, Jeanne, and Mme. Hennebeau run through the front door, and Négrel follows, thinking Cécile went before him. However, Cécile, too terrified to follow, is accosted by the crowd. The women, offended by her silk clothing and pristine skin, shout to whip her. Bonnemort, spurred by years of hunger, responds to “inner promptings which he could not have described” (364) and begins choking Cécile as the women yell to take her knickers off. Négrel and M. Hennebeau try unsuccessfully to rescue her. Recognizing Cécile, La Maheude tells Bonnemort to stop. Horrified, Étienne distracts them by taking an axe to the door of Maigrat’s shop. Deneulin arrives on his horse and saves Cécile.

The cook from La Piolaine informs the Grégoires that the mob has destroyed their house. M. Grégoire is stunned that the miners would think ill of him. When Deneulin says that he is ruined, M. Hennebeau is excited that he will be able to obtain Vandame for the Montsou Board.

Outside, Étienne bangs down the door of Maigrat’s shop. Maigrat sneaks out of the Hennebeaus’ home, intending to climb into his shop through a window. However, he falls to his death. La Maheude stuffs dirt in his mouth to represent “the bread he had refused to let them have” (370). La Brûlé pulls off his genitals, and the women yell that it’s “the last time you shove that up our daughters” (371). Étienne, Maheu, Rasseneur, and others watch this scene “with frozen horror” (371). From the Hennebeaus’ home, the women watch through a window.

Catherine arrives to warn her father and Étienne that Chaval has sent for gendarmes. They order her away and flee when the gendarmes arrive. Behind the gendarmes is the pantryman’s cart.

Part 5, Chapters 4-6 Analysis

The lack of seriousness with which the bourgeois take the mob represents precisely the minimization the miners are striking against. While the starving people search desperately for bread, the Hennebeau party, after a “jolly” outing, stops at a farmstead because Cécile had “taken a fancy to a cup of milk” (349). Mme. Hennebeau is irritated “that people should spoil her fun” (350), while Lucie and Jeanne watch “the show” (351) with delight, admiring the “horrible beauty” of the mob (352).

When the bourgeois finally take the mob seriously, it is only out of concern for themselves. As Mme. Hennebeau and her friends watch the mob from the farmer’s barn, they imagine the poor will spend all their money and destroy all their property, only to “go back to living in the woods like savages” (352). Later, M. Grégoire is unable to believe the strikers “bore him a grudge for living a sober, decent life off the fruits of their labour” (366).

It is once again clear that the Company’s dehumanizing of the workers is what brings out the workers’ most basic animal instincts. After a lifetime of starvation, the people become a “wild stampede” of “beasts” (352). Étienne continues to be horrified by “these brutes he had unmuzzled” (359). The mob pauses only when touched by the “soldierly obedience” (333) of the deputy Quandieu. Their respect for Quandieu’s position shows their ingrained sense of subservience, beaten into them by the Company. However, even the Maheus and Étienne are ultimately caught up in the moment. Growing gradually more intoxicated, Étienne begins “to bare his teeth, like a wolf’s” (337). La Maheude, “beside herself with rage” (337), participates in the smashing of lamps at La Victoire and in the mutilation of Maigrat.

The revenge the mob enacts on its victims is often symbolic of the victim’s crimes. La Maheude’s stuffing the dirt into Maigrat’s mouth is in repayment for his having denied her family bread. La Brûlé’s ripping off his genitals is repayment for his having extorted sex in exchange for credit. The attack on Cécile Grégoire is similarly reflective of their specific grievances against her. The women are infuriated by the sight of her silk dress, the feather in her hat, and the “delicate skin of an idle creature who had never had to handle coal” (364). In each case, they are described as animals: With Cécile, they are “[s]purred on by […] savage rivalry” (364), and they “prowled” around Maigrat, “nostrils flaring, sizing him up like she-wolves” as they contrive the perfect punishment to “relieve their pent-up fury” (370).

Whereas contrast establishes between the rich and the poor, there is one area in which no one achieves happiness: love. Catherine is determined to stay with Chaval despite his cruelty, for he is “the one who had had her first” (334). Since he took her, “she belonged to him” (341), and she defends him against Étienne and the mob as a matter of pride. M. Hennebeau envies the miners for their sexual freedom and “would gladly have swapped his fat salary just to have their thick skin and unproblematic sex” (356). This mutual envy paints a picture of a world in which true happiness is scarce. Yet M. Hennebeau’s equating of his pain with theirs—he wishes that “he was starving to death” because it would “put an end to his own interminable misery” (356)—again shows him incapable of understanding the plight of the poor. It also fails to take into consideration that, like Catherine, many poor women end up with their men because they are raped. M. Hennebeau’s yearning to be “enough of a boor to beat his wife and pleasure himself with the woman next door” (356) only reiterates that no matter whether a man is a subservient miner or a wealthy boss, he is always more powerful than the women beneath him, often “not caring a button whether they were happy or not” (314).

In a final contrast, the pastryman’s cart arrives behind the gendarmes who have chased off the furious mob. The calm delivery of the pastries missed by the Hennebeaus’ cook seems all the more trivial after the violence that’s just occurred. The delivery boy’s proceeding with his task as if nothing had happened, even as Maigrat’s mutilated corpse lies in the street, begs the question of whether any of this—the protests, the deaths, the appeals to the bourgeois bosses—will have any effect in the end.