Germinal

“His voice had assumed a tone of 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.” 

Étienne, upon first approaching Le Voreux, asks Bonnemort who owns the mine. Bonnemort cannot answer definitively. Instead, he gestures “towards an indeterminate point in the gloom, a remote, unknown place inhabited by the ‘people’ on whose behalf the Maheu family had been working the seams for over a century” (14). The Company is an elusive, oppressive force so powerful as to be unknown and unreachable to the miners who fill its coffers. The disconnection between the Company and its workers indicates that the Company sees its workers as a faceless mass of expendable people whose sole purpose is to produce for them. It also shows the contrast in power between the workers and their bosses. The fact that the oppressed people revere the Company for its enormity and omnipotence shows how they are conditioned to accept their subordination.

“For half an hour the shaft continued to gorge itself in this way, with greater or lesser voracity depending on the level to which the men were descending, but without cease, ever famished, its giant bowels capable of digesting an entire people.” 

Le Voreux’s depth both mesmerizes and frightens Étienne when he observes cages of “meat loads”—workers on their way to the pit-bottom—descend the shaft. Le Voreux is a giant beast, an “ogre whose hunger could never be satisfied” (72). It requires hundreds of miners working nearly around the clock in order to function.