Germinal

The Montsou Mining Company is the invincible, elusive company that owns the pits in Montsou. Referred to merely as “the Company,” it represents unchecked, exploitative power. On his first day in Montsou, when Étienne asks Bonnemort who owns the mine, Bonnemort waves “toward an indeterminate point in the gloom, a remote, unknown place” (14). He speaks of the Company with “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” (14). It is large and impassive to the workers, who respect it for its grandeur, accepting their own lowly place as servants to its needs.

The Company provides luxuriousness and comfort for shareholders on the backs of the starving poor. The Grégoires see their share as “a private god whom they worshipped in their egotism” or “a fairy godmother who rocked them to sleep in their large bed of idleness and fattened them at their groaning table” (80). The Grégoires prefer investing in the mine, where generations of people “would extract it for them, a little each day, sufficient unto their needs” (80).

The Company does not value the lives of the workers, who it sees as faceless masses whose purpose is to fill Company coffers.