Macquart branch
Étienne Lantier
Miner, socialist organiser
Son of Gervaise Macquart and Auguste Lantier, brother of Claude and Jacques. The hero of Germinal — and one of the great protagonists of nineteenth-century fiction. Étienne arrives at the Voreux mine in northern France as a young mechanic without work and without connections, fired from his last job for striking a superior (the Lantier violence finding its early expression). He goes underground, learns the work, is taken in by the Maheu family, and finds himself at the centre of a world of grinding, systematic poverty: families who have worked the same mine for three generations and have nothing to show for it. He is self-educated — he has read the International, has ideas about socialism and collective action — and his ideas find purchase in Montsou because the conditions are right: the Company introduces new pay terms that amount to a wage cut; the men are already hungry. He organises the strike. What follows is not what he planned: the weeks of cold and hunger radicalise the movement beyond his control; the violence turns savage; the army fires on the crowd. He survives the flooding of the Voreux — having watched Catherine Maheu die beside him in the darkness underground — and walks away from Montsou in spring, damaged, changed, and still believing in something he cannot quite articulate but will not give up. The Macquart hereditary impulse haunts him throughout: he sometimes feels the murderous impulse his brother Jacques cannot suppress, and controls it only barely. He reappears briefly in La Bête humaine as a railway worker, carrying his politics and his damage with him.
Fils de Gervaise et Lantier, héros de Germinal. Arrivé au Voreux sans travail, il s'installe chez les Maheu, s'éduque politiquement, organise la grande grève. Les semaines de faim, la violence hors de contrôle, le massacre, l'effondrement du Voreux. Il survit, Catherine Maheu meurt à ses côtés dans la mine. Il repart au printemps, blessé et toujours croyant. La pulsion héréditaire Macquart le hante, mais il la maîtrise — contrairement à son frère Jacques.
Slender, dark, with the restless intelligence of a self-educated working man and his mother Gervaise's clear, expressive eyes — a face that is very young at the novel's opening and visibly older at its close.
Slender, dark, with the restless intelligence of a self-educated working man and his mother Gervaise's clear, expressive eyes — a face that is very young at the novel's opening and visibly older at its close.
Family & Relationships
- Child Gervaise Macquart
- Child Auguste Lantier
- Sibling Nana
- Sibling Claude Lantier
- Sibling Jacques Lantier
- Lover Catherine Maheu — He loves her throughout Germinal; they are united only in the flooded mine, where they die.
Jules Férat, frontispiece illustration for Germinal (1886) — Public domain
Appears In
Details
- Branch
- Macquart
- Generation
- IV