Simoun sails on the Pasig River steamship alongside Spanish elites and clergy who occupy the shaded upper deck.

Students Basilio and Isagani travel below deck among Filipino and Chinese passengers and discuss plans for a Castilian Academy.

Cabesang Tales loses his hard-earned farmland to the friary after years of escalating and unreasonable tribute demands.

Tales is kidnapped by bandits and his daughter Julí sells herself into servitude to Sister Penchang to raise the ransom.

Basilio visits his mother's grave at night on the former Ibarra estate near an old mausoleum.

Simoun reveals his plan to sow resentment among Filipinos and instigate a revolt against the colonial government and clergy.

Basilio declines Simoun's offer to join the revolt, choosing to pursue medicine and hope rather than revolution.

Filipino students petition for a Castilian Academy and the Captain-General assigns Don Custodio to decide its fate.

Basilio tells Simoun that María Clara died that very afternoon; Simoun leaves in anguish and falls gravely ill.

Broadsides against the clergy and government are posted on university gates, triggering the arrest of many students.

Basilio remains in prison after wealthier arrested students are freed by their influential families.

Simoun recovers and reveals his final plot: a bomb-lamp at a wedding reception, with Cabesang Tales poised to storm the city.

Isagani seizes Simoun's rigged lamp and throws himself and it into the river, destroying Simoun's entire plan.

Simoun, wounded and pursued by the Civil Guard, takes shelter at Father Florentino's seaside retreat and swallows poison.

Simoun confesses his full history to Father Florentino, reluctantly accepts his violent methods were wrong, and dies.

El Filibusterismo follows the disguised exile Simoun, secretly Crisóstomo Ibarra, as he returns to the Philippines with a fortune and a plan to provoke violent revolt against colonial rule. He reconnects with Basilio, a young medical student, and attempts to recruit him as the corrupt system grinds down Filipino lives. The students' peaceful push for a Castilian Academy is crushed, and Basilio, wrongly imprisoned, finally joins Simoun's cause. Simoun plants a nitroglycerin bomb disguised as a lamp at a wedding attended by the colonial elite, but the plot is foiled when Isagani throws the lamp into the river to save his former love. Simoun flees, takes poison, and confesses his full history to the pious Father Florentino before dying. His story ends as a cautionary tale about whether vengeance and violence can ever serve as true paths to freedom.

The rise and fall of Simoun's revolutionary conspiracy.

Passengers above deck share legends about Crisóstomo Ibarra's supposed drowning death in the Pasig River while Simoun listens silently.

Simoun stays with Cabesang Tales, displays his enormous wealth, and leaves a pistol accessible to the desperate farmer.

Tales discovers Simoun's pistol gone; he has murdered the friar, the new landowner, and the landowner's wife and fled to join bandits.

Basilio rides a coach to San Diego on Christmas Eve and watches the coachman be roughed up by the Civil Guard over missing papers.

Plácido Penitente's physics professor unfairly interrogates and humiliates students who can only recite memorized text rather than reason.

Plácido confronts his professor over fraudulent absence marks and discriminatory questioning, then angrily walks out of class.

Isagani visits lawyer Señor Pasta to seek support for the Castilian Academy, but Pasta counsels quiet obedience to the system.

Quiroga agrees to smuggle rifles for Simoun in exchange for Simoun reducing the debt Quiroga owes him.

Mr. Leeds's sphinx illusion causes Father Salví to cry out that María Clara is still alive before collapsing in a faint.

Don Custodio devises his compromise: a Castilian Academy will be permitted but not attached to the university or led by Dominicans.

At the operetta performance, Makaraig announces Don Custodio's disappointing compromise, and the students leave the theater in protest.

Captain Tiago dies and leaves the bulk of his estate to the Church, with almost nothing reaching the imprisoned Basilio.

Julí goes to Father Camorra hoping to secure Basilio's release and jumps to her death from the friary window.

The Captain-General's Chief of Staff argues passionately for Basilio's release, is flatly refused, and resigns his post.

Father Florentino hurls Simoun's jewel case into the sea so its wealth cannot be seized and used for further evil.

While the main plot centers on Simoun's conspiracy, a parallel web of secondary events reveals the everyday machinery of colonial abuse. Cabesang Tales's family is destroyed by clerical greed, and Simoun quietly provides Tales with the means for personal revenge. Students encounter institutional humiliation in the classroom and political obstruction from self-serving officials, while characters like Quiroga and Señor Pasta illustrate how individuals navigate the corrupt system for personal gain. The French operetta provides a stage for social commentary, and the Castilian Academy compromise exposes the futility of peaceful reform. Julí's tragic death and the Chief of Staff's resignation show how the system consumes even those who try to work within it. The novel ends with Father Florentino disposing of Simoun's jewels, ensuring that colonial greed claims no final prize.

The supporting stories of abuse, complicity, and consequence across colonial society.

Simoun proposes using brutal slave-like labor for colonial building projects, openly testing the tolerance of the elites around him.

Tandang Selo repeatedly counsels his son Tales to pay the friary's tribute, comparing the Church to a crocodile that must be appeased.

Basilio recognizes Simoun at the grave as the man who helped bury his mother thirteen years ago, unmasking him as Crisóstomo Ibarra.

Students gather at Makaraig's house to strategize how to influence Don Custodio and win approval for their academy petition.

At Los Baños, Father Sibyla argues that granting the academy petition would erode clerical authority and inevitably invite revolution.

Plácido seeks out Simoun for help fleeing to Hong Kong and overhears Simoun plotting a revolt and vowing to rescue María Clara.

Alone after recruiting Plácido, Simoun questions whether the cost of innocent lives justifies his plans but is hardened by memories of past injustice.

Isagani passionately tells Paulita about his vision of a free Philippines where justice reigns regardless of race or religion.

Students gather at a noodle shop to mock the Castilian Academy compromise and notice a spy sent by Father Sibyla watching them.

Isagani argues to Father Fernández that students cannot enact any change so long as they are threatened with arrest for speaking out.

Basilio, freed from prison by Simoun, learns of Julí's death from a coachman and commits to joining the revolutionary plot.

Basilio secretly follows Simoun to the wedding venue and realizes it is Captain Tiago's former home, now owned by Timoteo Peláez.

Basilio sees Simoun leave the wedding house looking pale, warns Isagani about the bomb, and flees the scene.

Rumors about the foiled bombing spread through Manila; Isagani learns what he prevented and feels deep remorse, then leaves the city for good.

Father Florentino tells the dying Simoun that God could not permit his plan to succeed because violence and greed cannot produce true freedom.

Beneath the plot's surface lies a series of decisive moments where characters either cross a line or pull back from one. Simoun's true identity is unmasked to Basilio at a gravesite, and his patient manipulation of the system is gradually exposed through scenes like the sphinx show and his recruitment of Plácido. The students' organized push for reform reaches its limits when peaceful channels are blocked at every turn, radicalizing Basilio after his unjust imprisonment and Julí's death. Each attempt at lawful change, from Isagani's argument with Señor Pasta to his debate with Father Fernández, reveals the system's resistance to reform from within. When Simoun's revolt is foiled, the ensuing rumors and regrets expose how many quietly wished for the colonial order's destruction without acting on it. Father Florentino's final judgment condemns not the desire for justice, but the violent means Simoun chose to pursue it.

The key decisions, discoveries, and moral reckonings that shape the novel's arc.