Étienne Lantier arrives at Le Voreux coal pit in darkness and meets Bonnemort, who describes fifty years of mining life.

Étienne is hired onto Maheu's mining team and descends into the terrifying darkness of Le Voreux for the first time.

Engineer Négrel scolds Maheu's team for poor timbering and levies fines, leaving Étienne outraged at the miners' conditions.

Étienne rents a room at Rasseneur's pub and, inspired by talk of rebellion, decides to stay at the mine.

Étienne moves into the Maheu household and begins inspiring the family with readings and talk of revolution.

A rock-fall in Le Voreux kills miner Chicot and permanently cripples young Jeanlin, whose legs are both broken.

A deputation of strikers visits M. Hennebeau's house to plead their case; Hennebeau refuses their demands and dismisses them.

Pluchart speaks passionately at the Jolly Fellow pub and the assembled miners vote to join the International Workers Association.

Étienne delivers a passionate speech to three thousand miners gathered in the forest, urging them to destroy the system that exploits them.

The mob marches from pit to pit across Montsou, destroying machinery and attacking workers who have not joined the strike.

Gendarmes open fire on striking miners outside Le Voreux, killing Maheu and many others including Bébert and Lydie.

Souvarine secretly sabotages the already-weakened tubbing in Le Voreux's shaft, then climbs to the spoil-heap to watch.

Le Voreux floods catastrophically and collapses entirely into the earth, swallowing the surrounding buildings and land.

Trapped in the flooded mine, Étienne kills Chaval; Catherine and Étienne finally consummate their love and Catherine dies in his arms.

After six weeks of recovery, Étienne says farewell to La Maheude and boards the train to join Pluchart in Paris.

Étienne Lantier arrives penniless at Le Voreux coal pit and is hired onto Maheu's team, where he is appalled by the brutal conditions and starvation wages. Inspired by Rasseneur's talk of rebellion and his own voracious reading, Étienne moves in with the Maheu family and begins building the foundations of a strike. After the miners vote to join the International Workers Association, Étienne delivers a landmark speech to thousands and the mob's fury is unleashed across the pits of Montsou. Gendarmes open fire at Le Voreux, killing Maheu among many others, and Souvarine's secret sabotage of the shaft triggers a catastrophic collapse that traps Étienne and Catherine underground. Catherine dies in Étienne's arms after they finally consummate their long-suppressed love, and Étienne is pulled from the mine barely alive. Despite the strike's failure, he boards a train to Paris with renewed faith that the workers' revolution is merely delayed, not defeated.

The rise and fall of Étienne Lantier's coal miners' strike.

The Grégoires enjoy a leisurely morning at La Piolaine while cousin Deneulin visits and hints that he needs a loan.

La Maheude walks to La Piolaine to beg charity from the Grégoires, who give brioche to her children but refuse money.

Mme. Hennebeau tours the miners' village with guests from Paris, praising the housing as comfortable and the people as happy.

At the Ducasse festival in Montsou, Étienne proposes the creation of a provident fund to fellow miners drinking at local bars.

The Hennebeaus host the Grégoires for lunch on the day the strike begins; the bourgeois joke lightly about the miners' threats.

The Hennebeau party hides in a farmyard barn as the furious mob of strikers marches past on the road below.

Maigrat falls from a window to his death; the enraged women mutilate his body in the street below.

Étienne hides in Jeanlin's secret underground lair in Réquillart while soldiers search the region believing him to be in Belgium.

Young Alzire Maheu dies of starvation at home as the strike stretches deep into the winter months.

La Mouquette throws herself in front of Catherine to shield her from soldiers' bullets and dies smiling at them both.

La Maheude blames Étienne directly for her husband's death and the family's ruin after the Le Voreux shooting.

Deneulin, financially ruined by the strike, agrees to sell his Vandame pit to the Montsou Company at a knock-down price.

Zacharie dies in a gas explosion while desperately digging through coal to reach his trapped sister Catherine.

Bonnemort strangles Cécile Grégoire to death at the Maheu house while her parents visit the Levaques next door.

La Maheude, now working at Jean-Bart, tells Étienne she no longer blames him and will support the next revolt.

While the Maheus struggle to survive, the wealthy Grégoires live in oblivious comfort at La Piolaine, refusing to give La Maheude money even as her children starve at home. As the strike takes hold, the bourgeois treat the miners' unrest as entertainment, hiding in barns and hosting dinner parties, while miners' families descend into desperate poverty. The violence of the mob's march through Montsou claims Maigrat's life, and the shooting at Le Voreux kills the generous La Mouquette, who dies shielding Catherine. In the long aftermath, Alzire Maheu dies of starvation, La Maheude blames Étienne for her husband's death, and Deneulin is forced to sell his pit to the very Company he resisted. Zacharie dies trying to rescue his trapped sister, and Bonnemort ultimately strangles Cécile Grégoire to death, avenging generations of silent suffering. Yet La Maheude's quiet farewell to Étienne signals that despite total ruin, the spirit of rebellion survives.

The world surrounding the strike — its bystanders, victims, and aftermath.

Catherine shares her lunch with Étienne underground; Chaval watches with jealousy and forcibly kisses Catherine before Étienne can act.

Chaval lures Catherine to Réquillart and rapes her; Étienne watches them emerge afterward and bitterly misjudges her character.

Étienne meets Souvarine at Rasseneur's and hears his violent anarchist philosophy for the first time, borrowing books to begin serious political study.

La Maheude enters the fairyland of hope as Étienne describes a future society where workers share equally in prosperity.

The Company issues a notice reducing miners' pay to cover timbering costs; the entire village breaks down weeping over emptied wage packets.

Catherine moves in permanently with Chaval after he makes violent scenes threatening her, abandoning her family at their most vulnerable moment.

Étienne and Rasseneur have a bitter argument at the Jolly Fellow after Rasseneur secretly wrote to Pluchart telling him not to come.

Étienne grows drunk on gin during the mine riots and calls for a knife fight with Chaval; Catherine slaps him and defends Chaval.

M. Hennebeau finds his wife's perfume bottle in Négrel's unmade bed, finally confirming what he has long tried to deny.

Bonnemort is seized by an unnameable inner fury during the Montsou riot and begins choking Cécile Grégoire before the crowd.

Jeanlin silently slits the throat of sentry Jules in the dark at Réquillart; a horrified Étienne watches and cannot intervene.

Étienne and Souvarine discuss Darwin by the canal; Souvarine reveals the execution of his girlfriend during the Russian revolution.

Souvarine tries to send Étienne away from Le Voreux the morning after sabotaging the shaft, but lets him go when he sees Catherine.

Négrel descends the flooded shaft after the collapse and discovers that the tubbing has been deliberately sabotaged by an unknown hand.

Étienne is pulled from the flooded mine by Négrel; the two former adversaries weep together, their shared humanity laid bare.

From the moment Chaval forces a kiss on Catherine underground and later rapes her at Réquillart, Étienne's path and Catherine's suffering become entangled in ways that will define the entire novel. Étienne's encounter with Souvarine's violent anarchist philosophy and the Company's punishing new pay policy gradually radicalize the miners, while Catherine's departure to live with Chaval signals that the strike's human cost has already begun. As the strike spirals into violence, M. Hennebeau confronts his wife's betrayal, Étienne nearly loses control under the influence of gin, and Bonnemort erupts in unexpected fury during the Montsou riot. Jeanlin's murder of the young sentry Jules and Souvarine's fateful decision to let Étienne enter Le Voreux that morning lead directly to the catastrophe beneath the earth. Négrel's discovery that the shaft was deliberately sabotaged, and his tearful rescue of Étienne, reveal that even former adversaries can be stripped to a shared and fragile humanity.