Readers might know Emile Zola's novel Germinal, based on an early strike by French coal miners in northern France in 1884. Lots of socialists know at least the last lines!
"The sap was rising in abundance with whispering voices, the germs of life were opening with a kiss. Men were springing up, a black avenging host was slowly germinating in the furrows, thrusting upward for the harvests of future ages. And very soon their germination would crack the earth asunder."
While the sentiment remains true, the toilers getting even with the bosses can no longer be coalminers, not in France anyway. On 23 April the last coal mine in France, La Houve at Creutzwald in Lorraine, closed.
Never as big an industry as coalmining in Britain, in France it was nonetheless the engine of their industrial revolution, and coalminers the backbone of their labour movement. At the beginning of the 20th century miners numbered 200,000 in a population of 40 million (in the UK in 1913 there were one million miners in a similar population.
Unlike in Britain, the whole process has been a managed decline of the industry.
Mines were nationalised after the Second World War, since coal was vital in reconstruction. Production peaked in 1958 at 60 million tonnes.
Then in the 1970s the government developed nuclear power as a major source of energy. Today nuclear supplies 80% of electricity and 35% of total energy consumed.
Recruitment into the mines was frozen in 1984, and early retirement introduced. In 1947 there had been 370,000 miners. In 2001 there were 6,823.
In 2002, three mines remained - producing 1.6 million tonnes of coal. Two closed in 2003, leaving only La Houve.
Coal mining has declined all over Europe, having the effect often of eradicating a source of labour militancy. In Britain that was not merely - for the ruling class - a happy by-product, but one of the main goals of closing the mines.
The main reason for the move away from coal in Europe, however, has been economic. Coal is mined cheaper elsewhere and is thus cheaper to import than to produce domestically. A tonne of coal costs about $180 to deep mine in France, but can be as cheap as $15 to strip-mine in the US, South Africa or Australia.
When La Houve closed in April, there was a small ceremony attended by the last miners, their families and some revolting, smug, bourgeois politicians. The many who died or were injured in the mines, over three centuries, were remembered at a Catholic mass.
Among the many struggles of the French coalminers in those centuries, the most heroic probably was that waged in 1941 during the Nazi occupation.
A number of mines in the north, in Nord-Pas de Calais, were in territory directly controlled by the German military, ruling Belgium from Brussels. Though the strikes began as strikes against French employers, they quickly entailed clashes with the Nazi occupying state.
On 27 May miners at Le Dahomey mine struck against their employers over conditions. The strikes spread when Le Dahomey strike leaders were sentenced to hard labour; by 2 June 100,000 miners were on strike throughout the region.
The strikers won a supplement of food, clothing and soap; and the Vichy government agreed a general wage increase.
But there were heavy casualties too: afterwards, 450 strike leaders were arrested, and 270 deported to concentration camps in Germany, of whom 130 never returned. Nine Communists were abducted and shot.
The Communist Party (PCF), already strong among the miners, took great credit from these events. Locally, they had a different line from the PCF in occupied Paris, who at that point were neutral as between Germany and Britain - it was after the start of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, but before Hitler's armies invaded Russia on 21 June and the PCF became some of the biggest anti-German, French patriots!
Until that happened, the PCF in France generally were training their political fire against the French bourgeoisie and saying not much against the occupation. Around the northern mines the PCF line was hostility to the occupying forces: as a result of the strikes, it could hardly be otherwise!
The strikes inspired the miners and others in the area to resist; Nord-Pas de Calais was a major area for the Resistance.
Reference
"The 1941 miners' strike in France: from a dispute over soap to armed resistance" by Steve Cushion
