Between the end of XIXe century and the last third of the XXe century, workers occupied an essential place in French society. Beyond their quantitative decline, they have today become less and less visible. This process of erasure can be seen in the Liévin mining disaster in 1974.
Marion Fontaine’s book tells of a disintegration. The approach does not lack courage, as the curiosities focus more on what appears and is constructed than on what is undone. In this case, the author endeavors to follow the ways in which, in the mid-1970s, “ everything started to go wrong » for the working world.
Everything, starting with the way society views this group which, since the end of the XIXe century, an essential, even central, place in French society and in the representations it had of its future. For several years now, the invisibility of the working class has been studied, notably by some major works of sociology (Schwartz, 1990 ; Beaud, Pialoux, 1999). But the erasure process was still quite obscure.
A picture “ social-sad »
Committed, in her previous research, to renewing the image of the mining world, so strongly gripped by stereotypes, the historian here undertakes to explore a case, the Liévin mining disaster in 1974, and to shed light on its paradoxical consequences. . To do this, it begins with the event itself, the explosion that occurred in the 3 bis pit of Liévin on December 27, 1974 and in which 42 miners were killed.
This tragedy, the deadliest of the post-war period, immediately aroused strong and widespread emotion in the country and revived the echo of other disasters including the emblematic one of Courrières in 1906. At the foundation of this echo lies the myth miners, with the double figure of hero and martyr, present in many of the highlights of French history.
After the images of misery and sacrifice installed by Zola at the end of the XIXe century, the strikes of 1936, 1941 and 1947-1948, as well as the battle for coal during Reconstruction, associated miners with a promise of a future. From the strike of 1963, the symbolism transformed. The working class remains central in analyzes and expectations, but it is changing in composition. The booming technicians represent the new working class and liaise with the middle strata of the wage earner, sending miners an image of “ social-sad » and archaic.
The mutation of the minor myth is hardly dissociated from the future prospects for this sector of activity. After the record of 1958, production experienced a gradual reduction, organized by successive plans which established the hypothesis of an eventual cessation. It is in this context that the disaster occurs. Marion Fontaine sees here one of the keys to the paradox initially noted, that of an emotion as quickly suppressed as it was strong, for lack of agreement on the horizon to be given to the drama. For the PCF and the CGTa massively dominant union in the profession, pain and anger must not give any grip to supporters of the liquidation of the mines.
For the socialists, who occupy a large part of the municipal space, criticism must, on the contrary, encourage the acceleration of the reconversion of the mining basin. A large part of the press agrees, emphasizing the agony of the mining century and the inanity of these deaths. Even before ecological themes, the mining danger is presented as unacceptable. So, for some reason, minor anger is only carried mezzo voce and only for a time.
Class conflicts
But the historian finds traces of attempts made to break this kind of resignation and deploy indignation, at the initiative of the Maoist extreme left. Rather than observing their weak impact, she focuses on analyzing their failure and studies through them the exhaustion of class points of view on this mining drama.
The first of these companies dates back to an explosion that occurred on February 4, 1970 in Lens, which caused 16 deaths. The Proletarian Left intervened, led a campaign to denounce the Coal Mines, as well as the CGT and the Communist Party. She established contacts with minor activists and organized, in December 1970, a People’s Tribunal to which personalities like Jean-Paul Sartre took part. The Houillères’ questioning of insecurity in the mines and the acceptance of widespread silicosis aroused a national response.
But the Maoist organization did not build a lasting alternative consistent with its heroic vision and attributed this failure to “ alienation » of minors. In 1975, in Liévin, the PCRanother Maoist organization which has a few militants in the city, is also trying to provoke a denunciation of the same culprits and accomplices. He led a popular commission of inquiry, which again led to a popular tribunal in March 1975. Despite an honorable mobilization in which the innovative theme of health at work emerged, the movement remained caught in a dogmatic gangue, which did not does not assign a clear identity to miners, and fails to anchor itself in the mining environment.
At the same time, official courts are testing the possibility for minors of obtaining justice for the suffering suffered and of being recognized as having social dignity. A first procedure, led by Judge Pascal, undertook to indict the Houillères. Following a logic of class conflict, this attacks the engineers of the national company and above all the one who was responsible for the pit, who is indicted. After the judge’s withdrawal, which provoked little reaction among the mining population, a second procedure was initiated, dragged on and led, in 1980, to a circumspect trial.
The miners caught in the explosion were not producing coal, but were working to prepare for the reactivation of the previously dormant deposit. Highly qualified overall, they were led by management considered scrupulous, but the holiday period – between Christmas 1974 and New Year 1975 – made the operation fragile. The elucidation of the circumstances of the tragedy gives rise to an imputation as if in principle of the responsibility of the Coal Mines, and to a symbolic condemnation of the engineer. But the analytical precautions are accepted in Liévin and rule out the expression of class anger.
Areas of mobilization
One of the great strengths of the book consists of showing how, through the positioning of the forces involved, the figures of miners as constituents of a working class tend to become blurred, to crumble or to fade away. Suffering and risks lose their merit, the virtue of minors loses its clarity.
The book has another strength, which consists of identifying and characterizing sketches of other representations. Marion Fontaine thus examines how, in the face of justice, a collective of widows takes up a proposal from the far left and overcomes the obstruction of the CGT. But this association places the victims rather than the class in the foreground and shifts its protest to the existential terrain of destroyed life trajectories.
In the areas of mobilization that continue, that which concerns health at work takes its autonomy and begins to appear as a major subject. On the judicial level, while Judge Pascal exhausts himself on the terrain of class justice, other judges take up the fight against employer irresponsibility and the exception that forms the territory of work, and for a reaffirmation of the civil law and criminal law in business life.
Marion Fontaine thus notes the beginning of themes which constitute alternatives to the class divide in the representation of minors. Almost with regret, she notes how these new themes tend to replace the figure of the world of mining, rather than to renew it, how the old and the new fail to meet. It points, at the source, to one of the moments in the formation of worker asthenia which, at the end of the XXe century, echoes the “ melancholy » which Michelle Perrot highlighted for the previous century.