Back to the land of childhood. “As a daughter of Arras, I discover the mining basin”, by Rachel Notteau
The expressway leaves Arras behind it to speed between fields of potatoes and beets. In the rearview mirror, the belfry is shrinking before my eyes. On this June morning, I calmly put my wheels back in those of the family car that took me from Arras the city car to Nieppe, my grandparents’ town, in the heart of Flanders. On the left, the military cemeteries of the First World War line their impeccable steles along straight paths. Ten minutes later, crossing a bridge makes me tip into another world in a split second. The panorama changes. In the distance appear impressive brown conical hills: the slag heaps (pronounced “terris”), witnesses to three centuries of coal mining in the region. Here I am crossing the mining basin, a vast territory that stretches 120 km long and 12 km wide, straddling Pas-de-Calais and the Nord.
A shiver runs down my spine. What blinkers have prevented me from seeing it – from really seeing it – for the twenty-five years that I have been crossing this piece of heritage? In Arras, I have scoured all the museums, but those of the mining basin so close by, never. “Why go there? It’s ugly!” warned a woman from Arras before my visit to this region described by Zola. At school, I had not heard of it either. “It never occurred to me to have you study Germinal “, says my former French teacher at Robespierre high school, whose in-laws come from the mining industry. “Most of you came from an urban environment, dominated by tertiary activities,” he continues. “The mining story would not have resonated.” He prefers that I keep his name quiet, because in the teachers’ room, prejudices still circulate. For a long time, the mining basin was a source of shame!
An Eiffel Tower of Mines
Today I want to cross the invisible border and push aside this mixture of disdain and disinterest. Turning the signal, steering right, I leave the expressway. Direction: Liévin. My first stop.
A series of roundabouts adorned with advertising billboards – for a discount supermarket, dealerships or fast food outlets – crosses an ordinary commercial area… or almost. Because an imposing structure 40 m high overlooks the signs. It is an old headframe, a metal construction that allowed men to be lowered and raised. An Eiffel Tower of the mines. Its framework disappears under the scaffolding. “It needed to be renovated!” comments my friend Baptiste Boulan, who has arranged to meet me at this very spot.
He was the first to arouse my curiosity about the history of coal. Four years ago, he was preparing his thesis on the architecture of the mining basin. What I vaguely imagined thanks to the collective imagination, he knew it like the back of his hand. “This headframe is a landmark for me. As soon as I saw it, I was happy, I thought about the hamburger I was going to eat at the fast food restaurant, and the film I would go see at the cinema afterwards,” he says, happily, remembering his Wednesday afternoons. Baptiste grew up halfway between Arras and the mining basin. Since then, he has developed a passion for this neglected territory. In the car park, he takes me near a manhole cover that goes unnoticed. Here was another headframe, serving galleries where 28 miners died from a firedamp explosion at the end of the 19th century. A tragedy buried by collective oblivion.
The domino effect
In the neighboring establishment of a chain of restaurants that offers a breathtaking view of the metal tower, the customers seated at tables, heads down, keep their eyes fixed on their trays from which emanates a smell of frying. Only Marcel Mortuelle, 81 years old, former miner, wants to sit facing the window. This headframe, he has used it many times. Everything comes back to him: the screeching of the cage that propelled him towards the bottom at a rate of eight meters per second, his heart that heaves and the arrival in immense dark galleries… In 1965, the mine closed, and the land turned into wasteland. In the mining basin, by a domino effect, the pits were then abandoned one by one. The territory fell into an economic slump. The mine shut down, and with it all the local shops, the taverns, the ducasses, these funfairs typical of Nord-Pas-de-Calais that took place in each district. The miners, accustomed to living in a system where everything was taken care of – heating, school, health care – by the mining company, found themselves left to their own devices.
The solidarity that had been so strong until then has disintegrated. Everyone has retreated to their own mining settlement, while the employment mechanism has struggled to get going again. The aftereffects are still being felt today. A few kilometres away, in the city centre of Lens, where my journey continues, the many shop windows with closed shutters reinforce the image I kept from my childhood of an abandoned region. Every time I meet them, it’s the same refrain: “Arras is more bourgeois. Its inhabitants don’t come here because they want to stand out from this poorer region.” I feel like someone is holding a mirror up to me… “People think our region is black,” says Émile Beaurepaire behind his counter, who has time to sort through his cash register and chat. In his café, the trend is more towards yellow and red, the colours of the Racing Club de Lens. It feels good there.
Here, I rediscover simplicity, men and women without manners, living in coherence with their values: hospitality, effort, sincerity. Émile confides spontaneously. He was never at the bottom, and yet, at 14, he was already working. His mother had just died. The first son of a family of nine children, with strong shoulders, he took over and never complained.
The reality is not rosy. “We have 75% of welfare recipients here,” he laments, referring to residents who receive CAF benefits (around 68% in 2021). Slumped in his chair, the only customer in the middle of the morning pays no attention to his words, his gaze drowned in his pint of beer.
After the announcement of the closure of the mines, it was not until 1992 that the University of Lens opened its doors. And another ten years before the mining epic would be remembered.
Twenty years later, after many refusals, the area was finally listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Like the Palace of Versailles! The same year, Lens welcomed its first museum, the Louvre-Lens. A turning point for the region, which is banking on culture to revitalize itself. Nearly 150,000 annual visitors now make this recent institution the third most visited museum in France, outside of Paris. Visitors flock from the surrounding area, including Arras, and also from all over France.
This new attractiveness has allowed the renovation of mining houses, now occupied 10% by former miners, 30% by owners and the rest by social housing tenants. In the maze of alleys lined with red brick terraced houses, lined up in rows of onions, with the only detail sticking out, overhead electric cables, time seems frozen. “When I arrived here in the 1990s, the neighborhood was ‘crappy’! The toilets were still in the garden,” assures Jean-Luc Prudhomme, flip-flops and socks on his feet. Maintenance technicians or auxiliaries have taken over from the former miners. While the sixty-year-old admits that the atmosphere is no longer the same as before, there is no way he would want to leave his Cité 9.
A pack of green candies
Before reaching my last destination, I stop by the tourist office souvenir shop. Right away, a packet of green sweets catches my eye: miner’s pastilles. This plant smell comes back to me, it is associated with my grandmother, who loves them… A former farmer, another life of work, but the same values. I had never made the connection. These sweets were eaten by the men underground to cool down or avoid smoking. My Proust madeleine has a link with the mine! Another surprise awaits me. In Wingles, my last stop in mining territory, a passionate archivist tells me that one of the largest lampisteries (manufacturing lamps for miners) was located in… Arras. Less than ten minutes’ walk from my childhood home! At the end of the coal mining, the building became the Cité Nature science center, a museum that I explored… My journey ends with this discovery that invites us to revisit the link between the two territories.
