The miners’ strike in Nord-Pas-de-Calais

On the morning of 27 May 1941 the miners of pit No. 7 of the Dourges mine at Montigny-en-Gohelle, known to its workforce as “Dahomey”, refused to work. The immediate issue was a new method of calculating earnings, which for many meant a cut in pay, but the list of demands they put to the management was longer: higher wages, better working conditions, more butter, meat and soap. Within a few days the strike had engulfed the whole coalfield of the Nord and Pas-de-Calais departments. At its height, on 4–6 June, more than 100,000 of the region’s 143,000 miners had stopped work. It was the largest strike in occupied France and one of the largest in the whole of occupied Europe. It ended on 10 June, but its participants went on paying for it for years.

A coalfield in the forbidden zone

The Nord-Pas-de-Calais coalfield, stretching in a belt from Valenciennes through Douai and Lens to Béthune, produced some 60 per cent of France’s coal before the war. Geologically it is a continuation of the Walloon coalfield in Belgium. In May 1940 the Germans passed through the region on their way to the English Channel, and after the armistice of 22 June they did not hand it over to the French administration of the occupied zone in Paris. As in 1914–1918, both departments were placed under the German military administration in Brussels, and directly under Oberfeldkommandantur 670 in Lille, commanded by General Niehoff. The region became a “forbidden zone” (zone interdite), cut off from the rest of the country by the line of the Somme, with restricted movement of people and post. The French prefects and administration continued to function, and Marshal Philippe Pétain’s government in Vichy formally kept its authority here, but in reality the Germans decided, and Paris and Vichy had limited influence over what happened.

The mines started up again as early as 15 June 1940, and by September they were working normally. The coal went to power stations, coking plants and steelworks working for the Germans. The mining companies, grouped in the organising committee of the coal industry under the supervision of the OFK, wanted to recoup what they regarded as the losses of the Popular Front era of 1936. Shifts were lengthened, breaks shortened, time-and-motion study and piecework introduced, while wages remained frozen. From 1 January 1941 the working day was extended by half an hour without any rise in pay. In November 1940 Vichy dissolved the trade union confederations, and the miners’ safety delegates were stripped of their mandates. The winter of 1940–1941 was also the hungriest period of the occupation: ration allocations were meagre and often not honoured, the black market was expensive, and there was a shortage even of soap, without which a miner cannot wash off the coal dust.

A year of small strikes

Discontent showed itself from the first months of the occupation. In the summer and autumn of 1940 there were brief stoppages, and on 11 November 1940 some miners downed tools in memory of the victory of 1918. After the shift was lengthened in January 1941, the miners spent several weeks staging “grèves perlées” (go-slow strikes), stopping work for half an hour at the beginning or end of the shift. The movement, which began in the pits of the Escarpelle company near Douai, spread to more than a dozen shafts and ended with the arrest of nearly two hundred miners. In March German soldiers occupied the Escarpelle pits. On 1 May 1941 tricolours and red flags appeared on pylons and slag heaps, leaflets circulated, and there were disturbances in Lens and Avion.

Many of these actions were organised by communists. The French Communist Party, banned in the autumn of 1939 after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, remained underground. Its leadership in Paris, Jacques Duclos and Benoît Frachon, kept to the Comintern line: the war was an imperialist conflict, and the enemy was above all French capitalism and Vichy. In the coalfield, cut off from Paris, local activists nevertheless had considerable freedom of action. In Pas-de-Calais the party was led by Auguste Lecœur, René Camphin and Julien Hapiot, who as early as 1940 were setting up illegal Committees of Trade Union Unity and Action (CUSA), gathering weapons and organising small armed groups to protect activists. Their underground paper L’Enchaîné, in its Pas-de-Calais edition, spoke of a struggle against the “double yoke” of capital and foreign domination. One of the best-known activists was a young miner from the Dahomey pit, Michel Brûlé, twice detained by the Germans and twice released under pressure from his workmates.

An important stimulus was the example of Belgium. On 10 May the Strike of the 100,000 broke out in Seraing near Liège, after which the German military administration in Brussels – the same one to which Nord-Pas-de-Calais was subordinate – agreed to an eight per cent wage rise. News of the concessions won by the Walloon miners and steelworkers quickly crossed the border.

From Dahomey to the whole coalfield

On 26 May the Dourges company introduced at pit No. 7 the calculation of earnings for the whole team rather than for each man individually. The miners met underground and decided to stop work. On the morning of 27 May, when the overmen again tried to impose the new system, the entire pit came to a standstill. Brûlé presented the management with a list of demands on behalf of the union committee. Lecœur, informed at midday, sent word to activists in every part of the coalfield. The Germans learned of the strike only in the evening and afterwards accused the French police and the companies of failing to warn them.

On 28 May four more pits of the Dourges company stopped. A central strike committee was already at work in Lens, and it sent several dozen liaison agents to the mines with model lists of demands. The agitators usually turned up at mines where no one knew them, protected by armed groups. On 29 May the strike spread to Courrières, Ostricourt and Carvin, on 30 May to Escarpelle, and on 31 May to Anzin in the Nord department. On 3 June the mines at Lens, Liévin, Béthune, Bruay and Nœux joined in. According to French and German figures cited by historians, some 80 per cent of the miners, more than 100,000 men, were on strike on 4–6 June. Coking plants and some power stations also stopped, and at Seclin near Lille the spinners of the Agache mill joined the strike.

Women played a major part. Miners’ wives and daughters formed pickets at the entrances to the mining estates, turned back those willing to work, jeered at those who went to the pits under the protection of German bayonets, blocked roads and marched on the companies’ offices. The most famous march, led by Émilienne Mopty, the wife of a miner from Montigny-en-Gohelle, went to the “grands bureaux” of the Courrières company at Billy-Montigny; studies date it to 29 May or 4 June and estimate it at 1,500–2,000 women. Similar demonstrations took place in Liévin and Hénin-Liétard. The occupiers responded with an ordinance that from 6 June forbade women to be in the streets during the half-hour before and after the start of a shift at the mines.

Poles also played a strong part. Tens of thousands of Polish emigrants worked in the coalfield, most of whom had arrived in the 1920s, often from Westphalia, to help restore the mines flooded by the Germans in 1918. According to some studies they made up nearly a third of the workforce, and the majority of those working underground in the western part of the coalfield. Polish communists, among them veterans of the Dąbrowski Battalion from the Spanish Civil War, sat on strike committees and in the armed groups, and Polish-language leaflets called for a fight against “Hitlerite bayonets”. For many of them, whose own country was also under German occupation, the strike had a doubly patriotic dimension. According to French studies, at least two Polish miners were killed in clashes with the forces of order.

Repression

As early as 27 May the prefect of Pas-de-Calais, the sub-prefect and the director of the Dourges company met at the German Kommandantur in Béthune. It was decided to arrest the leaders and at the same time to promise that “justified” complaints would be examined once work had resumed. The first miners were arrested on 28 May. Lists of suspects were drawn up by the mining companies on the basis of reports from engineers and overmen, and supplemented by the prefectures with lists of known communists. French policemen and gendarmes guided the Germans through the mazes of the mining estates. This collaboration between the companies and the occupiers became one of the main charges brought against the mine owners after the war.

As the strike spread, General Niehoff brought in reinforcements: two infantry battalions, a company of armoured cars, detachments of field gendarmerie and a security regiment. The coalfield was divided into “combat sectors”. Cafés, cinemas and restaurants were closed, the sale of tobacco and alcohol was banned, and Luftwaffe aircraft flew low over the estates. Posters calling for a return to work and listing the names of those arrested were pasted on the walls. From now on, special rations of food – butter, sausage, soap – were to go only to the families of those not on strike. From dawn to dusk troops combed the estates in round-ups in which men and women were detained. The Kléber barracks in Lille and the barracks in Valenciennes were turned into camps for those arrested. A court martial in Lille sentenced detainees to hard labour.

Hunger and fear did their work. By 7 June only half the miners were still on strike, and the movement was collapsing where it had begun, in Carvin, Dourges, Drocourt and Ostricourt. The communist leadership issued instructions to return to work on Monday 9 June, and by 10 June work in the coalfield was almost back to normal. According to various estimates, the strike cost the Germans between some 460,000 and 500,000 tons of coal. Because power stations and coking plants had to be supplied with coal from Belgium, the effects were felt even in the Paris area, which was supplied with coal and gas from the north.

The occupiers and Vichy made partial concessions. On 16 June OFK 670 organised a special distribution of food, working clothes and soap to the miners, and on 17 June the Vichy government announced a general wage rise. But the toll of repression was heavy. Officially 414 people were arrested; historians give figures from more than 400 to about 600. On 13 June 273 detainees were taken by train to the citadel of Huy in Belgium. On 23 July 244 of them were sent from there to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin – one of the first deportation transports from France. According to French studies, more than half of the deportees did not survive the war.

The people of the strike

Many of the strike’s leaders died in the years that followed. Michel Brûlé, on whose head the Germans had put a price, went into hiding, was eventually caught and was shot on 14 April 1942 at the fort of Wambrechies near Lille. Émilienne Mopty continued her work in the armed underground; arrested in the autumn of 1942, tortured and sentenced to death by a German military court in Arras, she was beheaded on 18 January 1943 in Cologne. In the moats of the citadel of Arras the Germans shot some 270 people in 1941–1944, many of them miners. Auguste Lecœur survived the war and became one of the party’s most important figures; in 1942–1944 he ran its underground organisation.

Patriotic or social?

The role of the communists is beyond dispute – it was their activists who prepared, spread and led the strike. The dispute concerns its character. After the war the French Communist Party presented it as the “patriotic strike of the hundred thousand miners” and as proof that it had resisted the occupiers long before 22 June 1941. Its opponents replied that until the attack on the Soviet Union the party had kept to a line of neutrality. Historians, among them Étienne Dejonghe, see a more complex picture. The strike began as a dispute over pay and food supplies, and in May and June the party’s central publications stressed that the miners were demanding “better supplies, higher wages and security” and nothing more, and that their salvation would not come from “the victory of one imperialism over another”. The local activists in Pas-de-Calais, however, gave it an anti-German tone from the start, and its patriotic dimension grew as German soldiers confronted the strikers. In mid-May 1941 the party leadership called for the creation of a National Front for the independence of France, which showed the first shifts in its line even before the attack on the USSR. Lecœur himself later claimed that, had the German–Soviet war not broken out, the party might have denounced him as a provocateur.

Place in the war

The strike of May and June 1941 was the first mass, collective protest against the conditions of occupation in France, at a time when the Resistance still consisted of a handful of small groups. It showed the occupiers that the coalfield, on which the energy supply of northern France and part of the German war economy depended, could not be held by coercion alone; from then on the Germans combined repression with extra allocations for the miners. A few months later, on 4 October 1941, Vichy proclaimed the Labour Charter, which banned strikes and lockouts.

After 22 June 1941, when the communists turned to armed struggle, the coalfield became one of its main centres. According to Abwehr statistics, the number of acts of sabotage in the region jumped from a few a month in May and June to 27 in July, and in 1942–1943 Nord-Pas-de-Calais was among the regions with the highest number of attacks and acts of sabotage in occupied France. Coal output per miner fell throughout the occupation. The Germans responded by shooting hostages and with further deportations. After the liberation in September 1944 the miners demanded that the directors and engineers who in 1941 had handed lists of strikers to the occupiers be called to account, and in 1946 the mines were nationalised.