A disaster begins--a blast at at a coal seam face in the French Courrières mine in 1906.
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Most people known that by its very nature mining, particularly underground coal mining was and remains the most dangerous industrial
occupation. Pit collapses have been documented from the earliest post-Neolithic when the discovery of the rock that burns made coal a valuable
commodity for the hearth. By the late 19th Century the Industrial
Revolution had created an insatiable
demand for the stuff not only for home
heating, but to fuel the whirling
wheels of heavy industry, stoke
the huge and superheated furnaces necessary to create steel, run the vast networks
of railroads, and power the merchant fleets and Navies of world girdling empires.
As the skies above the great cities
of the world became begrimed with
belching soot, millions of men, children, and even women were needed to dig
mines that grew ever deeper, vaster,
and more complex. The work was brutally physical, the hours long and often included long, unpaid descents from the surface to the coal face which could take an hour or more.
Relatively small numbers of experienced and skilled miners from old pits in places like Wales and Italy were in
demand around the world but could not provide near enough bodies. Workers were recruited everywhere from the displaced peasantry, small farmers, and agricultural laborers. In exigency
even the lowest level of the urban poor whose health and strength were
generally bad and who were distrusted as semi-feral criminals and insurrectionary
radicals had to be recruited.
In Europe competition was great enough that wages in the collieries were well above those paid in most industries to attract men to work that
very often meant violent death or permanently disabling injury. In the U.S.
where mines were located mostly in isolated rural areas mine owners clawed back any extra pay with the
system of company towns, stores, and pay in script. Native born white miners
were pitted against immigrants recruited Europe and Blacks lured from the semi-slavery of share cropping.
Mine owners everywhere were determined to maximize profits not only by keeping
wages as low as possible, but by
ignoring or skirting safe practices.
Mine galleries were often insufficiently
timbered, ventilation inadequate, and evacuation
routes unbuilt or obstructed. Miners were not issued at company
expense new and safer helmet lamps as they came on the market, but were required to buy their own leading many to continued to use dangerous open flame lamps. The predictable
outcome was a depressing parade of
mine disasters around the world that killed scores or hundred and left communities ghost towns of widows and orphans. These disasters naturally outraged workers and led to
the formation of unions and a condition of semi-permanent and open class war in many
coal mining regions.
But on March 6, 1906 the Courrières Mine Disaster in northern France which killed at least 1,099 miners including many children dwarfed all
the rest. By contrast the deadliest mine disaster in U.S. history,
which is also the worst industrial
accident of any kind, which occurred later the same year on December 3 at
the Monongah Mine in West Virginia killed an estimated
367. The French tragedy remained the worst in the world until
April 26, 1942 when 1,549 miners died at the Benxihu Colliery accident in China.
The vast mine was operated by Compagnie des mines de houille de
Courrières, founded in 1852 between the villages of Méricourt, Sallaumines, Billy-Montigny, and Noyelles-sous-Lens 1 mile to the east
of Lens, in the Pas-de-Calais département 140 miles north of Paris. Each of those villages lost hundreds of dead
in the explosion.
The mine was considered one of the most modern in Europe, and certainly one of
the largest. It was accessed
by pitheads being interconnected by
underground galleries on many levels
totally more than 70 miles of tunnels. Although the multiple access points and galleries were thought to expedite evacuation in case of a
disaster, they helped spread the blast
and fire from an initial explosion deep in the bowels of the
mine, blowing up or damaging several pit heads and
spreading deadly coal dust and gas
far and wide.
Confusion and chaos as frantic rescue operations begin. |
At 6:30 in the morning of March 10 a
large explosion rocked the
mine. Moments later the elevator cage at Shaft 3 was blown high into
the air destroying pit head.
Wide-spread damage was done also at Shaft
4. When the elevator at Shaft 2 was raised to the surface it contained only dead and dying.
The exact cause of the explosion has never been determined. Some suspect it was ignited by badly executed face blasting. Blasting on
the previous shift at the suspected origination point of the
accident had been insufficient to
satisfactorily widen a gallery. Some
believe that foremen might have ordered excessive charges to speed up the work. Many, however, believe it was likely set off by an open flame from a miner’s cap in gallery filled with coal dust from
previous blasting. Most miners still
wore the open flame caps because they could
not afford Davy safety lamps and
the company refused to provide them.
General
Inspector of Mines Delafond summed up
the ultimate mystery of a cause in his official report thusly:
The primary cause of the catastrophe could not be determined
with absolute certainty. This is what generally happens in catastrophes where
all the witnesses to the accident are gone.
Rescue
efforts began almost immediately but were hampered by a lack of man power, disorganization,
and damage at the shaft heads. Few of
the 600 survivors of the explosion
who began to emerge from the pits on
the first day were fit to lend a hand or even advise rescuers where to find isolated pockets of survivors. Many were seriously injured either burned
in the explosion and fire or overcome
by coal dust and gas. There were many broken bones. The physically
unscathed were in a state of deep
shock.
Miners from other shifts and neighboring
villages pitched in along with townspeople,
company officials, and local
peasants. But both heavy equipment and expertise
were needed. Both were in short supply. France at the time had barely any trained mine rescue teams, lagging behind the British,
Germans, and Italians in this regard. It
took two days for engineers from Paris and German rescue teams to reach the scene.
By that time anger was growing in the mining districts and the company was blamed for slowing rescue efforts to
prevent damage to the galleries and fires
at the coal faces that could burn
for a long time and consume valuable
seams. This may or may not have been unfair.
There is some evidence on both
sides. The company claimed that
rescuers were hampered by the extent of the damage and the complexity of the vast tunnel system.
Retrieving the bodies took days. |
But there is no question that progress
was painfully slow. By April 1, three
full weeks after the explosion, only 194
bodies had been brought to the surface. Small pockets of survivors were
located. Most famously, on March 30 thirteen were rescued who had survived on the lunches of the dead and by killing
and eating a mine pony. Their stories were widely reported in the press
and they became such public heroes
that the government eventually awarded
the two eldest, men in their 50’s
the Légion d’honneur, the
other eleven including three younger than 18, the Médaille d’or du courage.
On April 4, one final man was
pulled out alive.
The event received unprecedented press coverage. The isolation of many mines from urban areas had prevented earlier accidents from receiving much coverage. In an expression and publication. Prior to that various governments, royal, republican, and imperial had
all severely censored news of industrial
calamities and the inevitable labor unrest that followed in their wake. But
there were five highly competitive
newspapers in Lille, the regional capital less than 25 miles
away. Their coverage was picked up in Paris and national publications rushed correspondents
to the scene. Front pages were dominated for days with lurid illustrations created from sketches drawn by artists at
the scene. Photographs in the form of widely
circulated post cards were available within days.
The first funerals of victims were held on March 14 during an unseasonable snow storm. 15,000 mourners turned out for the funeral march. |
The first strikes in protesting the lack of mine safety precautions and
the companies perceived lack-luster rescue efforts began on March 14, the day
after 15,000 people turned out for the first
funerals during an unseasonable snow storm. Soon 61,000 miners across the district and
spreading to other areas of France were out on strike. The strikes intensified, became occasionally
violent, and persisted for weeks.
On March 14, the very day the
strikes began, by happenstance a new
government led by the Radical-Socialist Party under Ferdinand Sarrien came to power. Veteran
journalist and Radical politician Georges Clemenceau—the same man remembered by Americans as one of the Big Four at the Versailles Peace Conference after World War I and President
Woodrow Wilson’s nemesis—became Minister of the Interior. Clemenceau was a Radical only in the classic French sense—he belonged to a party rooted in anticlericalism. Despite the support of the left wing of
his party for the labor movement Clemenceau was a reactionary in
regard to unions.
He visited
the area and made a show of trying to intercede in negotiations,
making promises to union officials that they knew he had no intention
of following through on. Despite his
pleas, the strike held firm.
Then, ironically on May 1—May Day—Clemenceau intervened
by flooding the region with troops who brutally suppressed the strike
and arrested over 700 union leaders.
Clemenceau shattered the government over his suppression. |
The experience shook the Left.
The labor movement began a total
reassessment of its position. That
reassessment came to a head at the 9th Congress of the Confédération générale du travail
(CGT) the largest French trade-union, in October 1906. The
Charter of Amiens, passed
overwhelmingly by the delegates in
attendance, mandated the
independence of labor unions from all political
parties. This vindicated the long-held views of French anarcho-syndicalists who became the dominant force in the CGT.
The Charter explicitly laid out
dual aims for the movement—the “defense
of immediate and daily demands” on one hand and the “struggle for a global transformation of society in complete independence from political parties and
from the state.”
In this way the system of French
Syndicalism, which persists to this day,
broke with the German model in which
the unions were expressions of the Social Democratic Party and the British model of trade unionism largely built on craft lines with limited
aspirations for sweeping social
change. Eventually the British
unions hoped to make the Labor Party their creation.
The development of French
Syndicalism paralleled and mirrored the development of radical industrial unionism in the
United States, particularly the Industrial
Workers of the World (IWW) and would provide intellectual and ideological
fodder for Wobbly writers and
organizers. So-called American Syndicalism was not a child of the French model, but a cousin whose resemblance lay in similar experience and condition. But each would develop their own forms, and especially structures.
Syndicalism remains at the root of the French labor movement to this day, even with the development competing labor federations which
emerged after World War II. All
claim heritage from and swear allegiance to the Charter of Amiens.
And that, more so than a surprisingly modest marker erected to the victims’ memory at Avion, is the real monument to all of those dead.
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