White Letters on Spoil Tips: The City of Saint-Étienne between its Mining Past and Political Present

TRANSLATED FROM FRENCH BY LÉOPOLD LAMBERT

The city of Saint-Étienne represents something particular in the French leftist imaginary: a city of intense working-class, miners struggles, made visible by a once-glorious football team. Today, it remains an important place of anticapitalist and antifascist organizing. We commissioned this text to Thomas Goumarre following his end-of-studies art research on the form and contents of the political messages displayed throughout the years by various organizations on top of two of the city’s crassiers (spoil tips).

You have come from so far away, you who have traveled many roads, and here you are, wearing a skirt, shirt, scarf, handkerchief, and gray apron.

Widowed by a miner who died of silicosis, to feed your child, every day you had to sort, sort, sort for hours on end, with your small, delicate hands, piles of dirty little black stones used to heat the cottages of the inhabitants.

Your pearl-gray eyes have seen much sorrow, but they continue to shine like little diamonds on your blackened face, and your courage has always brought a smile to your lips.

Woman of a distant past, through your difficult work, when the wagons rose from the depths of the mine, you showed us that happiness lies in the heart and that the greatest riches cannot be found elsewhere. So today, I dedicate this poem to you, so that Saint-Étienne will never forget that the spoil tips that dominate the city were born of your work and that of your comrades. From now on, a heart of coal beats in this city!

Christine Romezin, La Clapeuse