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

Saint-Étienne, a city once blackened by coal, still bears the negative image of its industrial past. It is often associated with poverty, deindustrialization, and a region perceived as being in decline, relegated to the margins of the Lyon metropolitan area. For over a century, the city developed at the pace of extractive industrial capitalism, growing like a mushroom town under the impetus of mining, metallurgy, armaments, and ribbon manufacturing. It was also built thanks to the labor of successive waves of migrants from Italy, Spain, the Maghreb, and Portugal.

Over forty years ago, underground coal mining ceased. The closure of the mines was accompanied by a policy of sweeping away the past, with the exception of the Couriot mine, which was preserved and converted into a mining museum, a place of remembrance (designed by the city of Saint-Étienne in concertation with some former mining engineers, and some former, mostly white, mine workers). This process was accompanied by a territorial rebranding imposed from above, aimed at transforming the city’s image into a “design capital” and a “creative city,” following a model of reconversion inspired by Bilbao, Manchester, and Detroit.

Crassiers (spoil tips) are among the few remaining industrial structures that the institution has not (yet) demolished, turned into museums, converted, or reclaimed. Unlike in northern France and French-speaking Belgium, where they are known as “terrils,” the term “crassiers” is used in Saint-Étienne to refer to these accumulations of mining waste. The word “crassier” comes from the metallurgical industry, where it referred to the piles of slag and waste produced by blast furnaces; it was then adopted in the Saint-Étienne basin to name these conical mounds resulting from coal mining. The poem that introduces this text was written by a clapeuse, i.e. a female mine worker. Stationed on the sorting platforms—called the “plâtre”—she separated the stones—the “clapes”—from the usable coal by hand. This was the last link in the chain before the waste was dumped on the crassier.

This text focuses on two crassiers that are now used as public display boards for political posters: the one in Couriot, facing the town center, and the one in Eparre, visible from the A72 motorway at the entrance to the town. My research brings together a collection of 24 images of messages that have been collected to form a chronological archive.

In March 2023, while I was a fifth-year student at the Beaux-Arts in Saint-Étienne, my classmates and I occupied our school to protest against the Macron government’s pension reforms, the closure of several art schools, and the patriarchal system that permeates the school’s art department. Since that internal struggle, my comrades and I have remained mobilized and regularly join particularly active militant organizations in Saint-Étienne: against police violence—in particular the murder of Nahel Merzouk in June 2023—against the genocide in Palestine, and against the rise of racism and the far right in power. It is in this context that, over the course of these struggles, I have paid closer attention to the messages written on the tops of the crassiers.

These are our beacons: at sunrise, white letters appear in contrast to the red background—the self-combusting earth of the crassier.

The starting point for my research is to consider these messages as inseparable from the crassiers on which they are written: not as advertising spots but rather as tactical supports for militant public display.

The twin crassiers of the Couriot mine are the most iconic crassiers. Located southeast of the city center, near the Clapier train station, they overlook Saint-Étienne. These two artificial hills, which are cone-shaped, reach a height of 150 meters and each measure between 250 and 300 meters in diameter. They were formed over a period of 23 years, from 1938 to 1961, corresponding to the extraction of coal from the Couriot mine shaft. The first was created in 1938, followed by a second in 1948. Today, Michon’s twin crassiers are still there, 63 years after mining ceased.

The twin crassiers are deeply ingrained in the landscape and identity of the city, embodying its industrial past, often stigmatized by the nickname “black city.” Neither photogenic nor “tourist-friendly,” these piles of mineral waste escape symbolic appropriation and remain (for the moment) outside Saint-Étienne’s strategy to promote its local brands. The crassiers are thus mostly reused in the representations of activist organizations and football fans: the Antifa committee and the Saint-Étienne’s football club (ASSE) ultra groups “Green Angel” and “Magic Fans,” each of which features the figure of the Saint-Étienne miner and the Couriot mine headframe with its two crassiers in their tifos.

At the tops of the crassiers, letters cut out of fabric or white tarpaulins are hung on the ground, held flat with tent pegs, stones, and rusty metal scraps, evidence of past activity. Some letters are drawn in chalk, directly covering the red earth of the crassier. These messages are precarious: they only last a few hours, a few days, rarely a few weeks. They are erased by opponents, by the police, or sometimes they are simply blown away by the wind. As you approach the summit, you can see the shreds of these messages thrown onto the side of the crassier, clinging to the bushes. Temporally, the appearance of the messages follows a logic of political events. The interval between two messages varies, but each one follows a pattern of repetition, using the same aesthetic principle: white letters on a red background.

The messages are displayed on the south-eastern slopes of the peaks, the hottest areas, where the ramps used to be that allowed the wagons (or “skips”) loaded with mining waste to climb to the top of the crassier and dump their load.

The surface temperature prevents vegetation from growing, thus freeing up large areas for display. The reddish color of the soil is evidence of the intensity of the self-combustion phenomena, with red shale rising up to the peaks.

This slope faces the city, providing a legible surface where messages stand out clearly, a contrast reinforced by the color of the soil. These formal, geological, and ecological configurations make the crassier a tactical space for public counter-billboard.

“Loi travail retrait” (Withdraw the labor law), “Antifa,” “1 toit 1 droit” (One roof, one right), “Mort au Fascisme” (Death to Fascism), “#Macron Ordure” (Macron Scum), “Free Palestine”: slogans must be short and punchy. In the limited space available at the summit, every letter counts. The aim is to convey a strong message in two or three words using as few letters as possible. Each of these messages is linked to a specific political event, whether international, national, regional, or local. Some of these messages pay tribute to people who have died and, through their public visibility, become political statements in themselves. Sometimes the message needs no words and is expressed simply through a flag. During the miners’ strike of 1948, a French flag was hung at the summit—probably the first public display on the crassier. During this strike, slogans such as “CRS = SS” (Antiriot police = Nazis) were painted on the walls of the Saint-Étienne mining basin and in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region. This denunciation of police violence through slogans continues today, surviving on the crassiers of Saint-Étienne.

The majority of these messages remain anonymous, unclaimed, and therefore not disseminated through official channels. Most of these images and messages are found in the digital public space of social media. Their dissemination often starts at the grassroots level and is sometimes picked up by organizations close to political movements. These messages may be affiliated with anarchist, communist, antifa, left-wing associations, and trade unions. One message stands out: on December 15, 2020, in response to the message “ACAB” on the crassier, unionized police officers attempted to respond by posting an opposing message. The police officers clearly distinguished themselves from others by their distinct approach to the aesthetic and political framework described above: a printed banner, a long text, and a staged presentation.

The crassiers are unintended counter-monuments. “Mountains of sweat,” their very presence bears witness to the memory of workers, historic union struggles, and now contemporary struggles. They are the most visible counter-monuments to past underground mining activity, retaining their aesthetic, symbolic, and political power.

As I was writing this text, a new message appeared on the Couriot crassier: “Free Gaza.” It appeared at sunrise on Friday, June 20, 2025, and remained visible until 1 p.m. before being removed by opponents. ■