Polish immigration to the Nord-Pas-de-Calais coalfield took place before and especially after the First World War. It took place mainly in the second half of the 1920s, when the mines, drowned in October and November 1918 by the Germans at the end of the war, were once again usable. Half of the Polish immigrants had initially entered Germany as Westphalian miners.
Several thousand were sent home in the five years following the 1929 crash, sometimes for strike action. A number of them were killed in the International Brigades, during the Spanish Civil War and then in the Resistance, particularly during the Patriotic Strike of the 100,000 miners of Nord-Pas-de-Calais in May–June 1941.
Between 1945 and 1949, when the battle for coal was being waged to combat electricity shortages in several countries, 62,000 Poles from France; returned to Poland via a "reemigracja", first spontaneous and then organized, including 5,000 miners from Nord-Pas-de-Calais, many of them communists who wanted to rebuild their country, despite or because of the arrival in power of the socialist government set up by the Soviet Union in September 1944.
Before the First World War
The consequences of the Courrières mine disaster
Between 1900 and 1913, the mines of Lorraine had been under German control since 1871, when the region was annexed by the German Empire, and only a third of French miners were still housed in the corons since the workforce came from Belgium for the Nord département, and from neighboring villages for the Pas-de-Calais.
French coal production rose by a quarter in the first decade of the century, from 33 to 40 million tonnes. Productivity was still low: only one tonne per man per day in 1913, but the expansion of electric power created strong demand, which companies were anxious to make profitable. In 1906, the terrible Courrières mine disaster killed nearly 1,100 miners working for Compagnie de Courrières, France's leading mining company. The company first recruited 900 miners in Kabylia, followed by the first Poles in 1909 and 1910.
Learning to jackhammer in Germany The Poles who first arrived at the Compagnie de Courrières were called Westphalian miners because they had come from the German Ruhr, where they had learned to handle the jackhammer. Among them was union leader Thomas Olszanski. On the recommendation of Polish Prince Witold Czartoryski, a shareholder in the Compagnie des Mines d'Anzin, the company also recruited 620 Westphalians. Satisfactory Westphalian miners were also recruited in Barlin, Lallaing, Guesnain, and Wallers by the Compagnie de Nœux and the Compagnie d'Aniche. At the beginning of 1913, Polish families settled in Méricourt, in the old housing estates known as "Méricourt-Coron", according to the testimony of a Polish miner of the time.
The First World War In January 1915, at the start of the First World War, the companies decided to disperse some of the "Westphalians" to the Massif Central, to Cransac in Aveyron, Roche-la-Molière and Saint-Etienne in the Loire, and Alais in the Gard. In a context of heightened patriotism, the aim was to guard against the mistrust aroused by their long stay in Germany, where many of them had even been born. Around 80 of them arrived in Cransac, Aveyron, including Thomas Olszanski from Compagnie de Courrières.
After the First World War
Throughout France, around two-thirds of the Poles recruited as farm workers went into industry as soon as they could, as the demand for labor was very high due to the accelerating growth of the French economy from 1924 onwards.
Silesian uprising and skilled miners Under pressure from the Allies, Germany gave Westphalians of Polish origin the option of Polish nationality from 1919, enabling them to return to Poland. The trend in the 19th century was to "Germanize", although this was mitigated by the German Empire from 1887 onwards. The Westphalians who returned, whose numbers are not well known, discovered very high unemployment and the crushing of the Silesian uprising by 21,000 Reichswehr soldiers in the summer of 1919. Faced with the beginnings of the Polish-Soviet War, they often preferred to leave again, but for France, which had set out to seduce them, via Myslowice and Toul, where Paris had set up an immigration office, rather than return to Germany, where the social situation was very tense, leading in March 1920 to the Ruhr uprising.
By the end of 1919, the French Ministry of Labor had opened a "Mission française de la Main d'œuvre" in Warsaw, which organized the first convoy from Poland to France on 14 December 1919. It soon had to move to Czestochowa, against the backdrop of the Polish-Soviet War, which began on 14 February 1920, with a first conflict near Biaroza, in Belarus. Employers tried to avoid hiring workers from the Dąbrowa Górnicza mining basin in the Silesian Voivodeship, where numerous strikes had accompanied the attempted Russian Revolution of 1905. However, the labor shortage meant that many workers were hired from 1923 onwards, especially as they had professional credentials. Competence criteria were introduced. At Myslowice, on the outskirts of Katowice in Silesia, applicants were only accepted if they had two years of experience in the underground, including eight months in coal mining.
Spartakist uprisings in Germany French mining companies increased their efforts to recruit in Germany, a country defeated by the world war, where mining activity was in any case made difficult by the confrontations in the Ruhr, which caused 2,400 deaths, in addition to 35,600 political assassinations. In response, from 6 April, France temporarily occupied Frankfurt and Darmstadt. In March 1921, the Allies decided to occupy Duisburg and Düsseldorf. In March 1922, the Coal Committee opened an office in Duisburg, in the Ruhr, and it was in the summer of 1922 that the largest number of Polish miners arrived in Pas-de-Calais.
A settlement shaped by wartime destruction Bruay-en-Artois became known as the "Polish capital" or "Czestochowa" and Poles became the majority, sometimes accounting for as much as 70% of the population in the western part of the coalfield: Sallaumines, Aniche, Ostricourt, Libercourt.
The Compagnie de Bruay was the only one immediately operational. It had mined 4.5 million tonnes in 1917, compared with two million in 1914, and was once again faced with a severe productivity constraint. In September 1920, it succeeded in recruiting Westphalian miners accustomed to using jackhammers in the German Ruhr: initially, 80 came to Marles-les-Mines, and 14 to Bruay, the companies hoping that they would then quickly convince their compatriots in the Ruhr to follow them.
After the Franco-Polish governmental conference of 5 June 1920, the Compagnie de Bruay built 1,600 houses for them in three years. They came with their families demanding high-quality housing and set up some forty associations in Bruay. In Marles-les-Mines, 3,000 houses were built by the Compagnie des Mines de Marles to accommodate the "Westphalians". In neighboring Lapugnoy, other Poles arrived from Poland, without family or furniture, by boat and then by train, via the Chocques station, this time to be installed in barracks. Some left because of the poor reception conditions, others after a one-year trial period.
Arrivals mainly in the mid-1920s Around 800 Poles arrived in France in the first convoy on 14 December 1919. This was followed by 2,500 families in May 1922. But it was not until 1923–1924 that the first arrivals took place, as the reconstruction of the mines after the 1914–1918 war took five years.
By 1931, some 30,000 Polish families, or 200,000 people were living in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais coalfield. In the Nord département, 60.4% of Polish immigrants worked in the mines, and 90% in the Pas-de-Calais.
The mid-1920s also saw the widespread use of heavy mining machinery (jackhammers, then cutters), with no attempt to neutralize the dust, which led to a higher incidence of silicosis. Overall, French companies found it difficult to recruit in Poland, even though in March 1922 Poles were rounded up in Poznań and sent to Sallaumines, where they made up 40% of the population. +Years (North)Total number of French minersTotal number of Polish minersBasin production (millions of tonnes)December 192164 000 (83%)3 600 (5%)10,9December 192367 000 (61%)32 000 (29%)15,2December 192678 000 (60%)42 000 (32%)24 In all, between 100,000 and 130,000 Westphalian miners arrived in France, including their families.
Difficulties and social integration The number of Westphalian miners of Polish origin increased a hundredfold in the decade following the First World War, but they were not the only Poles to settle in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais coalfield. Employers also recruited them directly from Poland, where some of the "Westphalians" had returned in 1919, but were unable to find work immediately because the Polish mines were in poor condition. There were also young, inexperienced miners from Poznań, whom some Frenchmen sometimes blamed for lowering shift yields.
At the turn of the century, those who came from Germany were envied for the jobs they had obtained thanks to their qualifications. In Sallaumines, between 1921 and 1926, around 30 Poles improvised as bakers, butchers, and grocers, rising to 36 by 1931, and 46 by 1936. In Bruay-en-Artois, one in three Polish miners' wives ran a store or a drinking establishment. The companies kept a watchful eye on them to "monitor their political development and union activity", as many had been union members in the German Ruhr region, but they were unable to prevent it: despite jealousies, integration was achieved through political parties and unions.
Redundancies during the Great Depression of the 1930s The crash of 1929 triggered the economic crisis of the 1930s. Initially, between 1930 and 1933, Polish miners were laid off for 5 to 10 days a month, depending on the coalfield.
From 1934 onwards, the dismissals accelerated. They were used to intimidate. Often, an expulsion bill was discovered by the miner on the way up, "the famous bill that scared everyone", remembers Jean Wroblewsky, a former miner and former mayor of Marles-les-Mines. In 1934 alone, the coal companies chartered 17 special trains to take their Polish workers back to the Belgian border. Between 1933 and 1936, some 20,000 Poles, either from Poznań or via the Ruhr, had to leave France, under very brutal conditions: only 48 hours to get ready, with a maximum of 30 kilos of luggage. Many had to give up everything in their homes and keep only the essentials.
The Gierek-Olszanski affair In 1932, union leader Thomas Olszanski, a naturalized French citizen since 1922, who contributed to one of the two Polish-language union newspapers, Robotnik Polski ("The Polish Worker"), was stripped of his French citizenship, in the wake of his commitment to and stance in defense of the working class. A support committee for Thomas Olszanski was formed by André Malraux, Paul Nizan, Henri Barbusse, Eugène Dabit, Paul Signac, Jean and André Lurçat and Georges Friedmann.
Having exhausted his appeals, he was expelled from France in 1934, at the same time as another Polish trade unionist, Edward Gierek, who would later become Prime Minister of Poland. After returning to Belgium in 1937, Gierek returned to Poland in 1948, where he became the "strong man" of Silesia and then number one of the Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR), after the Baltic events of December 1970, initiating links with the USA and West Germany, before being ousted by General Jaruzelski's 1981 Martial law instituting a state of siege to put an end to the growing role of the Solidarność trade union. His visit to France from 2 to 6 October 1972 was hailed by the press, even though he was still banned from the country, with an interpreter in miner's clothing and the honors of French President Georges Pompidou.