Polish immigration to the Nord-Pas-de-Calais coalfield

Productivity was still low: only one tonne per man per day in 1913,[2] but the expansion of electric power created strong demand, which companies were anxious to make profitable.

On the recommendation of Polish Prince Witold Czartoryski, a shareholder in the Compagnie des Mines d'Anzin, the company also recruited 620 Westphalians.

[4] 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.

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.

[7] 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.

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.

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.

In March 1922, the Coal Committee opened an office in Duisburg,[7] in the Ruhr, and it was in the summer of 1922 that the largest number of Polish miners arrived in Pas-de-Calais.

[8] 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.

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.

[7] 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.

After returning to Belgium in 1937,[15] 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[16] and West Germany,[17] 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,[18][17] even though he was still banned from the country, with an interpreter in miner's clothing and the honors of French President Georges Pompidou.

[19] These were the foreign workers' groups of the Vichy regime, created by the law of 27 September 1940, which set up internment camps and succeeded the foreign workers' companies, tasked with providing cheap labor: heavy work, mining, major works, agriculture, and forestry but which also provided semi-legal material aid to Polish soldiers and civilian refugees.

[19][20] When the German occupation of the Nord-Pas-de-Calais coalfield began in July 1940, Polish political, cultural, and religious associations had to suspend their activities.

Most of the arrests of Polish resistance fighters were carried out by officers of the Renseignements Généraux of the French police, who had spied on their population in the pre-war years.

In the Mauthausen concentration camp, where they were most numerous, their compatriots did not support them because they were associated with the Popular Front, suspected of having contributed to Poland's situation and the German-Soviet pact of 1939.

[23] From 1942 onwards, the German occupying forces deported several thousand Ukrainian civilians and Soviet prisoners of war to the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region to boost coal production, which had continued to decline.

[25] On 15 March 1942, to counter the Polish resistance, German propaganda created an association in Douai, the "Communauté culturelle des Allemands d'origine du Nord de la France" headed by a man called "Muller", of the Kreiskommandantur, which included a majority of miners of Polish origin, notably Westphalian miners who had worked in the Ruhr and those from Poznań and Silesia, which were German before Poland gained its independence in November 1918.

[27] In the summer of 1943, the Polish authorities in London, in liaison with the British secret services, decided to launch the main operations under the code names of Monica (or Monika), Monique-bas (in the free zone), and Monique-haut (in the occupied zone), and then to develop a more general intelligence plan: this was Operation Bardsea, entrusted to the Polish Ministry of National Defense (MON).

Despite this, on 29 May 1944, Daniel Zdrojewski and Jacques Chaban-Delmas agreed to place the fighting units under the tactical command of the Forces françaises de l'intérieur.

[28] In June 1944, Polish resistance fighters in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais coalfield were arrested in large numbers, following in the footsteps of those in southern France and Paris.

[5] In the summer of 1944, when the Allied forces were no longer very far from the regional mining basin8, Polish miners took part in the liberation battles in very large numbers, according to reports in the archives8.

[10] Clashes also took place in La clarence, Barlin, Hersin-Coupigny, Labourse, Courrières, Hénin-Liétard, and Lens, on the Lens-Béthune road, in Armentières, Calonne-Ricouart, and Hulluch.

[1] Most went to the Polish mining basin of Silesia, where the coal was produced that Poland needed to rebuild itself, as it suffered from energy and electricity shortages, like the rest of Europe.

[29] The "reemigracja" was organized by the communist authorities in Warsaw, and gave rise to a political conflict between supporters of Poland's new government and Polish anti-communist activists in France.

Numerous Rosary associations came into being, as did the Sainte-Barbe and Saint-Adalbert societies, the Sokół, a Polish youth movement founded in 1867, and the Strezelec (sports group).

In Pas-de-Calais, the first issue of the Polish-language underground newspaper Nasz Głos ("Our Voice") was published in 1940 by Polish PCF groups, edited by Communist Józef Spira.

However, in the early 1930s, the CFTC, a new religiously oriented French trade union founded in 1919 in the Paris region, had around fifteen Polish sections in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais mining basin.