On the move in the Pas-de-Calais, Wednesday, the Head of State, which maintains the suspense on his candidacy for the presidential election, has made the man of the Union and reconciliation, recalling The Mitterrandian slogan of “France unie”.
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Nearly half a century after the tragedy, the inhabitants of Liévin (Pas-de-Calais) always do not know what provoked the Grissou. But the wound, she, is intact. A few steps, which was the Fosse 3, where perished forty-two minors on December 27, 1974, the time seems to have stopped. Literally. The clock of the bell tower which adjoins the horse, vestige of the old mine, always marks 6:16, the time of the drama.
Since? Nothing. The abandonment of public authorities, sourness, oblivion and anger. “The public authorities, we have not seen them for decades. There has been a huge abandonment,” says André Verez, president of the association of the families of victims.
On Wednesday, February 2, Emmanuel Macron wanted to pay tribute to this “glorious and cruel” land, proving that the state had not given up its homework. After lodging a sheaf on the stele dedicated to the miners carried away in this morning of December, he spoke with the women, the mothers and children of these “black mouths”, memoirs of a time when the mining basin of the Nord-Pas-de-Calais still represented the country’s industrial heart. “We do not ask charity, what we want is to live normally”, enjoins a minor woman. “The minors gave. It’s time to make them a little”, abounded a son of disappeared, moved.
Addressing them and the entire mining basin region, the head of state has multiplied the promises to give the region a second youth: beyond the 100 million euros in the region dedicated to Urban renovation, the state will commit to 100 million, and even beyond if necessary. And the President of the Republic to caress the dream of making Hauts-de-France “The European Valley of the electric battery”, after the announcement of the establishment of a new battery plant in Dunkirk (North).
A region seduced by the extremes
To evoke this radiant future, Emmanuel Macron should first plunge into this dark past. At less than seventy days of the first round of the presidential election, scheduled on April 10, he needed a place that was the symbol of the industrial revolution and the great workers’ struggles of the XX e century .
He was left, for that, to put himself in the footsteps of François Mitterrand, last head of state reached a tribute, in 1994, to the missing minors of Liévin. It is here that the man on the left had concluded the end of his second septennat, calling to “remember” past struggles. “Remembering their fight, it is also the memory of all that was necessary to serve human dignity, for the recognition of social rights,” explained the craftsman of the union of the left, already weakened by the disease .
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