Lorraine mines
The Lorraine mines ( French Houillères de Lorraine ) are in the region of Lorraine-Saar-Nahe Basin is settled mines . Although the existence of hard coal has been known since the 16th century , it was only since the beginning of the 19th century that the raw material was systematically dug.
The Lorraine coal basin is located in the north of the Moselle department and covers an area of 49,000 hectares . It can be roughly delimited by the triangle Faulquemont - Villing - Stiring-Wendel and includes around 70 municipalities. Mine shafts were built in more than 58 places between 1818 and 1987 . Coal mining in Lorraine ended in 2004. Since then, there has been no hard coal production anywhere in France.
history
The history of mining in Lorraine is closely related to mining in the Saarland , because the deposits merge underground and are only politically separated by the state border. Industrial development was accelerated when, with the Second Peace of Paris in 1815 , France had lost what is now the Saarland with the coal fields it had already developed itself and now had to look for other sources of coal. The close relationship is not only determined by the common history of origins and spatial proximity, but also by the fact that the national border has shifted several times over the course of time, the management of the pits and the legislation was sometimes German and sometimes French.
In 1818 the first mine was sunk in Schœneck in the canton of Stiring-Wendel . The license required for this was granted on September 22nd of that year. You could already reach the coal corridor at 80 and 120 meters. But as early as 1835 the work was stopped because there were repeatedly uncontrollable floods. In 1840 the investors withdrew. From the mid-1840s new attempts were made, which were initially unsuccessful. In 1846 Charles Wendel from the industrial family de Wendel , the Parisian banker Georges Tom Hainguerlot and Baron von Hausen acquired a concession and founded a company in 1850 under the name Compagnie de l'Est and, from 1851, Compagnie nouvelle des Houillères de Stiring .
By 1863, nine further concessions with a total area of 19,000 hectares had been awarded, practically the entire available mining area. All concessionaires were corporations so that further capital could flow into the company through the corporate form.
The mining industry received new impetus from the connection of the railway from Metz , which created significantly improved sales conditions, and from the construction of a steelworks in Stiring.
Only in the four fields of Hochwald , Falck , Spittel and Karlingen did coal mining then begin, but was hampered by inadequacies in mining technology. In addition to the difficulties of breaking through the massive surface layer of red sandstone and shell limestone , water ingresses repeatedly occurred. The first coal mine was in Petite-Rosselle , and from 1860 Maximilian Pougnet et Cie. in Karlingen , which was renamed Compagnie de la Moselle from 1868 . Number three was the Société houillère de St. Avold et l'Hôpital . Until the annexation of Lorraine to the German Empire after the lost Franco-German War , the structures and ownership remained unchanged.
In 1872 the Saar- und Mosel-Bergwerks-Gesellschaft ( French Société des mines de Sarre et Moselle ) was founded with its seat in Metz, most of the investors came from Brussels , which combined most of the concession fields and added an additional field. The area was now over 15,000 hectares. The French shareholders of the old company had withdrawn from the company after the annexation and left the fortunes to the new investors. The new owners also included Société Générale and Banque Belge du Commerce et de l'Industrie . It was not until 1883 that a small surplus was generated, but this was offset by deferred interest on arrears from previous years.
Many shareholders parted willingly with their shares in 1899 when Dresdner Bank submitted an offer to buy on behalf of Hugo Stinnes , August Thyssen and Graf Douglas . Success came with the new owners: the entrepreneurs with experience in mining stabilized the exploration of the Saar and Moselle mining company. By 1913, a year before the First World War , the output rose to 3.8 million t . After returning to France, the facilities were confiscated and transferred to French companies.
During the occupation from 1940, the coal mines were again managed by German personnel. After the Second World War , as part of the reparation payments and the special status of the Saarland as a French protectorate, coal mining with the two mines Merlebach-Nord and Saint-Charles was extended to Saarland's "national territory". The transport from the Merlebach-Nord mine near the French border was carried out by a newly built railway line of the HBL mine railway (Houillères du Bassin de Lorraine, nationalized on June 28, 1946), which also took the French miners to the Merlebach- mine station on the route. North promoted.
The mining areas where exploitation has ceased cause numerous problems. The water penetrates the mines and causes subsidence like in the Auboué in Meurthe-et-Moselle, part of the iron ore district of Lorraine, on October 14, 1996. In 2006 a mining museum was opened in Petite-Rosselle .
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c Ralf Banken: The industrialization of the Saar region 1815-1914: take-off phase and high industrialization 1850-1914 . Franz Steiner Verlag , Stuttgart 2000, ISBN 978-3-515-07828-3 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
- ↑ Freyming-Merlebach, Le center du bassin houiller Lorrain. Retrieved May 12, 2015 .
- ↑ The tunnel database. Germany's industrial, connecting, mine and light rail tunnels (selection). In: traffic relics. Retrieved August 14, 2012 .
- ^ Dans le cour brisé de la Lorraine ( Memento of March 2, 2005 in the Internet Archive )