ROUBAIX, FRANCE.- Archives Nationales du Monde du Travail present Mines and Miners Between Reality and Imagination - Two centuries of private and public archives from the Ancien R�gime to Charbonnages de France, on view through July 27, 2007.

Coal has marked various centuries of industrial and commercial history, in particular the 19th and 20th centuries. This exhibition presents for the first time documents from 1773 to 1998. They all come exclusively from the funds of the Archives nationales du monde du travail kept in Roubaix, and refer to all the coal basins in France.

Coal symbolises all at once danger and fear, development and social progress. The mine is the embodiment of the population movement from the countryside to the town, then from abroad to France, with the Company bosses going there to fetch the workforce needed to develop the sites. It calls to mind dramas - natural or economic catastrophes - in which man fills the main role in death at work and in the fights and strikes, from the miner's survival to the survival of the mines. We are also presented with the technical and scientific capacities put to work to exploit a resource that was indispensable for a long time. The mine mobilized the political and social world for over two centuries: Jaur�s and the miners from Carmaux, Maurice Thorez and the battle of production, Mitterrand and the miners from Li�vin... It also mobilised the arts; in the 1960s for example, when Marguerite Duras went to read literary texts - that were not hers - to the mine rs of the North-Pas-de-Calais region and spoke with them of literature.