YMHC #5: A study of sound and voice during coal miners’ strikes, Northern France, (1833-1884) – by A. Quièvre – Labour In Mining
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description: ELHN Working Group
date: 2022-05-05T12:41:23Z
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items: YMHC #5: A study of sound and voice during coal miners’ strikes, Northern France, (1833-1884) – by A. Quièvre

YMHC #5: A study of sound and voice during coal miners’ strikes, Northern France, (1833-1884) – by A. Quièvre
type: item
creator: LIM COORDINATORS
date: 2022-05-05T15:04:00Z
subject: Sources and Resources
subject: YMHC
subject: coal mining
subject: France
subject: Mining History
subject: mining sounds
subject: noise
subject: PhD
subject: sound history
description: The fifth issue of the series Young Mining Historians Corner is online! In this issue, Adrien Quièvre (PhD candidate, Univ. Lille, CNRS, UMR 8529 – IRHiS – Institut de Recherches historiques du Septentrion) presents his...
encoded: The fifth issue of the series Young Mining Historians Corner is online! In this issue, Adrien Quièvre (PhD candidate, Univ. Lille, CNRS, UMR 8529 – IRHiS – Institut de Recherches historiques du Septentrion) presents his doctoral research about sounds’ history in contemporary coalmining industry. Go to previous issues. *** by Adrien Quièvre (adrien.quievre@univ-lille.fr) What did the 19th-century strikes of the French coal miners sound like? What were the words, the songs or the sounds miners used to trigger and spread their strikes? Did this soundscape change during the century? These are the questions I try to answer in my PhD thesis. The starting point were the numerous books and articles in social history dedicated to the coal mines of the North of France in the 19th century. Works by Michelle Perrot, Bruno Mattéi, Diana Cooper-Richet, or Bernard Plessy and Louis Challet [1] They all depicted the strikes of miners as spontaneous, tumultuous, and violent revolts; as the miners were heard shouting and chanting in bands, for hours long and without any prior organization. The noise, the chants, the music were pictured as an impulse, driven by a collective anger, always improvised but still systematic. Coming from a background of musicology and sound studies, I was intrigued by the sonic and musical dimension of the strikes. Yet something appeared missing in all these descriptions. For instance, I could not understand why and how these sonic practices came to be. How hundreds of workers could get together spontaneously; sing and shout the same songs, the same slogans? What made such synchronicity of sounds and voices possible? Were they only noisy because they were angry? Or were they considered angry because they were making noise? And in this case, why were they shouting, and at whom? To find answers, I needed to study the strikes at the smallest possible scale – the scale of body, gestures, and voices. Hence my choice for a micro history perspective. In my thesis, …