Introduction

On February 4, 1970, in the Fouquières-lès-Lens coal mine in northern France, sixteen miners were killed in a gas explosion (“firedamp,” grisou in French).Footnote ¹ This was an accident like many others before it, yet with a relatively high number of fatalities. The public prosecutor concluded, as usual, that there was no case against the publicly owned mine. No investigation was to be carried out. The accident had been the work of fate, of bad luck.

Yet at the same time, the mine's head engineers secretly launched an internal safety review, to ascertain what had technically gone wrong and what could be improved for the future. This discrepancy—claiming no investigation was necessary, while carrying one out in a confidential fashion—was too much for some engineers linked to the Maoist movement, who publicly denounced it.

On February 16, Maoist activists, from movements such as the Gauche Prolétarienne (Proletarian Left) and Secours Rouge (Red Rescue), armed with Molotov cocktails launched an attack on the head offices of the state-owned coal mines in Hénin-Liétard. Arrests followed. The trial of seven men was set for the following December. To the leftist organizations involved, the contrast between the rush to prosecute the angry arsonists and the absence of any investigation concerning the mining accident was a blatant sign of a class justice system, rigged against the exploited masses.

The Maoists decided to take justice into their own hands. On December 12, 1970, the Gauche Prolétarienne organized a People's Tribunal in a large room of Lens City Hall, before an audience of five hundred. The jury was asked what, or who, was responsible for the death of the sixteen miners. Colleagues of the deceased, as well as sympathetic engineers and physicians, were called upon to testify.

The mining industry as a whole was on trial. During the eighteenth and especially nineteenth centuries, throughout Europe and North America, mining had become central, providing the raw material for the Industrial Revolution. In the early part of the twentieth century, mine accidents and explosions killed thousands of miners every year. In the United States, more than three in every thousand miners died on the job every year, more than twice the mortality rate in England, France, or Germany.Footnote ² On both continents, mining became the symbol for the exploitation of the economic systems as a whole.

The Popular Tribunal's proceedings were centered not just on accidental hazards, such as firedamp or collapse, but also on silicosis, a disease that was most closely identified with mining. As historian Paul-André Rosental writes: “Silicosis is an incurable lung disease caused by inhaled silica dust, affecting not only miners, but also workers in quarries, foundries, glass and porcelain factories, in construction and in public works. Though the disease is now disappearing from national memory, it was the twentieth century's most deadly occupational disease in France.”Footnote ³ Similarly, in the United States silicosis was known as a “king of occupational diseases” for it affected workers in such a wide variety of industries and so completely captured the exploitation that was manifested by death and disease on the job.Footnote ⁴

The People's Tribunal in Lens was followed by the media, in part because of the status of the man who was acting as prosecutor: none other than Jean-Paul Sartre, who had taken over leadership of the Gauche Prolétarienne during the year 1970 after the previous leaders had been arrested. Sartre put on trial, not only the management of the mine but also the whole system implemented in 1898 to give a pretense of fairness to the harm that was being inflicted: While workers and their families received only meagre financial compensation for occupational injuries, diseases or fatalities, those profiting from the system—owners and managers—were not held accountable.Footnote ⁵ This administrative-managerial complex was the entity in France that the Maoist activists called out as the Boss-State (L'Etat-Patron). Debates turned in particular around the notion of a “percentage of silicosis,” which was a bureaucratic category rather than a medical one. The “percentage of silicosis” determined the amount of compensation miners would receive. For example, it was common practice that some miners were “recognized” as having “0% silicosis,” an oxymoron that meant that though sick, they were not considered sick enough (yet) to claim any compensation.

Sartre's analysis was equally applicable to the system that was evolving in the United States. Beginning in the 1930s, states integrated silicosis and other dust diseases of long latency like asbestosis into their workers compensation schemes formally eliminating the need to assign blame or responsibility to negligent owners. Further, the compensation decisions were moved out of courtrooms and into the province of experts, primarily doctors, who, like in France, evaluated the degree of disability caused by the work. In the United States, the designation of “primary” silicosis served the same function as did “0 percent” silicosis in France. The workers’ compensation system defined primary silicosis as a condition that caused scarring of the lungs (fibrosis) that was permanent but ineligible for compensation because it did not yet interfere with work. Thus, a workers’ body could be damaged but neither legal nor financial liability accrued to the owner. The worker's body was valued only as long as it labored.

As an existentialist philosopher, Sartre was famous for his notion of “bad faith” (mauvaise foi), i.e., the tendency to negate one's own freedom and to attribute one's actions to external forces. While Sartre's idea was initially conceptualized in a metaphysical sense, he increasingly applied it to moral and political issues. The fundamental distinction between existence and essence was synonymous with freedom, and freedom entailed responsibility. Hence, Sartre was probably the best equipped intellectual to launch a critique of the no-fault, no-responsibility compensation scheme for occupational damages. The implementation of this scheme in 1898 had been synonymous with the end of all criminal prosecution of occupational damages, as if the notions of penal responsibility and guilt no longer had currency.

Sartre's critique would have been equally applicable to conditions in the United States, where the question of responsibility was also relegated to civil courts and not defined as subject to criminal prosecution.Footnote ⁶ While political and economic leaders deemed workers’ suffering as one of the “costs” of industrial “progress,” socialists saw these diseases, disabling injuries, and deaths differently. Morris Hillquit of the US Socialist Party had anticipated Sartre's argument in 1911. At a mass gathering of workers, Hillquit protested “against the wanton and ceaseless murder of our sons and daughters in factories, mines, and mills.” He told the crowd that “if the capitalist class cannot conduct the industries of the country without murder the workers will assume management of the industries and conduct them with safety to the employees and for the good of the community.”Footnote ⁷

Two days after the Popular Tribunal, the State's Safety Court (Cour de sûreté de l'Etat)—a special court originally designed to handle national security cases during the Algerian liberation war—acquitted all the Maoist activists involved in the firebombing of the Head Offices, except for one of them, Bernard Liscia, who was sentenced in absentia.

Reproduced below is Sartre's closing speech as a prosecutor for the Popular Tribunal. It was published the following year in a collection of his interventions,Footnote ⁸ yet this is the first time it is translated into English. Sartre's words resonate with Edwin Sutherland's 1959 discussion of white-collar crime, which is characterized by the fact that it is seldom prosecuted or punished.Footnote ⁹ The existentialist perspective on occupational hazards helps address a fundamental question: Why is occupational injury, disease, and fatality rarely investigated and treated as a criminal matter? Sartre's words also resonate with recent legal developments in asbestos criminal trials in Italy, which attempted to reinject a notion of responsibility, fault, and intention into these issues.Footnote ¹⁰ Sartre raises the fundamental question: If death could be prevented and predicted by management, then was it not homicide? In this context, is there such a thing as an “accident”? Sartre raised these issues in the context of a mine disaster and framed it as a gross abdication of human rights, yet his argument was broader and more poignant, for it spoke to the pain that capitalists in their rush to industrialize had wrought upon the working masses.

The issues that Sartre raised in the context of the mining disaster a half century ago are equally relevant today. In the midst of the economic crisis created by the COVID-19 pandemic, our corporate and political leaders urged the opening of the economy despite the consensus among public health workers that sending workers back into factories and other commercial settings unprotected and untested is a cost that has to be paid to get business back to normal. As Sartre exposed all too precisely, it is workers, not those profiting from their labor, who are called upon to sacrifice their lives.

We must decide whether the disaster is due to bad luck.

If the accident could have been prevented and was not, then we are dealing with homicide. There are two types: negligent homicide and intentional homicide. In this case, we must decide which of these two offences we are dealing with.

Nothing can be decided about the February 4 disaster without placing it within the general framework of safety.

The mine is foul, we are told; when the worker gets to the bottom, he is at danger of death, or at least of disability. He thinks these are hazards. If one day, bad luck causes him to lose his finger or his hand, he will easily have fallen victim to fate. This belief is only subjective and individual: no one can be sure of being injured this week, or this year. What is certain, however, is that there have been 80 deaths per year in recent years in all the mines in the North, and that there will be as many this year, if not more, because with the new machines, the number of accidents will increase. The managers and the engineers have the data. They know this for certain. Yet what do these percentage rates stand for? Some say, inevitability: “mines eat men”, they claim.

This would be reasonable if working in the pit were a natural action, if man was forced by his nature to live and work in mines. This is not the case: it is a social activity, that develops within capitalist society under its conditions. These losses and accidents are therefore not unavoidable, they are accidents and losses required by the race for profit. Firedamp, silicosis, we may call them bad luck or fate, but then we should add that this is fate or bad luck that comes to some men because of other men, who exploit them, who sacrifice the health or life of workers to productivity.

Without the capitalist form of mining labor, miners would not experience silicosis; without the new machines—and especially the integral cutters that create evermore dust as they grind coal—silicosis would be less virulent and would touch fewer people. In other words, this disease develops in proportion to improvements in mine productivity. It is in fact an overexploitation of the miner. He is exploited, of course, like all workers. But, though occupational accidents and diseases exist for all workers, miners are overexploited because in their line of work these accidents and diseases are more severe, one must say increasingly severe. The average age of death in mining is lower than in other trades. Bourgeois society overtaxes its miners, because it does not even want to spend the necessary amount to restore their labor force every day: it lets illness and disability gnaw away at them. Day after day, they are less able to work. Every day, as they head to the bottom, silent, lonely and mute, they know that they will encounter the “fate” that damages them. Yet this fate has a human face: it simply stands for the conditions that bourgeois society imposes on their work, in order to get the maximum profit at the expense of their lives.

The death sentence imposed on them still seems abstract, though. In truth, it takes men of flesh and blood to execute it. The miners know these men: they are the foremen, the engineers, the physicians, the directors. Hence, this is a case of homicide, and the “supervisors” are responsible for it since it depends on them. What remains to be seen is whether they should be charged with negligent homicide or intentional homicide. It is manslaughter, or negligent homicide (homicide par imprudence), if these officials were unaware of the harmful consequences of the policies they implemented: if they were unaware of them, but if, through a more sustained effort, they would have been able to know them. Intentional homicide occurs when they are aware of the effects of their decisions. From this point of view, one thing at least is clear: silicosis is a disease that is caught at the bottom, the miner eats coal, his lungs are gradually engulfed in black dust. There is only one way to save him: remove him from the bottom, give him a job out in the open. It is the physician's duty to determine his silicosis rate. Following medical advice, the chief engineer may move the miner to another position. Under these conditions, if the physician determines that the patient has a silicosis rate of zero, or one that is lower than he does have for real, then the physician is intentionally criminal. He knows perfectly well that if the miner remains at the bottom, his condition can only get worse. No way will the miner escape the disease. The physician knowingly sends his patient to slow death.

Despite all this, it has been proven that mine doctors are most reluctant to treat silicosed miners as real victims of injury. Why? Because if the patient is removed from the mine, if a pension is required for his disability, then the State-Boss will be paying a man to do nothing. A physician who would tell the truth would not last six months in the mines: such things have been seen. And what one sees all the time is that a worker sent back to the bottom with a recognized rate of 1% silicosis, and sometimes even without any medical mention to the disease (he has asthma, that's all), dies soon after, and the autopsy discovers—especially if it is carried out by a physician with no ties to the mines—that he had 100% silicosis. Therefore, for each case, the mine doctor has a choice: either he arouses the distrust of the Head Offices, which, in the long run, will lead to his contract not being renewed. Or he lies. Those physicians who have been working for a long time, who own the most beautiful houses and who live comfortably, let us be sure that they have long since decided to play the game of regularly crafting homicidal lies. All those physicians who have declared lower silicosis rates than the real rates discovered later—by autopsy or otherwise—let us conclude that they are murderers.

A strange conspiracy of silence and lies develops around miners when it comes to silicosis, and even more so when it comes to safety measures.

The court has proven that safety in the coal mines is false safety. It is safety that allows people to kill.

There are two types of safety measures. The first are concerned with general safety. It is the Boss-State's duty to implement them. There would be considerably fewer injuries and silicosis cases if the bottom of the mine were made livable: water, first, to make the dust drop, watering while miners are working, fans in good condition, remote gas detectors, wide galleries in which you can move with a load without getting your hand crushed, alternate worksites where teams can work when ventilation breaks down. Yet none of this really exists. On February 4, in Fouquières, in a worksite known for being firedamped and stuffy—the fan was being replaced—there was not one remote gas detector in the entire pit. Why? Why? Because it would have been too expensive. Investing more in gear, unproductive gear, because basically it would only protect the lives of miners. As for the alternate worksites, also too difficult. There was not a single one in Fouquières. Rare are the pits in which management has planned for such alternate worksites. Water? Hardly any. The integral coalcutter has water spouts, but they get clogged very quickly and no time is spared to clean them, the hoses break, nobody fixes them. The galleries should be evacuated when the coalcutter is working there. But it would take too much time, too much going to and fro, production would diminish; so miners work in a cloud of dust, and too bad for silicosis.

Hence, the competition for the safety award is a solemn lie, which gives rise to new lies. If last year safety was greater in one pit than in the others, it can only be the work of chance, because the causes of accidents are as present everywhere. Yet they don't stop at this. Not only is luck rewarded, as if it were the result of general caution, but the competition itself is rigged. There is a premium for false safety. When a pit is on the verge of winning the cup, accidents are actively concealed, with the help of physicians. They are converted into seasonal illness. On this issue yet again, the physician who acts as an accomplice is criminal. How many doctors tell miners: “You're not hurt. If you want to get well, say you are sick or take a few days off.” This is clearly a systematic and voluntary pattern: this way, the pit will be awarded the bonus. And a few days later, the injured worker will be forced back to work, though he is not well yet: “do you want to deprive your colleagues of their bonus?” If, later on, the miner feels too impaired, he will take sick leave and will receive only the 15 francs daily allowance (except on Sundays) from the Mutual Rescue Fund. The trick is done. As one can see, everything is fake. Profit hollows all, cancels all. Yield is paramount, it converts all else into mere chatter and token gestures. The miners know this well; do you think the engineers and management do not know it? They all know. They talk, they cheat, they kill. The aim is not to achieve maximum safety, not even to convince miners that they are safe, but to extort from them testimony that their safety is guaranteed—whatever they really think. This is what the grotesque farce of the safety award is for.

In addition to general safety measures, there are some specific measures that are the miner's responsibility. At first glance, the principle may seem right. At some point, the worker must protect himself; the roofer must know where he is stepping. But let us see how things go in the mines.

Public opinion is led to believe that the miner earns a lot. It is a despicable lie: those who have been at the bottom for twenty or thirty years earn a hundred thousand, a hundred and twenty thousand francs a month. This is not enough to live on. Many workers have wives who work in the textile industry and this is still not enough. Miners try to get the yield bonus, which is ever more difficult to attain, as productivity markings increase every day.

However, while roofers are simply asked to be careful as they move around, miners are asked more. They are supposed to protect themselves and to protect their worksite. And they are supposed to pay for this protection from their own pocket. When a miner digs a gallery, he must, at the same time, timber it. He is blamed for all accidents. “You aren't following instructions, you aren't paying attention!” True, the instructions defined in the past by the mining companies, and repeated today by the Boss-State, are likely to prevent many accidents. If the miner timbers, he avoids himself a lot of trouble. As for the blaster, if he can go down 120, 150 meters lower to reach the gallery before the explosion occurs, he can avoid having coal fall down around him. But for both, this means lower returns, this means being paid less. In other words, the miner is faced with a monstrous choice: yield or safety. And, if he chooses the latter, as one miner said: “If you keep yourself safe, your children won't eat meat often.” So? What do they do? They go for it. They carry out voluntary roof-falls without any timber above them. Or—and this is the Boss-State's fault—after timbering and putting in frames for about ten meters, they run out of wood. What they just put up behind them, they take away and put it up in front. They move forward in this fashion, as best they can. Sometimes only the hoses hold the roof. If an accident happens, it is considered the miner's fault. The outcome is this despicable system: from a laborer's earnings, the Boss-State substracts all the work that safeguards him from being killed. The mine is owned by capitalist society, and therefore, the latter is solely responsible for all occupational injuries and disease that occur within it. Yet the mine makes the worker himself pay to defend himself against the evils for which it is responsible. The mine knows that if the poorly paid worker must choose between speeding and timbering, he will choose the former. The mine knows it so well that it encourages him to do so. The yelling and violence of the foremen throw the workers into a panic, they are asked to go faster, they do so, sacrificing safety to yield.

In other words, the tactic is the following: at the top, security instructions are given, but it is known and hoped for that the worker will protect himself poorly, because he cannot not do so well without damaging his yield. He falls into the trap—and how could he avoid it, since his wage depends on it?—and he does not protect himself. This is approved of, applauded, but silently. In this way, when an accident occurs, the instruction book can be produced: the miner is at fault, it is he who caused the accident, it is he who must be penalized. Vile trickery: those who are really responsible (and are aware of it) are to be found within management. They hire the workers, they dangle the promise of good pay, but they conceal to them that they will have to devote part of their own wages to ensure their own safety.

Here we may come to a first conclusion: when you enter the system, you necessarily become either a murderer, or a victim. The workers are the victims, the foremen (previously chosen among the workers, today selected and trained in special schools) and especially the engineers, the physicians and the directors, are murderers. They know it and they lie. The worker tries not to consider himself a victim. In vain: deep down, he is aware of his condition. His oppressors may perhaps try to hide their evil deeds. In vain: the State coalmines need an increased rate of accidents and silicosis in order to increase their yield. This requirement is impossible to conceal. For all these reasons, these are cases of intentional homicide, if not of murder. A murderer knows the identity of the person he kills: it is the jealous husband, who kills the man he has identified as his wife's lover. Someone who is guilty of intentional homicide foresees there will be eighty deaths every year; he knows nothing of these future victims, not even their names. He just knows that these victims are necessary and that next year, with the new machines, there will have to be even more of them. He is a murderer nonetheless.