Forgot Your Password?

New to The Nation? Subscribe

Print subscriber? Activate your online access

.nation-small__b{fill:#fff;}

The Year I Taught in a Former Coal Mining Town

Teaching in the South of France, I learned that equality was just a story teachers told about themselves.

Statue of a miner by the artist Raymond Roux, to memorialize Alès’s having been a mining town during the 19th and 20th centuries.

During the first year of the gilets jaunes protests, I taught English in France. By the time I arrived during that impossibly hot August in 2018, a grassroots movement against fuel taxes and economic inequality had been building, with its members eventually blocking off roundabouts and toll booths across the country and marching, every Saturday, down the large avenue at the end of my street. I would sit, lazily, with my legs sticking through the wrought-iron balustrade of my balconette and watch them go by.

It was my first year out of college, and I had taken the job in France, in part, for the time to read and write. I was assigned to one of the largest public high schools in the country, Lycée Jean-Baptise Dumas. Alès, where I taught, located in the south of the country, was a former mining town that had produced a record 3.3 million tons of coal in 1958, its workforce of 20,000 built largely on Algerian labor that France had recruited after the war. The last mine closed in 2001, but the families stayed, and many of their descendants were my students. The other teachers were French and drove in from neighboring towns like Anduze and Uzès. Due to the scarcity of housing available to foreigners, I also commuted from a neighboring city. Nîmes, where I lived, was on the edge of the Mediterranean and hosted Spanish-style bullfights in its Roman amphitheater. During my second month there, a woman was gored to death by a bull that jumped over the fence.

It was a year of experiencing firsthand something I had already learned as a French major in college: that French equality was a story France told about itself, and that the far right had been a more or less consistent underbelly of the country since at least the 1890s. France’s own Constitutional Council had ruled in 2007 that race and ethnicity could not be recorded as categories in any official state data collection, making it impossible to measure discrimination through government statistics, though private studies found that ethnic minorities in France were more than 30 percent less likely to be hired for jobs, and unemployment among people of North African origin was twice the national average. I was brought in on a seven-month government contract that prohibited other work and was designed to expire before I could declare residency. I was answerable to teachers 15 to 40 years my senior, though none of them had formal authority over me. As a teaching assistant, I was paid a poverty wage that qualified me for government housing assistance, even though I was a government employee. My position in the country was at least more honest than what France had done to my students’ families, who had been recruited to build French mines and then told, once the economic boom ended, that even if they got citizenship, they weren’t French at all.

A few weeks in, I arrived 20 minutes late to a class I was assisting with after its room was reassigned without my knowledge. The teacher held a meeting with me and two other staff members, where she threatened that if I was late again, she would bring in the French authorities to oversee my behavior and deport me if I wasn’t performing my job well. I said, in French, something like, “That sounds like it will take a long time,” to which she said it would be a several-month process. “I’m not here for very long,” I told her. “So my visa will likely expire before it’s done anyway.”

My appointment with France’s immigration office, for instance, where they would do a routine blood check for HIV and stamp my passport, was set for early December—four months after my arrival in the country. So I wasn’t worried about the French bureaucracy suddenly becoming more efficient. Plus I felt pretty certain that I hadn’t done anything to warrant deportation, and I knew that, since my........

© The Nation