Forbach train station. Flickr/forzaq8. Some rights reserved.All weekend, my mother-in-law kept glancing anxiously out of the window: "They said it was going to be sunny, but just look at it pouring down,” she’d sigh. We’d exchange glances, and then busy ourselves with whatever toddler-induced chaos needed mopping up or – in one particularly embarrassing incident – scrubbing from the walls.
Somehow, we’d reached an unspoken understanding: we weren’t going to talk about the election. That in itself was odd, because my husband’s family is French, we were in France and the whole of the country was talking about nothing else.
My mother-in-law had a solution for that too: the TV stayed resolutely tuned to German children’s channels from the moment we arrived to the moment we left. Like many of the older generation in Moselle, north-east France, my mother-in-law grew up between languages: French, and a dialect which, to all intensive purposes, is the same as the one their German neighbours know as “Saarländisch”. She was born in Morsbach, on one side of the “Rue Nationale”, a peculiarly ill-named road given the fact that the houses on the other side actually belong to Germany. Here, you buy your baguettes in France but, for anything else, you nip across the road to the German supermarket, where everything is noticeably cheaper. “I had trouble with the boeuf bourguignon,” my mother-in-law says fretfully, “the butcher doesn’t do beef during the week any more, and the other one’s closed down.” Another anxious glance at the window. Marine Le Pen won 42.5 percent of the vote in Forbach, and 53.95 in Morsbach.
Give or take a few industrial estates, Morsbach effectively is the “Rue Nationale” – a seemly never-ending line of nondescript and strangely dusty-looking houses set back a good seven to ten metres from the road. The reason for this spatial largesse? This is coal-mining country, and the front-yards were where your monthly supply of coal used to be dumped and then shovelled, bit by bit, into your cellar. Ten minutes down the road is Forbach, where my husband’s paternal grandfather was a miner. Right up until the 1970s, this area produced 45 per cent of the nation’s coal. Thousands of people were employed in the mines or, as locals put it, “they were with the Wendels”. The Wendels were the big mine-owning family and, if you were “with them”, you could count on a regular wage, decent pension and subsidised housing.
