Who Says Heritage? Old Stakes and New Practices ofPatrimonialisation of Coal Activities in the Industrial French City ofSaint-Etienne

This chapter looks at the fluctuations of heritage in a town that was once one of the country’s main industrial and mining centres, before suffering a severe economic and demographic depression in the 1970s. For a long time, both the French government and the town council were reluctant to give heritage status to these industrial remains. It is only recently that the industry and its workers’ memory have been given a certain “heritage legitimacy”. In this process, mining took on a more prominent role than ithad in the city’s history and economy. Saint-Etienne imagined itself to be a city of miners, forgetting metalworkers and weavers. The museum dedicated to the subject since 1991 has played an important role in fostering the recognition and legitimacy of asocial heritage that is now better recognised. The chapter shows that, over the last thirty years, what we might call the “confines of heritage” have contributed to transforming and renewing what constitutes heritage; at the same time, it shows how this heritage contributes to the life of the city. Ultimately, heritage is not made up of unchanging elements but is constantly renegotiated by social actors.