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It’s not music but theater. Requiem for four miners premiered at the village hall of Champagney, in Haute-Saône, on June 29, 1974. The mining history of the coalfield of Ronchamp-Champagney had been over for almost twenty years and, in the meantime, here as elsewhere, the image of the miner had been greatly modified. The five acts of the play are ordered according to the chronology of a disaster that occurred at the Étançon well, in December 1950. However, the point is not of re-enactment, and the flooded tunnels remain invisible. The fiction produces another reality and builds its analytical framework around the humans and things it puts in various situations, there basing its methods of veridiction. It deals with another montage of the history and the establishment of new forms of distribution of life over time, the fabrication of subjugated minds, domestication through labor and consumption, the exercise of domination in a market democracy. But it also discusses a possible escape, the critical exercise seems to borrow from Sartre, Lefebvre, Ellul or Gorz. So, “the accident of the Étançon” is otherwise present, beyond the collections of photos, newspaper clippings, all the documents produced as monuments to the vanished activity and the deaths it caused. It takes another turn, which serves as a refractive surface for the idea that there another catastrophe at work, something yet to come or perhaps already there.