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On the audio documentary La Parole ouvrière (Words of Workers) broadcast on France Culture on 31.08.1991.“Do you remenber what you felt when you went down the mine at 18?” is the question Marion Thiba, producer of the programme La Parole ouvrière for France Culture, asks to Bertrand Bartz, a miner of Lorraine’s coal mines. He answers, using his own words, and describes the specific experience of going down into a place never touched by sunbeams, where a specific way of working is forged amidst risks and solidarities; it is a reserved and at the same time vivid relation. This paper is the transcription of this 1990’s account, while Marion Thiba returns, in 2019, to that emotional experience she had when whe was making this documentary: “I had the deepest of respects for these men who used to go deep underground… They were responsible men, they taught me a lesson about life.”