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Concept
Borinage
Summary
The Borinage (bɔʁinaʒ) is an area in the Walloon province of Hainaut in Belgium. The name derives from the coal mines of the region, bores meaning mineshafts. In French the inhabitants of the Borinage are called Borains.
The provincial capital Mons is located in the east of the Borinage, but there was a great sociological difference between the inhabitants of Mons and the Borains of all the villages around Mons.
"From the 18th century to 1850, the economy of thirty municipalities in the Borinage was founded on coal mining. Between 1822 and 1829, production more than doubled in that region i.e. from 602,000 to 1,260,000 tons. That was more than the total production of France and Germany at the time. The Borinage exported its coal mostly to France and Flanders."
In 1878, several fossils of iguanodons were found: this find was unique because complete skeletons were present. When this area was occupied by the Germans in World War I, a few attempts were made to reopen the mine where the skeletons had been found. However, this never succeeded and it was determined that it will probably never succeed again.
In 1957, out of 64,800 people recorded as being in employment in the Borinage, 23,000 worked in the coal industry. Only 7,000 people in services, although in Belgium as a whole, 49 percent of employment was in the tertiary sector.
In the 1960s, because of the end of the collieries, Ladrière, Meynaud and Perin wrote that the Borinage died in the ideological and economical sense.
Belgian general strikes
In his mid-twenties, Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh spent several years (1878-1880) living in the Borinage. He initially preached to and lived among the coal miners, before suffering a breakdown and deciding to become an artist. His first masterpiece, The Potato Eaters (1885), depicting Dutch peasants, although not painted in the Borinage, was indirectly inspired by the bad conditions of the miners and their families in the Borinage.
Dutch-born Belgian painter Henry Luyten resided in the Borinage between 1886 and 1887.
Official source
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