Timeline

Key figures

Origin and history

The Musée de la mine de La Machine, created in 1983 in the Nièvre (Burgundy-Franche-Comté), is located in the former administrative headquarters of the Houillères. It preserves the memory of local coal mining, active since the 2nd century and intensified in the 17th century under Colbert, which introduced a Belgian mining machine giving its name to the city. Schneider bought the coalfields in 1865, modernized the wells (up to 700 m deep), and modeled the city around the mines, employing up to 1,600 workers in the 20th century.

The closure of the last well in 1974, after the nationalization of 1946 and the competition for oil, marked the end of the mining era. As early as 1983, former miners transformed the site into an educational museum, combining exhibitions (tools, fossils, archives), visit of the mine tile with its chivalry, and reconstructed underground gallery. A collection of 3 tons of minerals and fossils, offered in 2015 by Serge Bonnotte (former minor and amateur paleontologist), enriches the fund.

The museum also illustrates the daily life of "black Gules": working conditions (security, extraction techniques), social life (working cities, leisure, conflicts), and industrial heritage (steam machine, lamp factory). Two outdoor circuits complete the visit, linking the mining remains scattered throughout the city. Labeled Musée de France, it offers temporary exhibitions and animations guided by former miners.

The history of La Machine is inextricably linked to coal, exploited artisanally from the Middle Ages before becoming, with Schneider, a regional economic pillar. The "Système Schneider", paternalist, organized housing, schools and services for workers. The mine closed after the oil shock, but the museum perpetuates this collective memory, combining ethnology, technical history and geology (Carboniferous fossils).

The site is composed of three spaces: the museum (director's office, models, collections), the mine tile (bottom-up, engine room) and the underground school gallery, visited in the light of the minor lamps. The objects exhibited, given by the former workers, evoke dramas, innovations and working culture, while videos and stagings restore the atmosphere of the wells.

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