How France Killed Its Steel Country: Longwy

On the 13th of December, 1978, the front page of the regional paper told the steel town of Longwy that Usinor had struck it dead. This documentary follows how France killed its own steel country, and why the end of Lorraine steel in Longwy was not simply a market death but a decision made in Paris, on a date that can be written down. For almost a century, Longwy’s valley on the Belgian and Luxembourg borders lived from its blast furnaces. In the autumn of 1978, the French state took control of a steel industry drowning in debt. That December, a restructuring plan set out 21,750 job cuts, 6,500 of them in the Longwy basin, while the newer coastal plants at Dunkirk and Fos came through largely intact. The film explains how that choice was made, and how a town of twenty thousand people answered it. Inside the documentary: How a poor, phosphorus-laden ore, a border redrawn in 1871 and a British chemical breakthrough built Lorraine’s steel country The 1979 revolt that Le Monde called the People’s Republic of Longwy, from the bulldozer attack on the police station to Lorraine Coeur d’Acier, the pirate radio that broadcast from the town hall Mitterrand’s promise that no sector would be condemned, the 1984 plan that broke it, and Luxembourg’s very different answer to the same crisis, which explains why about half of Longwy’s working people now cross the border every morning This channel tells the long-form stories of the industries, companies and places that shaped modern life, and of what happened to the people who depended on them.