Émile Basly was a miner who became a union leader, a deputy and for a long time the mayor of Lens, and his monument stands in the town as a salute to the people who worked underground. He led the great strike of 1884 at Anzin, which inspired Zola's Germinal, and later rose to national politics as a socialist. In Lens, a town of over thirty-eight thousand people at the heart of the Pas-de-Calais coalfield, he remains a local hero. The town was razed in the First World War and rebuilt in the 1920s, so much of the centre has the brick-and-concrete look of that rebuilding.
You come to Lens for the landscape of the mining basin, which UNESCO listed in 2012. The twin slag heaps at Loos-en-Gohelle, a few kilometres away, are among the tallest in Europe, rising nearly two hundred metres above the plain, and they can be climbed on foot. From the top you see a wide, flat country of fields and small towns, with other terrils scattered across the horizon like a chain of low volcanoes. The Louvre-Lens, a satellite of the Paris museum, opened in 2012 on the site of an old pit, with a long, low building of glass and aluminium that reflects the sky.
Riding is easy but not thrilling. Straight roads cross the plain, lined with brick houses and the occasional chimney, and cobbles break the surface now and then. Weather is changeable, with wind and rain from the North Sea, so pack a waterproof. The football stadium, home of RC Lens, is a place of passion, and on match days the town is full of red and yellow shirts.
Fuel and food are no problem in Lens, and the old brewery bars and frites stands are good for a cheap, filling meal. A visit to the memorial to the Courrières disaster of 1906, in which over a thousand miners died in the worst mining accident in European history, is a sober but worthwhile stop. The monument to Basly says, in its own way, that the people who dug here counted.