A final block of coal was to be extracted from La Houve mine in the western town of Creutzwald as a symbolic gesture closing the chapter on France's former reliance on the carbonised fuel, which was first discovered in the country in 1720.

Three days of exhibitions and visits here will then follow to recall the sacrifice of the hundreds of thousands of miners who once toiled beneath the surface to bring up the coal that underpinned the industrial revolution.

Miners, their families and politicians led by the junior minister in charge of industry, Patrick Devedjian, are to attend a ceremony later Friday, and on Sunday a mass will be held at the mine to remember the workers who died carrying out their profession.

After a postwar peak, when 300,000 men, many of them immigrants from North Africa, Italy and Poland, laboured in France's mines, the industry went into slow decline.

That hastened in the 1970s, when nuclear energy progressively took over as France's main source of energy. Today, nuclear plants supply 80 percent of the country's needs.

The European Coal and Steel Community pact between France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands -- which formed the nucleus of today's European Union -- permitted France to freeze new hirings in 1984 and set in place early retirement provisions for the miners.

By 2002, there were just three mines left in France, producing a mere 1.6 million tonnes of coal. Last year, two of them closed, leaving just La Houve.

In much of the rest of Europe, the industry is also in decline, and those still heavily dependent on coal, especially in central Europe, are increasingly importing it much cheaper than they can mine it.

A tonne of French coal cost around 150 euros (180 dollars) to extract, compared to as little as 15 or 20 dollars for a tonne of coal strip-mined from the United States, South Africa or Australia.

China is the world's biggest producer and consumer of coal. The United States, which relies on coal for around half its energy needs, is just behind, ripping nearly one billion tonnes of the stuff out of the ground each year.

Coal still accounts for 26 percent of global energy production.

WAR.WIRE