Later this week, the French government will publish a decree putting the final nail in the coffin of the country’s 300-year-old coal industry. In its heyday, the industry employed 300,000 people and became the engine of the country’s industrial revolution.

It has been the bedrock of the French political left and it is not altogether coincidental that its steady decline over the past three decades has also tracked the decline and virtual disappearance of the Communist Party as a political force in France.