The Polish People from Rosières (Central France) and the Heritagization of Saint-Albert Church

We will question the appropriation of a place of worship by various migration communities from the working-class town of Rosières, especially by Polish and Portuguese people. Located in central France, the town was built, in a paternalistic move by a factory of the same name during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. All the buildings were built on the initiative of the factory’s successive administrations. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the administration started hiring immigrants (first from Poland, then from Portugal and postcolonial countries). By studying the process which led the factory’s management to sell the church to the municipality between 1999 and 2003, we shall observe, on the one hand, the shift of the church’s status in the townspeople’s representations (from a religious symbol to a social one) and, on the other hand, that the mobilization ending with the sale was instigated by those professing Polish ancestry.