Abstract
The Watch Tower movement saw considerable expansion in northern France, especially in the mining basin where it essentially recruited Polish emigrant workers, but also French workers in lesser proportions. The author attempts to retrace the history of the spread of the movement in this region and examines the causes of its unique development in France. These causes could be linked to the social conditions of this population : social and cultural change, unsatisfied expecta tions, absence of political power, a crisis of confidence in the Catholic Church. They could also be subsumed under a more global hypothesis according to which the Watch Tower movement would have constituted a substitute home- land for the emigrant Polish workers. As for the French Jehovah's Witnesses, it was seen that they partially shared the Polish workers' fate, and individual particularities had to be taken into account.