French Country · Encyclopedia
Old French trades and the people who kept them alive
Coopers, bell founders, saddlers, thatchers, cutlers and lacemakers: fifteen country trades, recorded in their workshops by the reporters of Détours en France. Each entry explains the craft, its tools and what it produces, as the reporters found it in the early 1990s.
The cooper (Le tonnelier)
Jarnac, Charente · Reported in 1995 · Book pp. 10–15
Barrels have been built the same way since the Celts invented them about two thousand years ago: oak staves (douelles) set side by side, bent over fire and held by galvanized iron hoops (feuillards). In Serge Chalufour's cooperage at Jarnac, nine coopers repeat these gestures every day for the cognac and wine cellars of Bordeaux and Cognac.
Machines now cut and joint the staves, but raising, heating and hooping remain manual even in the large factories. The staves are first stood inside a mould hoop, then the cask is heated over a small fire, the grâlasse, so the wood softens and can be drawn in with a steel cable. Toasting the inside over the embers, called bousinage, gives cognac part of its aroma.
The heads are fitted, the belly is smoothed with a riflard, a broad blade held between two handles, and the hoops are driven home with a hammer and driver. A well-made cask can last nearly a century; after a few years the wood stops giving tannin, so worn staves are replaced one by one.
The Lyon silk weavers (Les canuts)
Croix-Rousse, Lyon · Reported in 1995 · Book pp. 16–19
In the nineteenth century the steep streets of the Croix-Rousse rang with the looms of thousands of canuts. When the book was written, only eleven hand weavers in Lyon could still beat the weft by hand, and they alone could reproduce the brocaded silks of Versailles or Fontainebleau.
Working on the back of the cloth, the weaver passes up to thirty boxwood shuttles across a single brocade and composes the design from memory. He advances 3 to 15 cm a day; preparing a loom can take six weeks and a single piece more than a year. Painted designs were translated onto squared paper, then punched into Jacquard cards.
Until 1725 a draw-boy, the tireur de lacs, pulled the pattern cords by hand. The first Jacquard mechanisms appeared in 1805, and canuts who feared for their work broke them with their clogs, or sabots. One cocoon yields 600 to 1,800 metres of thread, and a kilo of raw silk needs about 4,500 cocoons.
The bell founder (Le fondeur de cloches)
Saint-Loup, near Orléans · Reported in 1995 · Book pp. 20–25
Dominique Bollée, one of the four master bell founders in France at the time, works much as founders did in the Middle Ages. His foundry near Orléans cast the seven bells of the basilica of Yamoussoukro in Côte d'Ivoire.
The mould is built in three layers of earth: the core, the false bell and the cope (noyau, fausse cloche, chape). The materials are startlingly simple: Beauce earth, clay, wood ash, hemp tow, horse dung and goat hair. A wooden template, the calibre, turns on its axis to scrape each layer to the bell's profile. Wax ornaments, moulded from boxwood matrices, are pressed onto the false bell and leave their imprint inside the cope.
When the false bell is broken away, its space receives the bronze, 78% copper and 22% tin heated to 1,200 °C. The pour lasts about forty seconds. Twenty-four hours later the bell is freed from its earth, polished, fitted with its clapper and tested with a tuning fork handed down in the family.
The parchment maker (Le parcheminier)
Levroux, Indre · Reported in 1995 · Book pp. 26–31
Parchment was invented around 200 BC in Asia Minor and was the only material for books until rag paper. At Levroux, the town of leather and parchment, Jean-Pierre Bavouzet took up his grandfather's trade in 1986 and was one of the very few artisans in France still making it by hand.
Only 5 to 7% of skins are good enough. He chooses the whitest and finest lamb, kid and goat skins; stillborn calf, fine as silk, becomes vellum. The skins soak ten to fifteen days in lime, are rinsed in a wooden drum, sometimes whitened in hydrogen peroxide, then dehaired on a wooden beam with a half-moon knife fitted with a slate blade.
Stretched on wooden frames with cord, each skin is scraped with a fleshing knife, the most delicate step, then dried for one to fifteen days and polished with gypsum stone. About two hundred parchments a month went to bookbinding, the restoration of old books, orthopaedics, drum and banjo heads, and furnishing.
The Camargue saddler (Le sellier)
Mas-Thibert, Camargue · Reported in 1995 · Book pp. 32–37
Fernand Meffre, a Meilleur Ouvrier de France, made most of the saddles used by the Camargue gardians, the mounted herdsmen of the Rhône delta, for nearly fifty years. The Camargue saddle descends from the medieval knight's saddle, with a high pommel and a raised cantle that keep the rider seated when a bull charges.
The tree, or arçon, joins an ash and marine-plywood pommel and cantle with bolted iron fittings. It is covered with leather cut with a half-moon knife and sewn entirely by hand with the saddler's stitch: a single linen thread coated with pitch and beeswax, worked with two needles. If one thread breaks, the seam still holds, which is why such a saddle can last a hundred years.
Girths, stirrup leathers, saddlebags for pincers and veterinary supplies, a cushion on which Arlésiennes rode on feast days and cage stirrups complete the work. One saddle takes about a hundred hours.
The thatcher (Le chaumier)
Grande Brière, Loire-Atlantique · Reported in 1995 · Book pp. 38–45
The Grande Brière marsh spreads over 40,000 hectares between Saint-Nazaire and Guérande. François Pédron spent forty years roofing its thatched cottages, the chaumières. Once a sign of poverty, thatch had become the emblem of the region, encouraged by the regional nature park.
From December to March the reed is cut from a punt, waist-deep in black water, with a quick stroke of the sickle, then dried. On the roof the thatcher works upward in courses, balanced on the battens, binding each bundle with wire passed by a needle he forged from a rake tooth. A wooden bat, the palette, dresses the reed to follow the slope.
Most thatchers buy sagne, reed from the Camargue, but Pédron used local reed. Thatch costs about 25% more than slate and is an excellent insulator: after a full day of rain, only the outer two centimetres are wet.
The pinasse builder (Le pinassayre)
Arcachon Bay, Gironde · Reported in 1995 · Book pp. 46–51
In Gascon, pinassayre means both the builder and the user of the pinasse, the slender, brightly painted wooden boat of Arcachon Bay. Jean-Pierre Dubourdieu and Christian Raba of La Teste were the last two builders in the region.
The keel, stem and sternpost are cut from iroko; oak or iroko floors strengthen the bottom; acacia frames, steamed for three or four hours, form the skeleton; mahogany planking and deck are caulked with oiled cord. No part can be prefabricated, and every piece is fitted by hand around pine templates.
Pinasses of 9 to 10 m are decked and motor-driven. The smaller pinassotes of 6 to 7 m go under sail or oar. Their flat bottoms suit the shallow waters of the bay. Each spring, boats that wintered on the quays are scraped and recaulked with oakum and oiled string.
The makila maker (Le makila)
Larressore, Basque Country · Reported in 1995 · Book pp. 52–57
The makila is the Basque walking stick, a symbol of free men who defended themselves. The Ainciart-Bergara family has made it in Larressore for four centuries. A sharp steel point hides under the pommel, and a weighted iron ferrule both steadies the walk and can strike.
In June, wild medlar stems are incised on the living tree; the scars swell as they heal and give the stick its knotted look. Cut in December, the stems are peeled, straightened in an oven by a family method and dried for fifteen years. A natural reaction of the wood gives the russet to bronze color.
Making one takes 25 to 30 hours. A perfect makila balances on one finger. Its metal collars are engraved by hand with Basque crosses or the fern of Larressore, and the buyer chooses the wood tone and a motto. The wait was fourteen months. The name is often explained as e-mak hila, "to give death"; pilgrims to Compostela already carried it.
The edge-tool maker (Le taillandier)
Orléans, Loiret · Reported in 1995 · Book pp. 58–65
The taillandier makes cutting tools. Bernard Solon, great-grandson of Louis Alexis who founded the Orléans workshop in 1872, was the only one in France still forging his tools from a plain iron bar about thirty centimetres long.
At the forge the metal is heated, struck on the anvil and shaped under the martinet, a foot-operated power hammer: socket on one side, blade on the other. A single tool can need up to twenty-four heats and five hours of work, and it can last thirty years. Adzes, planting picks, hoes and carpenters' drawknives sit beside regional tools, bark scrapers and an arborist's knife he designed to score fruit-tree bark.
North of the Loire, tools are pulled and have curved handles; to the south they are pushed and have straight ones. He bent his chestnut handles himself while the wood was green and hot.
The wool maker (Le lainier)
Séez, Savoie · Reported in 1995 · Book pp. 66–71
At Séez, near Bourg-Saint-Maurice, the Arpin family still made Bonneval cloth with machines more than a hundred years old. It was said to be so strong that "you wear out your skin before you wear a hole in it." Weaving in the upper Tarentaise began in the 1600s, and the cloth took its name from a mountain guide of Bonneval-sur-Arc who sold it through the valleys.
The wool is sorted by hand, washed in large vats, dried in the attic (the galetas), opened in a beater and teased on the "wolf." After weaving, the piece goes into a fulling machine built in 1880, where it shrinks from 180 to 140 cm wide and becomes waterproof and very dense.
Farmers used to exchange raw fleece for cloth, clothing or knitting wool. The natural colors remained white, beige and burel, the brown of a monk's habit.
The cutler (Le coutelier)
Thiers, Puy-de-Dôme · Reported in 1995 · Book pp. 72–75
Thiers makes about 90% of French knives, and its industry divided the work very early: by 1788 a single knife passed through eight pairs of hands, a century later through thirty-six. In 1976 Henri Viallon set out to make a whole knife alone, from forge to handle.
He heats the steel to about 1,000 °C, straightens it with the hammer, quenches it in oil and grinds it. He was one of the few in France able to make Damascus blades, a forging method known to the Vikings. In the past the grinders lay on planks behind sandstone wheels with their dogs stretched across their legs to keep them warm.
A Laguiole has eight parts: blade, liners, side plates, awl and corkscrew, assembled around the spring with its famous bee and held by ten nickel-silver pins. Neighboring Saint-Rémy-sur-Durolle called itself the world capital of the corkscrew.
The schnapps distiller (Le bouilleur de schnaps)
Ungersheim, Alsace · Reported in 1995 · Book pp. 76–79
In eastern France, schnaps means any clear fruit brandy. Janot Schermesser travelled from farm to farm with his still from the age of fourteen, beginning in 1945, and distilled from October to March, starting with mirabelle plums.
The fruit is crushed or chopped and ferments in wooden casks for a month to six weeks. In the first copper pot, heated with wood, the mash boils and its vapor passes through the swan neck to cool in a second vessel. The first spirit, the petite goutte, runs at 40 to 65°. The weak spirit of several batches is distilled a second time to between 45 and 60°.
He trusted only this double distillation: "there is nothing better than the second pass." The schnapps rests six months in a demijohn, and in wax-sealed bottles it keeps for fifty years.
Chair makers and rush-seat weavers (Chaisiers et pailleuses)
Rancy and Bantanges, Bresse · Reported in 1995 · Book pp. 80–85
Around Rancy in the Bresse of Burgundy, the second region in France for straw-seated chairs after the Landes, chairs had been made for nearly two hundred years. Sedge, rye straw and fruitwood were close at hand, and the trade stayed small and familial: about 200 workers producing 300,000 chairs a year.
Each chair has about eighteen beech parts, cut from templates, shaped and sanded, then mortised and tenoned together with a mallet on a low, thick bench called the selle. Everything is drilled at an angle, which is why "a joiner cannot make a chair."
Seating was women's work. The pailleuse splits rye straw with her nail, wraps it around sedge and twists it round the frame while the chair turns on a swivel. A traditional seat takes about three hours. Imports from Asia reduced the local seat weavers from two hundred to about thirty.
The hatter (Le chapelier)
Chazelles-sur-Lyon, Loire · Reported in 1995 · Book pp. 86–91
Chazelles-sur-Lyon has made true felt hats since at least the sixteenth century. In 1868 it had forty-three workshops and 1,200 workers; by the 1990s only the Écuyer-Thomas workshop remained, revived for haute couture clients.
Felt is made from rabbit or hare fur. In the bâtissage, a jet of hot water draws the fur onto a perforated metal cone, forming a cobweb-thin hood. It is felted by rolling on a steam-heated iron table and fulled in water and sulfuric acid until it shrinks by two thirds.
The hood is stretched with steam, brushed with rough shark skin and sheared until velvety, a step called castorinage. It is then shaped on a lime or walnut block, from tricorn to bowler, pressed with an iron and given a final polish, the bichonnage, before women add the lining and ribbons.
The lacemakers of Le Puy (Les dentellières du Puy)
Le Puy-en-Velay, Haute-Loire · Reported in 1995 · Book pp. 92–95
For more than five centuries the story of the Velay has been tied to bobbin lace. Legend credits its invention in 1407 to Isabelle Mamour, a young embroiderer making a robe for the Black Virgin of Le Puy.
The lacemaker works on a pillow, the carreau, crossing linen threads around pins that follow a pricked pattern card. Boxwood bobbins are handled in pairs, two in each hand, and complex patterns can need 150 bobbins or more. The point d'esprit is a Le Puy specialty. A 20 cm Cluny doily takes sixty hours.
By the early 1970s the craft was nearly lost to machine lace and imports. Mick Fouriscot founded a teaching center in 1974 that trained more than 4,000 students, and the national lace workshop-conservatory opened in 1976. Men once carved the wooden winders, the plioirs, on which finished lace was rolled.
Source: Les Trésors de France: vieux métiers et objets d'autrefois (Éditions Rustica, Détours en France collection, 1995), pp. 9–95. Descriptions summarize the book's reportage and captions; the book was published in 1995, so workshops, people, prices and figures are described as the reporters found them then, and some workshops may since have closed or changed hands.