Work, Regulation, and Identity in Provincial France

The Bordeaux Leather Trades, 1740–1815

D. Heimmermann

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137438591
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic History
• Index: Economics

The 18th-century French leather industry was a strategically important manufacturing sector, one vital to both civilian and military life. This study examines the production of leather in the Bordeaux trades during the 18th and 19th centuries, illuminating the realities of a craft economy and its relation to the wider French political economy.

CHAPTER 1

Nature, Work, Regulation, and the Bordeaux Leather-Manufacturing Economy

In May 1807, as Napoleon Bonaparte made preparations for the decisive Battle of Friedland against the Russians and the Fourth Coalition, the Emperor ordered his envoy in Hamburg to obtain desperately needed cloth and leather from England to supply the Imperial army with uniform coats, vests, caps, and shoes.¹ Napoleon’s violation of his own continental blockade of Britain, instituted only 6 months earlier (November 1806), acknowledged both the strategic importance of textiles and leather and the severe shortage of these materials that afflicted the French Empire at the dawn of the nineteenth century.

Since ancient times leather, like cloth, was an integral part of both military and civilian life.² Leather was widely employed in the production of clothing such as shoes, boots, gloves, and belts, and in the manufacture of furniture, book covers, and bindings, as well as in the fabrication of all kinds of containers, such as pails, purses, satchels, trunks, sword cases, dagger sheaths, and pistol holsters. Before the advent of mechanization when horses and draught animals served as the primary means of transportation, leather was used in the production of carriages, saddles, harnesses, and riggings, and in the early industrial age leather was employed in industry in the form of machine belts and for use in textile looms.

Given the varied uses of leather and the important role it had in the wider economy, authorities in both Britain and the France believed the leather-manufacturing trades rivaled those of the metal craftsmen.³ Unlike Napoleon’s British rival across the Channel, however, where there existed a national leather market centered at London, the French leather sector remained highly dispersed and regulated through various provincial and local laws, taxes, and policies.⁴ Throughout the eighteenth century only the Paris leather market was directly controlled by the Versailles government, which organized the trade around the Halle aux Cuirs and the Bureau des Cuirs, which monitored the manufacture, sale, and transport of leather.⁵ Outside of the Paris vicinity, meanwhile, including the Guyenne, control of the French leather industry remained in the hands of local authorities and, above all, the trade corporations or guilds.

In Bordeaux, assuring the supply and quality of leather was the responsibility of the leather-processing guilds and the local municipal authorities, in particular the town council, the Jurade of Bordeaux.⁶ During the early-modern period three Bordeaux trade corporations were responsible for the production of finished leather. The city’s master glove-makers and parchment-makers fabricated lighter chamois leather, produced from sheep and lamb skin, for their own use as well as for consumption by the city’s booksellers, shoemakers, saddlers, and collar-makers.⁷ The town’s most important processors of leather, however, were the guild tanners whose corporate privileges of 1570 accorded them the right to manufacture and dress all types of leather. Their most important work was the production of durable leather from cattle hides, generally referred to as tanning. In addition to providing the city’s artisans with workable leather, Bordeaux master tanners supplied dressed leather to merchants and tradesmen of other French cities and abroad.⁸ From the fifteenth to the middle of the eighteenth century Bordeaux leather processors enjoyed both local and international renown and demand for their products, and they proudly claimed to produce “the best leather in Europe.”⁹ Indeed, Bordeaux’s leather-processing trades constituted one of the most important elements of the town’s, albeit underdeveloped, manufacturing economy. The relative importance of the tanning industry in Bordeaux is illustrated when compared to leather-processing trades of Paris. During the middle of the eighteenth century, with a population only one-tenth of Paris, Bordeaux counted no less than 16 major tanneries, compared to 28 Parisian enterprises at about the same time.¹⁰ The prosperity in Bordeaux tanning, however, would not endure. During the second half of the eighteenth century the Bordeaux and French tanning industry suffered a dramatic decline from which it did not recover until well into the next century. The demise of the Bordeaux and French tanning industry can be explained not only by examining the complexities and vulnerabilities that were inherent in the nature-dependent leather industry, but also by exploring the role of the local guilds and governmental authorities in enforcing and promoting the standards of manufacturing and product quality and the efforts of the royal government in creating a national leather market during the second half of the eighteenth century.¹¹ As we will see, through the prism of the Bordeaux leather-processing trades, throughout the eighteenth century the primitive Bordeaux and French tanning industry remained highly vulnerable to the fortunes of nature, artisanal abuses, and resistance to innovation and, above all, to an antagonistic royal fiscal regulatory regime that was created during the second half of the eighteenth century. The results of such vulnerabilities, deficiencies, and policies were a precipitous decline of the tanning industry, shortages of leather, and, as the Emperor learned, dependence upon outside producers of leather.

Leather

Leather is animal skin that has been chemically modified to produce a material that is durable and flexible, repels water, and resists decay. One of man’s earliest crafts, dating back more than seven millennia, leather processing involves the transformation of animal hides into leather with tanning substances. Leather can be manufactured to be as soft and supple as cloth or as hard and durable as sole leather depending on the varieties of hides and the methods by which they are processed. Generally speaking, animal skins were cleansed and treated to depilate the hair and then submitted to various processing methods. The hides of smaller animals such as sheep, lamb, goat, and calves—used for shoe uppers, book bindings, gloves, purses, and other delicate apparel—often were treated with oils that produced softer and lighter chamois leather. These finer skins also could be rendered more durable through a process known as tawing, which involved the application of alum and salt. The hides of cattle, the primary raw material for leather production and used in the production of durable leather required for the soles of shoes, trunks, sheaths, pistol holders, belts, saddles, and harnesses, were immersed in successive baths of bark or grain solutions for extended periods of time. Processed leather was then finished with oil dressings and then subjected to scraping, combing, buffing, and pommelling—a process known as currying—which rendered the tanned leather supple and waterproof.¹²

The production of leather was dependent entirely on organic substances. The supply of these natural primary materials posed particular problems for eighteenth-century leather processors. Because of the poor communications that existed in eighteenth-century France, tanners had to rely largely on local and regional suppliers for their primary materials, although raw supplies were imported from abroad as well. The difficulty in assuring the supply of organic materials such as hides and tree bark and the competition for resources and lack of enforcement of guild and local protective legislation, however, made the provisioning of raw materials precarious.¹³

Skins and hides were residual by-products of the butcher’s trade or the meat market, and consequently the supply of leather was dependent on the national and local supply of cattle as well as the consumption of meat. Compared to Britain, the French cattle asset and the consumption of meat remained modest until the middle of the nineteenth century.¹⁴ Disease and dearth of forage were the principal reasons for the scarcity and high cost of beef and its relatively low consumption in France and Bordeaux during the eighteenth century. Not surprisingly, Parisians consumed more meat than any other part of the realm and consequently the finest meats and hides were sent to the capital. Generally speaking, outside of the Paris region, including the Guyenne, cheaper cuts of meat such as lamb, which in Bordeaux cost only one-quarter the price of beef, were preferred by most French consumers.¹⁵ As a result, the quantity and price of tanning hides in Bordeaux were unstable during the entire early-modern period.

In France, the uncertainty of the supplies of hides and leather can be attributed not only to the low cattle asset and beef consumption but also to the lack of a coherent national leather market or strategy to promote the efficient allocation of raw materials and production of leather. In Bordeaux, as well as in other towns outside of the Paris region, local public authorities traditionally had intervened to assure a reliable supply of hides for tanners. In accordance with an arrêt of the Bordeaux parlement of August 1, 1716, the tanners of Bordeaux were given the right of preference to the hides that were produced by the city’s butchers between Good Friday and Mardi Gras or between Easter and Mardi Gras or Carnival.¹⁶ Furthermore, the city’s butchers were permitted to transport or sell hides outside of the Sénéchaussée of Bordeaux only after a 24-hour waiting period during which tanners had the right to exercise claims on the hides.¹⁷ Although tanners frequently complained about the poor quality of the hides, in particular those that had been damaged by the butchers’ careless handling of them during the slaughtering process, the principal cause of disputes between Bordeaux butchers and tanners was over the maintenance of the latter’s right of preference in securing hides.¹⁸ The disputes that arose during the century between the city’s tanners and butchers revolved around both parties’ understanding of the meaning of “right of preference.” The tanners assumed that their rights to the Bordeaux butchers’ product included not only the privilege to possess the first opportunity to negotiate the purchase of hides and skins but also the right to choose the types of hides on the basis of their needs. For their part, the butchers of the city perceived the tanners’ rights of preference in a more limited sense. The butchers’ maintained that it was within their right to present to the tanners the terms of a contract already negotiated between themselves and a third party for hides and, before finalization of the sale, to allow the tanners to exercise their right of preference, which to the butchers meant the right of the tanners either to accept all of the terms of the contract already negotiated or to waive their rights to the hides and skins altogether. Understandably, the butchers sought customers who not only could make large advances but also were willing to accept all of the hides and skins that their butcheries would produce in a given year.¹⁹ Many of those who negotiated contracts for hides with the Bordeaux butchers were from outside the city, and often these merchants and others who were in a financial position to make large advances purchased all of the butchers’ product and resold the hides in the city at an inflated price or exported the hides altogether, thereby depriving the tanners of hides. Thus, finding themselves presented with terms of sales that they had not negotiated, which often included the responsibility of accepting more hides than they desired, high prices, large advances, and the possibility of higher prices and dearth of hides, the tanners frequently appealed to the Jurade to decide what their right of preference meant.

A dispute that epitomizes the struggle between the Bordeaux tanners and butchers over the sale and purchasing of hides occurred in 1751. In March of that year master tanners complained to the Jurade that five of the city’s butchers had agreed to sell to Trinquier, a merchant from Toulouse and an agent of the royal tannery in Lectoure,²⁰ the hides that they would produce in their butcheries between Easter and Mardi Gras of next year. Trinquier had advanced 13,500 livres to the five butchers and had promised to make similar payments at the time of the October fair.²¹ The tanners maintained that Trinquier was a long-time customer of the Bordeaux butchers and had been responsible for transporting hides both directly to Toulouse and to several other towns, thus depriving local leather processors of hides. Moreover, the tanners pointed out that advances such as those made by Trinquier and other merchants could not be matched by the Bordeaux tanners as the daily wages paid to their workers, the rent paid for the tanneries, equipment, and other expenses consumed a great portion of their liquid assets. To assure the local supply of leather, the Jurade reaffirmed earlier decisions and nullified the sale of hides to Trinquier and required the butchers to deliver to the master tanners all of the ox and calf hides produced between Easter and Mardi Gras of 1752 for a mutually agreed price.²²

Despite the consistent support of local authorities, disputes between the butchers and the tanners over the right of preference continued throughout the century as butchers often sought to circumvent the tanners’ right of first preference to their hides. Indeed, the butcher’s noncompliance with guild and municipal regulations frequently was blamed for shortages of hides by the city’s tanners and leather workers. In April 1772 the master tanners complained that the 19 masters and widows of the community were in desperate need of ox hides as butchers were selling their hides to tanners from Bazas and Langon.²³ The scarcity of leather also was recognized by the master shoemakers who submitted to the municipal authorities a petition with the signatures of 98 masters attesting to the shortage of leather and to the superiority of the Bordeaux tanners’ products and defended the tanners’ right of preference.²⁴

Royal measures taken during the second half of the eighteenth century to liberate French commerce also threatened the local supply of hi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations and Note on Spelling
• Introduction
• 1. Nature, Work, Regulation, and the Bordeaux Leather-Manufacturing Economy
• 2. Regulation and Economic Activity: The Bordeaux Shoemaking Economy
• 3. The Guild Communities
• 4. Apprentices and Journeymen
• 5. Establishment in the Bordeaux Leather Trades
• 6. Patron Leather Artisans
• 7. Reform, Revolution, Abolition, and Beyond
• 8. Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index