In the district of Le Thelle, to the south of Beauvais, there is “a multitude of petty trades, of which one hardly imagines the importance. I have seen,” M. Dumazet says, “small factories of buttons made from bone, ivory, or mother-of-pearl, brushes, shoe-horns, keys for pianos, dominoes, counters and dice, spectacle-cases, small articles for the writing-table, handles for tools, measures, billiard keys—what not!... There is not one single village, however small, the population of which should not have its own industry.”[145] At the same time it must not be forgotten that thousands of small articles for the writing-table and for draughtsmen are fabricated on a large scale in the small factories in the same region. Some of the workshops are situated in private houses, and in some of them artistic work is made; but most of them are located in special houses, where the necessary power is hired by the owner of the workshop. You see here “a fantastic activity”—the word is M. Dumazet’s; the division of labour is very great, and everywhere they invent new machine-tools.
Finally, in the villages of the Vermandois district (department of the Aisne), we find a considerable number of hand-looms (more than 3,000) upon which mixed stuffs made of cotton, wool and silk are woven.[146]
Of course, it must be recognised that, as a rule, in northern France, where cottons are fabricated on a large scale in factory towns, hand-weaving in the villages is nearly gone. But, as is seen already from the preceding, new small industries have grown up instead, and this is also the case in many other parts of France.
Taking the region situated between Rouen in the north-east, Orléans in the south-east, Rennes in the north-west, and Nantes in the south-west—that is, the old provinces of Normandy, Perche and Maine, and partly Touraine and Anjou, as they were seen by Ardouin Dumazet in 1895—we find there quite a variety of domestic and petty industries, both in the villages and in the towns.
At Laval (to the south-east of Rennes), where drills (coutils) were formerly woven out of flax in hand-looms, and at Alençon, formerly a great centre for the cottage-weaving of linen, as well as for hand-made lace, Ardouin Dumazet found both the house and the factory linen industry in a lingering state. Cotton takes the lead. Drills are now made out of cotton in the factories, and the demand for flax goods is very small. Both domestic and factory weaving of flax goods are accordingly in a poor condition. The cottagers abandoned that branch of weaving, and the large factories, which had been erected at Alençon with the intention of creating a flax and hemp-cloth industry, had to be closed. Only one factory, occupying 250 hands, remains; while nearly 23,000 weavers, who found occupation at Mans, Fresnay and Alençon in hemp cloths and fine linen, had to abandon that industry. Those who worked in factories have emigrated to other towns, while those who had not broken with agriculture reverted to it. In this struggle of cotton versus flax and hemp, the former was victorious.
As to lace, it is made in such quantities by machinery at Calais, Caudry, St. Quentin and Tarare that only high-class artistic lace-making continues on a small scale at Alençon itself, but it still remains a by-occupation in the surrounding country. Besides, at Flers, and at Ferté Macé (a small town to the south of the former), hand-weaving is still carried on in about 5,400 hand-looms, although the whole trade, in factories and villages alike, is in a piteous state since the Spanish markets have been lost. Spain has now plenty of her own cotton mills. Twelve big spinning mills at Condé (where 4,000 tons of cotton were spun in 1883) were abandoned in 1893, and the workers were thrown into a most miserable condition.[147]
On the contrary, in an industry which supplies the home market—namely, in the fabrication of linen handkerchiefs, which itself is of a quite recent growth—we see that cottage-weaving is, even now, in full prosperity. Cholet (in Maine-et-Loire, south-west of Angers) is the centre of that trade. It has one spinning mill and one weaving mill, but both employ considerably fewer hands than domestic weaving, which is spread over no less than 200 villages of the surrounding region.[148] Neither at Rouen nor in the industrial cities of Northern France are so many linen handkerchiefs fabricated as in this region in hand-looms, we are told by Ardouin Dumazet.
Within the curve made by the Loire as it flows past Orléans we find another prosperous centre of domestic industries connected with cottons. “From Romorantin [in Loire-et-Cher, south of Orléans] to Argenton and Le Blanc,” the same writer says, “we have one immense workshop where handkerchiefs are embroidered, and shirts, cuffs, collars and all sorts of ladies’ linen are sewn or embroidered. There is not one house, even in the tiniest hamlets, where the women would not be occupied in that trade ... and if this work is a mere passe-temps in vine-growing regions, here it has become the chief resource of the population.”[149] Even at Romorantin itself, where 400 women and girls are employed in one factory, there are more than 1,000 women who sew linen in their houses.
The same must be said of a group of industrial villages peopled with clothiers in the neighbourhood of another Normandy city, Elbœuf. When Baudrillart visited them in 1878-1880, he was struck with the undoubted advantages offered by a combination of agriculture with industry. Clean houses, clean dresses, and a general stamp of well-being were characteristic of these villages.
Happily enough, weaving is not the only small industry of both this region and Brittany. On the contrary, scores of other small industries enliven the villages and burgs. At Fougères (in Ille-et-Vilaine, to the north-east of Reims) one sees how the factory has contributed to the development of various small and domestic trades. In 1830 this town was a great centre for the domestic fabrication of the so-called chaussons de tresse. The competition of the prisons killed, however, this primitive industry; but it was soon substituted by the fabrication of soft socks in felt (chaussons de feutre). This last industry also went down, and then the fabrication of boots and shoes was introduced, this last giving origin, in its turn, to the boot and shoe factories, of which there are now thirty-three at Fougères, employing 8,000 workers[150] (yearly production about 5,000,000 pairs). But at the same time domestic industries took a new development. Thousands of women are employed now in their houses in sewing the “uppers” and in embroidering fancy shoes. Moreover, quite a number of smaller workshops grew up in the neighbourhood, for the fabrication of cardboard boxes, wooden heels, and so on, as well as a number of tanneries, big and small. And M. Ardouin Dumazet’s remark is, that one is struck to find, owing to these industries, an undoubtedly higher level of well-being in the villages—quite unforeseen in the centre of this purely agricultural region.[151]