A Book of the Cevennes

by S. Baring-Gould

The first steps taken in this new culture were slow and timid during nearly a century. Francis I. accorded special favours. His successor, Henry II., is said to have been the first King of France to wear silk stockings, 1550. The religious troubles and the rivalries between the great seigneurs did much to impede the progress of agriculture and of sericulture. The cultivators of the soil were crushed by taxation and exactions of every sort, as well as by the ravages of rival political and religious factions.

But when Henry IV. was well settled on his throne, and the League was at an end, it was possible for agriculture and all the trades save that of the armourer to revive. Henry was keenly desirous to raise them from the deplorable condition into which they had been plunged during the long period of civil and religious discord which had marked the end of the dynasty of the Valois.

The Béarnais, who had spent his early years among farmers, nourished great ideas as to how to help them on and to make trade flourish in the land, so great as sometimes to startle his most devoted councillors, notably Sully, his finance minister. The King, seeing that the industry of weaving silks was on the increase, and that to supply the looms raw material had to be imported in great quantities, was desirous of encouraging the production of silk in France, and he confided to a gentleman of the Vivarais, Olivier de Serres, the mission of developing sericulture by writing a treatise advocating it. De Serres published his "La cueillette de la soie" in 1599. Two years later he brought to Paris twenty thousand young mulberry trees, which were planted in the gardens of the Tuileries. At the same time Traucat, a gardener at Nîmes, with royal assistance, erected vast nurseries, which in forty years supplied over five millions of mulberry stocks. Sully, who had at first thought the King's projects chimerical, threw himself eagerly into them when he saw that they were likely to increase the wealth of the country; prizes were offered, subventions were promised to such as should take active part in the development of the industry. There exist still some of the old mulberry trees planted four centuries ago, that the Cevenol peasants designated Sullys in commemoration of the great minister of Henry.

Sériculture made no progress during the reign of Louis XIII. It lost ground, and it was Colbert, the celebrated minister of Louis XIV., who resumed forty years later the policy of Henry IV., and had to struggle against just the same difficulties of inertia and indifference among nobles and peasants alike. Colbert, following the same idea as his predecessors, wished that France should produce the raw material needed for the looms of Lyons, which were using 500,000 kilogrammes of foreign silk, whereas the French harvest produced at the outside 20,000 kilos of raw silk.

To attain this result, exemptions from taxation were accorded to plantations of mulberry trees and to magnanaries of silk. In the Langue d'Oc, the silkworm is called magnan, derived from the Latin magnus, as giving the greatest profit to the farmer, and the sheds in which the worm is brought to spin is called a magnanerie. A bonus of twenty-four sols, equal to five francs, was given for every mulberry plant that lived over three years. The Protestants of the south devoted themselves especially and with great energy to the rearing of silkworms. In 1650 De Comprieu, Consul of Le Vigan, introduced the new industry into the Cévennes from the Vivarais where it had taken root, due to the initiation of Olivier de Serres.

A few years later Colbert brought a silk-spinner, Pierre Benay, from Bologna and installed him near Aubenas, in a factory for the spinning of the thread.

The production of the cocoon and of silk was prospering and developing, when in 1605 the Edict of Nantes was revoked, and this disastrously affected the growing industry. The Protestants, hunted out and persecuted, were forced to expatriate themselves, and carry their knowledge and their energies elsewhere. The creation of silk-weaving factories in Switzerland, Germany, and England was mainly due to these refugees. Some 50,000 French Protestants had come to England. Of these the silk-spinners settled in Spitalfields, and introduced several new branches of their art. At this time foreign silks were freely imported, and about 700,000 pounds' worth were annually admitted. But the establishment of the refugees in this country led to monopolies and restrictions. In 1692 they obtained a patent, giving them the exclusive right to manufacture lute-strings and à-la-modes, the two fashionable silks of the day, and in 1697 their solicitations were effectual in obtaining from Parliament a prohibition, not only of the importation of all European manufactured goods, but also of those of India and China. From this period the smuggling of silks from France became extensive, reaching, it is said, to the value of £500,000 per annum.

In France a disaster at the beginning of the eighteenth century gave a new impulse to sericulture in the south. The winter of 1709 was of exceptional severity, and froze the olive trees of Languedoc and Provence. The farmers, obliged to root out their stricken olives, replaced them by mulberries, and the rearing of silkworms, the spinning and weaving of the silk made rapid progress. From this time sericulture issued from a period of groping and hesitation to become a standard industry. The production of cocoons rose to six and seven millions of kilogrammes between 1760 and 1790, again to slacken during the period of revolution. Nor were the first years of the nineteenth century, marked as they were by the great wars of the Empire, favourable to the industry. But an event that had considerable influence on the destinies of agricultural France had taken place. The lands of the clergy and of the emigrated nobility had been declared national property, and had been sold at ridiculously low prices to the peasants on account of the depreciation of the paper money of the period, the assignats. The peasants worked with enthusiasm and energy on the land as proprietors where they had lived painfully as common labourers. Great plantations were made on ground newly cleared, and so soon as peace gave the people breathing time, the production of France doubled as by enchantment. From 500,000 kilogrammes, the output of silk passed to a million, between 1826 and 1830, and between 1840 and 1854 it grew to two millions.

"The silkworm is the caterpillar of the mulberry-tree moth (Bombyx mori) belonging to the tribe of mealy-winged nocturnal insects, of which in the summer evenings we see so many examples. The eggs of this moth are smaller than grains of mustard-seed, very numerous, slightly flattened, yellowish at first, but changing in a few days to a slate colour. In temperate climates they can be preserved through the winter without hatching until the time when the mulberry tree puts forth its leaves in the following spring. This tree forms the entire food of the caterpillar, and seems almost exclusively its own; for while other trees and vegetables nourish myriads of insects, the mulberry tree is seldom attacked by any but this insect, which in many parts of its native country, China, inhabits the leaves in the open air, and goes through all its changes without any attention from man. The common mulberry (Morus nigra), so well known in Great Britain, is not the best species for the nourishment of the silkworm. The white-fruited mulberry (M. alba), a native of China, is the best, and is greatly preferred by the insect." [9]