Many centuries ago, certain chieftains of the Allobroges were inspired to plant their little village of Cularo at the supremely strategic point of all southern Gaul. They built it a trifle to the East of the meeting place of two rivers, the Isère and the torrent of the Drac; north of them stretched the high, unbroken wall of the lower Alps. And there in the sheltered valley they lived and were protected against incursions of other more warlike tribes—until the great conqueror of the world poured its invincible legions over the mountain barriers, and Rome seized the little Allobrogian defence town to be a colonial outpost of considerable military importance. On the site of Cularo sprang up the strongly fortified Gratianopolis, thus called in honor of the Emperor Gratian who reinforced the walls begun by Diocletian and Maximian. Later, with the decline of the Roman power and the development of the Frankish nation, the Latin name was abbreviated to Grenoble—by which the modern city is known to-day as the chef-lieu of the department of the Isère in France.
The town, from its birth to the end of the sixteenth century, was familiarly styled “la ville du pont,” the city of the bridge. For more than a thousand years it commanded the only point where it was possible to cross the river Isère. It was also designated “the old Roman route town,” for it lay on the natural highroad which linked Italy on the north with the country of France, the valley of the Po with that of the Rhone. The quaint, turreted bridge which spanned the river in mediæval days provided passage to the Alps from French soil, and was the gateway to France for strangers approaching over the mountains. While its strategic position in time of war must be apparent, the site of the city was no less vital to trade and to later industrial development. As early as 1615 Grenoble was known, far and wide, as “the city of glovers.”
The earliest records of the consuls of Grenoble, which have been preserved almost intact since 1244, tell us only of “drapers, tailors, apothecaries and shoeing-smiths” in the city; and in 1489 they mention in addition sailors, pastry cooks, carpenters, barbers—but not glovers. Only the weavers, tanners and curriers of wool and hemp presage the industrial future. There seems to be some question of a lone glover in 1328 who gave his services to the dauphin. But probably this workman made numerous things for his fellow-citizens, gloves included, and at the same time was a dealer in furs and perfumes. In the statutes of the glovers of Paris, dating from 1190, they are styled “marchands-maîtres-gantiers-parfumeurs,” mastermerchants-of-gloves-and-perfumes, and are accorded the exclusive right to prepare and sell these luxuries. Furs were usually added to their stock in trade. But the solitary glove-maker of 1328 was in no sense a pioneer of the glove guild in Grenoble, else had he apprenticed to himself other workmen, and the town been filled with glovers fully a hundred years earlier than it was.
The latter part of the sixteenth century was a period of war and domestic upheaval for Grenoble, during which the city government was tossed back and forth among predatory barons until, in 1590, Lesdiguières, “the King of the Mountains,” took the town by siege in the name of Henry IV. Under Lesdiguières’ remarkably public-spirited governorship, peace returned, commerce was resumed, and natural resources, scarcely recognized before, were drawn upon for the development of new crafts, whose products, now for the first time, were to be exported to all parts of France and even into other countries. Among these new crafts glove-making instantly sprang into prominence.
For the raw materials were everywhere at hand. On the slopes of the mountains, enclosing like the tiers of a vast amphitheatre the city seemingly chosen by Nature to become the mis-en-scène of the glove drama, millions of wild goats fed. Already the tanners and tawers had tested the admirable quality of their skins, and those of the females in particular were found to be of the fine, soft variety, peculiarly free from flaws, so admirably adapted to the making of gloves. For the process of tawing the skins, moreover, the waters of the Isère, because of their singular purity, were incomparable. And in the city itself—its population now greatly increased by prosperity and peace—lived scores of skilled artisans and their sons, well fitted for the careful cutting and shaping of gloves; while the women, equipped with three-cornered needles, quickly became adepts in sewing gloves by hand.
Other occupations, which now received special impetus in mediæval Grenoble, were the weaving of hemp textiles—for hemp was the most prolific crop of the alluvial river valleys—paper-making, and the manufacture of playing-cards; about 1630, the fruit of the vineyards on the mountain slopes, was turned into wine for exportation, and beautiful pottery and tiles were made of the rich clay deposits of the Drac. But of all these crafts, the one taking first rank from the very start, and the one which quickly identified itself with the town, was gloves. In the municipal acts, glovers often appear after 1606. In 1619 Claude Honoré, a master glover, was elected consul. And in 1664 a certain skilled workman, Jean Charpel, an artist in his line, proclaims himself glover to the king.
“One sees the glovers,” observes a noted traveller of those times, “filling all the streets after 1610, and especially the rues Saint-Laurent, Perrière, Très-Cloître, and the suburb, together with the curriers, tanners and tawers, and the combers of hemp.”
Although most historians date the close of the Middle Ages and the beginnings of modern Europe from the era of the Protestant Reformation, spanning the period from 1517 to about 1560, Grenoble remained for a hundred years longer a mediæval city in every sense of the word. France continued a Catholic country, and Grenoble, sequestered in a southern province, scarcely felt the disquieting breath of the great religious revolution which was sweeping mid-Europe. Its ideas and its civilization changed little, even while fresh consciousness of its natural powers and material resources was impregnating the city with new industries. The spirit of craftsmanship—that joyous love of perfection, not only in the fine but also in the useful arts, which characterized the Renaissance—was still the ruling temper of its citizens; and the guild of glovers, the most numerous and influential of all the artisans, particularly personified this civic character. If we would gain some notion of the part glove-making actually played in the lives of these people, and the status of the glove-craft as it first appeared in mediæval Europe, we have only to journey in imagination to Grenoble in the middle of the seventeenth century, on the occasion of the great annual festival of the glovers.
It is a clear, tranquil morning in the latter part of July, 1650, and the sun, scarcely an hour’s march above the mountains, is flooding with almost tropic brilliancy the matchless paradise of the Dauphiné. In its confluence of rivers and fair valleys, the ancient capital city, Grenoble, shines in the midst of the green plain of Grésivaudan. Impossible to describe the ever-changing charm of the horizons!—as, from the city itself, the eye sweeps eastward, northward, westward, over range upon range of snow-crowned mountains, under a sky so pure, so glowing, that distant peaks apparently loom near, and the cool breath of Alpine heights gently smites the cheek.
Eastward, the prongs, the pinnacles, the clear-cut outlines of a sierra; it is the chain of Belledonne. From the devastation of its summits and terraced slopes, one divines beneath its summer cloak of verdure concealing only its lower descent, the adamantine rock moulded for all time by the glaciers of the ice age. It is indeed the advance guard of those massive crystal formations, the veritable backbone of the Alps, which penetrate into France from Mont Blanc. On a morning like this, the Swiss peak itself can be seen, cleaving the far-away heavens which overhang Savoy.