Gloves, Past and Present

by Willard M. Smith

Angelus finds the merry-makers still romping, singing, dancing; a little wearily the couples break apart, and the townsfolk once more flock through the streets, transformed in the afterglow to running rivers of gold, and are lost in the stilly dusk of the cathedral. And now the tapers gleam like stars upon the altar of Saint Anne, and the fading flowers send forth a sweet, benumbing perfume, as heads are bowed to receive the evening benediction. On the rough, uneven stones of the floor they kneel, imploring in their hearts the good saint who protects and prospers all devout glovers, that the craft may wax stronger with every year in the city of Grenoble.

So we see an entire community uniting in a great religious, civic, industrial and social festival to celebrate and re-consecrate the craft of glove-making. The place of honor this calling held in former times is unique and striking. In the chapters which follow we shall observe how gloves—and especially the gloves of Grenoble—have sustained their early tradition through three hundred years of political vicissitude and commercial struggle.

Chapter V.
THE GLOVERS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

“Lo, the old order changeth!”

How the glove craft of Grenoble spontaneously sprang up, took firm root and grew until it controlled, to a great degree, the fortunes of that city, has been shown in the foregoing brief summary of events. The many phases of life with which glove-making was bound up in mediæval days, its social and economic importance to the community and its pre-eminence among the early industries, cannot have failed to be apparent. From about 1600 the chief city of the Dauphiné underwent an astonishingly rapid development.

But, if the seventeenth century was little short of phenomenal in glove history, glove-making in Grenoble was not fated to become one of the leading enterprises of the world without a struggle. The hundred years that followed were at once the most sterile and the most fecund in the annals of the trade—and, for that matter, the same is equally true of the eighteenth century as regards its bearing upon the destinies of Europe. Destructive of immediate results and of contemporary prosperity, this era which endured the birth throes of modern states and the upheavals of the Revolution, was, nevertheless, big with prophetic good. And it is to the everlasting honor of the glovers of Grenoble that they bore their part in this vast social and political movement, which temporarily threatened death to their personal interests, with their eyes fixed, not upon gain, but upon those high ideals and principles to which their faith clung, even in the midst of business paralysis and social chaos.

While the flame of the Revolution did not break forth until nearly the close of the century, the spirit of modernity and unrest attacked the French people fully a hundred years before the fall of the Bastille. In Grenoble the transition from the old order to the new was anticipated as early as 1691, in response to a proclamation of the king that the business of the country be taxed to refill the royal treasury.

After the brilliant victories of his early reign, Louis XIV. had suffered severe reverses. He was gravely in need of money to repair the military organization. New resources must somehow be found, and that immediately. The only adequate answer which presented itself took the form of taxation imposed upon the business interests of the realm. The glovers of Grenoble, accordingly, in 1691, organized themselves into the Corporation des Gantiers, or Corporation of Glovers, to determine how heavily their industry should be taxed in support of the régime. While they felt loyally obliged to contribute all they were able to the king’s cause, by the very act of their organizing and by virtue of the funds they furnished, they became masters at home, respected by the monarch, independent and self-governing. Their sacrifice of money to the government had, in the same hour, bought them their freedom in all that pertained to their local affairs.

The importance of this initial association for an economic purpose scarcely can be overestimated. The Corporation later proved the unit of strength which was to render the glovers, as a body, invincible through the endless chain of vicissitudes, political, moral and industrial, which all but swept away, in the next hundred years, the totality of progress gained in the seventeenth century. In 1590 Grenoble had not 10,000 inhabitants. In 1692 Vauban values the population at 33,000. During the seventeenth century, then, its numbers had more than tripled, and this must needs strike one as the more remarkable inasmuch as city life in that epoch was little developed. Such growth, as we have seen, went hand in hand with the evolution of its industries. In 1692, Vauban wrote:

“The city contains a very numerous bourgeoisie, and is filled with a high quality of artisans which furnish a great variety of products to the largest part of the province. Its increase has been such that it actually is bursting out of its new ramparts. The city has dire need of expansion; all ranks of people demand it irresistibly.”