Gloves, Past and Present

by Willard M. Smith

The Corporation of Glovers, however, suffered meanwhile from the growing restlessness and vague ambitions of its workers. The old regulations were gradually and inevitably giving way before the awakening consciousness of a new race of wage-earners, grown almost morbidly distrustful of vested authority. The Dauphiné was afflicted with the bad example of many of its aristocrats. The nobility was indeed unworthy of its rank. The pervading restiveness and insubordination of the working class sprang out of a deep, instinctive resentment against the prevailing order. Of course, the first point of friction lay between the apprentices and the masters.

Though the severities of apprenticeship were modified, the former good faith between these two was irretrievably lost. Fear of foreign competition faded into insignificance before this intimate situation—the suspicious attitude toward one another of masters and workmen. Such was bound to be the price of a last, furious assault upon the mouldering ramparts of long-decayed feudalism.

The master glovers, on their side, shared in the social discontent, and participated in the long drawn-out struggle between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie to determine which of these should predominate in the local tribunals. The glovers of Grenoble contended that they, as an organized body of people, no longer merely having a trade, but enjoying also a social position encroaching on the importance of the man of the robe, the magistrate and the attorney, should have the largest voice in the making of the laws. Their product, they argued, was bringing money into France from England, Germany, Switzerland, and other northern countries, where more than one-half of their gloves were sold. In 1775, it is stated, out of 100,000 dozen pairs of gloves made in Grenoble, 60,000 were on commission for the foreigner. Naturally enough these manufacturers and merchants felt that over an idle, and even vicious, aristocracy, their opinions and practical needs should lead in shaping public legislation.

Further, bitter contention involved the business men of Grenoble with the lawyers of that city, for the latter persisted in looking down upon plain citizens not bred in their profession, and in excluding them from public affairs. In 1789 all glovers were shut out of the city council. In view of the fact that they “gave work daily to more than eight thousand persons, and thus enabled to live one-third of the population of Grenoble,” the glovers resented bitterly this deliberate indignity from “les hommes du robe.” It only fired them the more to throw themselves into the great conflict ahead; to prove that, even if they could not discourse so eloquently upon public matters as those who had insulted them, “at least they knew how to talk less, act more, and give all they possessed” to the cause of justice.

Thus, with the greatest crisis, perhaps, of modern times approaching, the glovers found themselves, workmen and masters alike, drawn almost before they knew it, into the very heart of the maelstrom. Industry itself was at a standstill. Nay, it was slipping backward; for in the midst of such internal suppression of terrible passions, such scorching hatreds, and ideals to set the world on fire, what footing could there be for the arts of peace?

And then the black cloud burst. Grenoble was drained of men whom the actual eruption of the Revolution forced to flee its walls. It was emptied of soldiers departing for the centre of action. The Revolution put out of business many of those following religious vocations, whose offices now were enlisted in grimmer callings; it wiped out of existence the gentlemen of leisure. There had been many of these latter in the beautiful, old city of the Dauphiné.

And who was there left to wear gloves, in all the length and breadth of France? What was to become, in such an hour, of an industry which addressed itself to the pleasure-loving rich, and to the privileged classes? The rich? There were no more rich. Privilege—the title, the robe, the gown? Lost off in the wild scurry of fugitives! In the appalling reaction, such a harmless mark of elegance as the glove, became, so to speak, branded with horror. To be seen in gloves in those days was to be marked for a criminal against mankind; to be suspected of being a Royalist, a lover of the king, a Judas to the People.

So we have the spectacle of the glovers, “plain men of business,” throwing over every material advantage, to hurl themselves and all they possessed into the French Revolution. “The Revolution!” cries M. Xavier Roux in his invaluable book, The Glovers of Grenoble, published for private circulation in that city in 1887, “they themselves desired it. They sacrificed to it their money and their effort.” Again he says:

“It would seem as though, in their eyes, there were no longer practical ‘interests’; there were only ideas. Never, perhaps, as then, has a whole people forgotten its industry, it business relations, and suffered itself to be moved by principle alone.”

And yet one spectacle more remains—the silent factories on the Isère. For the first time since the founding of its main industry and source of prosperity in the past, we behold the paradox of a gloveless Grenoble!