The processes carried on in the great chemical works at Chauny are in their way as interesting as the processes carried on at St.-Gobain or in the glassworks here. But I cannot say they are as pleasant, or even as picturesque. Commercially speaking, the output of the chemical works of this great company is at least as important now as the output of its glassworks. The chemical works grew up out of the necessities of the glassworks. When the company was led, at the beginning of this century, by the pressure of the war epoch, to adopt in its glassworks the use of the artificial soda made by Leblanc, the Director soon found it advisable to have the artificial soda manufactured by the company itself. This led to the establishment of the chemical works at Chauny, and down to 1867 the company itself was the chief consumer of these chemical products. The Exposition of that year widened the horizon, by making France acquainted with the agricultural importance of the English fabrication of 'superphosphates' as fertilisers. At the Exposition of 1878 the Company of St.-Gobain exhibited, and received a gold medal, for superphosphates, which it was then turning out at the rate of 20,000 tons a year from three establishments—one at Chauny, one at L'Oseraie, and one at Montluçon. As the company was then turning out a great production of sulphuric acid, and owned the only important mine of pyrites in France, it went on with increasing energy, and now, in 1889, shows an output of 110,000 tons of superphosphates, from no fewer than six establishments—Chauny, Aubervilliers, Marennes, Saint-Fons near Lyon, L'Oseraie, and Montluçon. Besides these it possesses salt-works at Art-sur-Meurthe, its iron pyrites works at Sain-Bel, and some important deposits of phosphates at Beauval. These give employment to no fewer than 3,300 workmen, independently of those employed by the company at its various glassworks in the glass manufacture. At Chauny alone the chemical works employ 1,350 of these workmen. For these, as for its glassworkers, the company has established a system of savings institutions and of pensions. Medical advice and medicines are given gratuitously to the workmen and their families. The co-operative association founded by M. Cochin at St.-Gobain has not, I believe, been extended to the chemical works; but the company maintains establishments which supply the chief wants of the workpeople at cost price, and the dwellings provided for them, either gratuitously or at very low rents, now number more than seven hundred, independently of the dormitories for unmarried workmen. Retiring pensions, varying from one-fifth to one-fourth of the wages of the workmen, are granted to all after a certain number of years of service, and to workmen disabled by disease or by accidents.
At the pyrites-mine of Sain-Bel, in the South, near Tarare, where more than 400 workmen are employed—300 as miners and the rest in the works above named, the former earning on an average 1,309 fr. 25 c., and the latter on an average 1,114 fr. 90 c. a year—a system exists under which any workman who chooses to put aside his savings in a caisse de la vieillesse receives from the company, when he has completed twenty-five years of service, or has attained the age of fifty-five years, an annual pension more than equal to the amount at that time of his savings in the caisse.
As I have said, the manufacture of chemical products is not so pleasant or so picturesque in itself as the manufacture of plate-glass and mirrors. Within the last decade the output of sulphuric acid alone from the company's works has more than doubled, and now amounts to more than 200,000 tons a year. The gases disengaged in the manufacture of chemical fertilisers, such as carbonic acid, sulphuretted hydrogen, fluorine of silicium, and so on, it was found at Chauny, destroyed entirely in a very short time the polish of the glass in the window-panes of the houses opposite to the works, and certainly did not improve either the respiratory organs or the general health of the workmen. The company therefore spent a good deal of time and of money in working out a system for the complete condensation of these gases. I am told that it has proved completely successful, and is now established in all the chemical works of the company, to the great advantage not only of the workmen, but of the company also.
Although Chauny is really a very ancient city—dating back at least to the age of Charlemagne, when the monks of Cuissy and St.-Eloi-Fontaine, with the keen eye of those early agriculturists for a good thing, reclaimed its marshes and turned them into a fat land, yielding, as an old local dicton tells us, the
'septem commoda vitæ,
Poma, nemus, segetes, linum, pecus, herba, racemus.'
—it has almost nothing to show to-day in the way of antique architecture. Of the 'seven comforts of life,' the vine has vanished also; but all the others flourish abundantly, and the people of Chauny have little to complain of on the score of the natural resources of their region. During the wars, though, of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the place was so often taken and retaken that its buildings were pretty well battered to pieces. The English of Harry the Fifth stormed it in 1417, and England held it for a quarter of a century, during which period an incident occurred much more creditable to the burghers of Chauny than is the taking of the Bastille in 1789 to the citizens of Paris. Monstrelet tells the story in a quaint and vigorous fashion. Chauny at that time was part of the appanage of the Duc d'Orléans, then a prisoner in England, and it was held for the conquerors by a French, nobleman, 'Messire Collard de Mailly,' who had accepted the office of Bailli of Vermandois from King Henry of England. The burghers of Chauny, who had lived for two centuries in the enjoyment of the rights and privileges granted them in a royal charter by Philip Augustus, did not like this state of things at all. So they made up their minds to demolish the castle, lest 'Messire Collard de Mailly' should fill it with English soldiers and make himself quite unendurable.
It was a rather hardy enterprise, and the burghers went about it with great coolness and good sense. Theirs was a real rising of the citizens of a town to abate a nuisance which threatened their liberties, and not, like the attack on the Bastille, a blow struck at law, order, and the constituted authorities of a great kingdom by a subsidised mob; and their leaders were the most respectable men of Chauny—not a crew of thieves and murderers like the infamous Maillard, that 'hero of the Bastille,' against whom his own employers and allies were eventually forced to proceed as the chief of a gang of ruffians, and who, not content with assassinating political prisoners and stealing their property in Paris, roamed all over the Departments of the Seine and the Seine-et-Oise, torturing farmers to make them give up their money, and maddening the countryside with outrages not to be described.
Jean and Mathieu de Longueval, Pierre Piat,[7] and other 'notable persons' of Chauny, bound themselves together by an oath, in 1432, to 'take the fortress of the city and demolish it.' They chose an occasion when the bailli, Collard de Mailly, and his brother, Ferry de Mailly, with some of their men, went riding out of the fortress 'to take their pleasure in the town.'
With a few courageous 'companion adventurers,' previously posted in hiding near the castle, these determined burghers suddenly sallied 'forth from the place where they were watching the castle gates, and, no one paying any heed to them, entered the castle courtyard, drew up the bridge after them, and took possession.'
'News of this going after the two brothers, they were sore displeased, but they could do nothing,' says the chronicler; 'for the citizens who were in the plot straightway fell to sounding the tocsin, and gathering about the castle in great numbers, with arms and with sticks, were soon admitted into it.'