FROM ARTIST TO ARTISAN
“There is nothing impossible to industry.”—_Clio, one of the Seven
Wise Men of Greece._
Until now we have been dealing with revolutionary movements in the
political sense, and, indirectly, their effects upon the glove trade. We
presently have to consider the great revolution within the industry
itself, which came with the introduction of machinery in the nineteenth
century, whereby productive labor was completely transformed and
glove-making permanently modernized.
Early in the nineteenth century, the factory system was firmly
established in England. The French, however, held out against the
system, in great measure, as might be expected of a people who recently
had fought so passionately for individual liberty. Child labor was an
evil against which the French economists were vehement in their
protestations. Apprenticing the young was an entirely different matter,
without doubt, from enslaving children from dawn to dark in mills, where
they were compelled to repeat unceasingly some mechanical detail of the
process, with very little hope of enlightenment or advancement in their
occupation. The French, progressive but not greedy, sought to maintain
industry upon a humane basis.
With the revival of glove-making at the time of the First Empire, the
honored methods of craftsmanship still were in practice. Gloves were
made entirely by hand, and the glove-maker—whether designer or
workman—was, in the true sense, an artist. Patterns, cut from thin
boards, were laid on the leather, and the shape traced with lead pencil.
These designs were cut out with a pair of long scissors. The parts were
then sewed together. In order to keep the stitches uniform, the pieces
were placed between a pair of jaws, the holding edges of which were
serrated with fine saw teeth; and the sewer by passing the needle
forwards and backwards between each of these teeth secured neat,
even-length stitches. The embroidery on the backs was done with very
great care, and necessarily consumed much time. Although these gloves
possessed the charm peculiar to most hand-made articles, the matter of
fit was purely accidental, for it depended partly upon the elasticity of
the leather and even more upon the skill of the maker.
In point of skill no glove workers in the world at that time surpassed
those of Grenoble. Relying wholly upon the art of her workmen and the
dexterity of her sewing women, the ancient glove city still set the
standard of excellence for the rest of Europe—even in the years when she
was not in a position to turn out so many gloves, nor sell her product
so cheaply, as Paris. Though forced for some time to take secondary
place, quantitatively, Grenoble never yielded to her rivals in the
matter of quality. If she could not produce the _most_ gloves, she at
least would furnish the market with the _best_ gloves.
The finest tawed skins to be had were prepared for the Grenoble glovers
in the mills at Millau and Annonay. Their value excelled that of any
skins tawed by foreigners. On this fact, however, the prestige of the
Grenoble glove did not rest. These beautiful skins were sent abroad to
manufacturers all over Europe, so, in themselves, they did not create a
monopoly in favor of the city really responsible for their superiority.
No, it was her method of making gloves, the cutting and the sewing of
them, which actually distinguished Grenoble. Her workers enjoyed a
privileged position in the industry; they were celebrated far and near.
Other localities did their best to entice them away; especially did
Germany, Piedmont and Switzerland offer inducements, and, whenever
possible, strangers would enter the Grenoble shops to spy upon these
artists and steal their secrets. But they were never able to carry this
far enough to establish any great competition in the international
markets. The Grenoble glove continued to be much sought and exceedingly
envied. Not able to procure elsewhere gloves of equal beauty,
shapeliness and finish, merchants far and wide were obliged to supply
themselves from the city of inimitable artists in the Dauphiné; and
thus, without the slightest compulsion from the Grenoble manufacturers,
these traders stimulated their business and spread their fame.
The sewing women, M. Roux tells us, constituted a peculiar source of
wealth to the Grenoble industry. Their exquisite handwork defied all
rivalry; there were no other such accomplished sewers in all France, nor
in any other country. To-day they are still celebrated; but then they
formed an exclusive factor of Grenoble’s prestige. Apprenticed while
young girls, they looked upon glove-making as a career, an art in which
they desired to perfect themselves. The traditions of glove-making
forebears held them to the ancient _metier_ of the place; and even more
than the glovers and the male workers, they met the encroachments of
self-seeking foreigners with an intuitive distrust and proud resistance.
Under such conditions as these, the glove industry in Grenoble was able
to support successfully the extreme vicissitudes of the
post-Revolutionary era. Even while the wave of prosperity rolled, now
high, now low, in face of other manufacturers it maintained an
invincible superiority—none excelled the skill of its handwork. Others
were unable to counterfeit this; it could not be imitated; never
elsewhere was it equalled.
But meanwhile, right at home, unsuspected forces were slowly working,
which were destined to prove at the same time propitious and full of
danger for the Grenoble glovers. The real revolution was approaching;
the great, internal change which was to be the undoing of the old, the
uprearing of a new industrial system upon the razed foundations of the
old. The days of the craftsman and the artist were numbered.
Every genius has his forerunner. About the year 1819, Vallet d’Artois, a
French glove manufacturer, invented steel punches in three sizes, each
of which would cut, or punch, out of leather two dozen gloves at once.
This invention was the first step toward the introduction of modern
machinery into the glove industry. It multiplied the efficiency of the
glove cutter, so far as speed was concerned, twenty-four times.
In the same year, the genius who was finally to revolutionize
glove-making was barely entering young manhood. Xavier Jouvin has
sometimes been called a Parisian. He was born, however, in Grenoble, on
the eighth day of December, 1800, in the house in the rue St. Laurent,
now bearing the number 57. Jouvin was in Paris as a student in 1817, and
he lived there again in 1825. But he never felt at home in the least in
the French capital. He was a provincial by tradition, birth and natural
inclination; a student and a dreamer whose spirit was nourished by
seclusion—by journeying inward and exploring its own solitudes rather
than by contact with men and affairs.
It seems significant that the first year of the new century should have
ushered into the world one of the leading mechanical minds of that
epoch. It is also strikingly appropriate that Jouvin should have been a
native of Grenoble, since his name, above all others, is identified with
the modern industry of glove-making. He was a visionary, whose single
need was the necessity of inventing something all his days. He could not
see any kind of work going on near him but he must think how he could
make it easier by the creation of some mechanical instrument. Without
ambition for fortune or for fame, he was only too contented to proscribe
his life within apparently narrow limits. Returning from Paris in 1825,
he was resolved to enjoy obscurity, the provincial and rural environment
in which his talent throve; while occupying his mind almost exclusively
with the study of mechanical processes necessary to assure exact
regularity in cutting gloves.
Already this young man had invented a mowing machine, and a planisphere,
by means of which, automatically, one could determine the position of
the stars for every night in the year. Now, in turning his attention to
the problem of regularity of cut in gloves, he was really broaching the
great factor which has given modern glove-making its ascendency over the
old method—namely, the element of _fit_. At the outset he perceived the
exact terms of the problem which he had set himself to solve. First, he
must make a general classification of the different sizes and shapes of
hands one meets; secondly, he must ascertain the precise extension of
the skin required for the measurements of the hand he wished to fit.
By minutely studying hands in the Hospital of Grenoble, Jouvin
discovered and wrote out in a rectangle thirty-two different sizes of
hands. He furthermore recognized five types—very broad, broad, medium,
slender and very slender—each type being divided into two classes. As
there were thirty-two sizes for each class, and five types altogether,
this made three hundred and twenty different numbers of gloves, which
proved more than requisite to the demands of the finest trade.
The dies which Jouvin invented and perfected for cutting out these three
hundred and twenty different gradations of gloves consisted of the
calibre, or glove pattern, and the punch, or _emporte-pièce_, and were
made of fine tempered steel blades fastened to a back of cast iron. In
making the heavier grades of gloves, the die was struck with a ponderous
mallet, cutting only one thickness at a time. By cutting only one piece
in this way, the artisan avoided any holes in the skins which might have
been made in killing the wild animal or in dressing the leather. The
thumbs and gussets, or fourchettes—the strips inserted to form the sides
of the fingers—were cut with separate dies from pieces not large enough
for the body of the glove, thus utilizing nearly every scrap of the
material. As the leather was first placed upon a block to receive the
blows of the mallet, this grade of goods came to be called “block cut.”
In “table cut” gloves, however, the leather was tranked out on a table
and shaped for the size desired. Then, by means of a power press many
pairs were cut at once. The nicest part of this process consists in
getting the leather in proper shape. Different sizes may be cut with the
same pattern by estimating accurately the elasticity of the leather.
Jouvin’s calibre is the same by which—under many different systems, of
course—all gloves are cut to-day.
Jouvin also studied to determine what degrees of pressure the skin will
withstand in different parts, in order that, in every case, just the
right piece of material should be selected to produce the measurements
desired. Expert knowledge of skins is equally important with proper use
of utensils in producing an accurately fitting glove.
In his work Jouvin sought the satisfaction of the scientist and the
artist rather than any financial benefit which might have accrued to him
from his remarkable system. When he had completed his invention, he
hardly realized its pecuniary value; he took out a patent for France,
but not for any foreign country. The immediate effect of his achievement
was somewhat curious.
During Jouvin’s own lifetime his invention not only failed to profit the
glovers of his native city, but actually worked them harm. He himself
groped his way for several years, in an attempt to find capital and
workers which should prove the usefulness of his new method. But the
manufacturers scoffed at him. They declared that Jouvin had “vulgarized”
glove cutting. The glove cutter was dethroned; he was no longer an
artist. A machine did his work, and it was evident that with this
machine a good cutter could turn out good gloves from poor skins, while
a poor cutter would turn out poor gloves from good skins. The calibre
certainly was a mischievous device, and had turned the glove art
topsy-turvy!
Like any inventor, Jouvin himself was not greatly affected by all this
talk, nor by the rebuffs he met whenever he tried to interest business
men; for he was absorbed in the possibilities of further improvement
upon his invention. He had discovered the calibre in 1834; in
1838—without having drawn a cent of profit thus far—he added the punch,
or _emporte-pièce_, for automatically cutting gloves to measure. In the
following year, however, his work suddenly received conspicuous public
notice. It was rewarded a bronze medal at the Industrial Exposition in
Paris. From that moment, Jouvin’s future as a glove manufacturer was
assured, for men with money rallied to his support. The first thing the
Grenoble glovers knew, Germany, Switzerland and Italy had all seized
upon their fellow-citizen’s admirable invention and were turning it to
tremendous commercial account. Their outputs were increasing by leaps
and bounds. But, in France, one factory only—that of the
inventor—worked, while his compatriots stood still for the benefit of
foreign competitors to whom the Jouvin system was free, while debarred
from French manufacturers under the terms of the patent.
Of course, lawsuits against Jouvin arose, as other glovers endeavored to
have the broad, general idea of stamping out gloves become _domaine
public_, or public property. But the industry had so far diminished in
Grenoble in 1840 that that city was not mentioned as one of the
principle producers of gloves.
Without doubt, the conservative manufacturers of that town learned their
lesson. For, in 1849, the year in which the Jouvin patents expired, they
hastened to shake off this decade of depression which had seen them
bound hand and foot, while the glove-makers of other lands rapidly
eclipsed them in importance; and immediately they installed in their
shops the new system. With their unrivalled skill and natural precedence
now reinforced by up-to-date mechanical methods, the glovers of Grenoble
effected a lightning recovery. Moreover, their misfortunes had not been
due to the lack of mechanical equipment alone. Financial panic in
America had robbed them temporarily of one of their best clients; and
the price of skins had risen to an exorbitant figure in France, even
while foreigners knew how to get them, without paying a heavy duty, from
Grenoble’s own mills at Annonay.
These conditions, however, were soon to be righted. But another
challenge to the old régime loomed a few years ahead. In 1867, at the
Paris Exposition, some Grenoble glovers paused in front of a fragile,
little machine, glanced at it with curiosity, and went home without any
idea that that modest piece of mechanism was going to cap the work of
the calibre; and that shortly the whole world would possess what, for
two centuries, had been the fortune and renown of their native city—the
ability to sew gloves perfectly.
The era of labor-saving, quantity-multiply, and cost-reducing machinery
had indeed arrived; and Grenoble, once she realized the full
significance of “vulgarizing” her ancient trade, did not lag far behind.
She faced and conquered great difficulties in the nineteenth
century—notably, the large increase in the “centres” of glove-making, as
the trade grew and improved abroad; and also she succeeded in finding a
cheap, but good, kid to compete with the German and Italian lambskins
which looked so well that they satisfied the taste of the general
public. These things she accomplished with the help of modern machinery;
for which, in a peculiarly thankless and round-about way, the city owed
a great debt to one of her own sons. The European glove world paid its
tribute to Jouvin in 1851, when the Universal Exposition held in Vienna
voted him a Diploma of Honor.
A later contribution to the technique of the glove was the modern style
of fastener, introduced, about 1855, by M. Raymond of Grenoble. His
factory was a valuable addition to the leading industry of that city.
Roux gives credit to Raymond for all the various changes and
improvements in glove fasteners which we have to-day. The old-fashioned
lacing has been completely replaced by the clasp, the neatness and
efficiency of which could hardly be bettered.
Thus, in the last century, we see virtually every trace of the
immemorial methods of glove-making vanish before the swift incursion of
modern machinery. A few hand-sewn gloves alone remain to remind us of
the days when the _couturières_, peasant women and girls gathered in
groups in cottages on the outskirts of Grenoble, or in the _ateliers_ of
the town, to sing as they sewed gloves for the nobility and the gentry
of a former time. But the art has gained by the inestimable assets of
fit and individuality in gloves: by the great numbers, also, in which
gloves to-day are supplied, that we all may delight in wearing them.
In respect to Grenoble, moreover, it should be observed that, through
all these changes and commercializing influences, she has sacrificed not
a whit of her invincible good taste. Against foreign competition and the
paralysis which she suffered under the Jouvin patent, she had only the
superiority of her product to offer—the suppleness of her skins, the
elegance of their cut, the beauty of the tints artificially applied, the
finish and durability of her sewing. But these were enough to keep her
art alive. They still prevail—and in even higher degree—in the gloves of
Grenoble makers to-day.
In the evolution from artist to artisan, there is little room for
regret. Already the glove-workers of France have readjusted very largely
to changed conditions within the industry; while the consumer and
producer alike may rejoice in the widespread accessibility of the finest
gloves in the world.