Une magnanerie en Provence (France) (Mirabeau)

@credits

A magnanery (French: magnanerie) is the site of sericulture, or silk farming, similar to a farm being the site of agriculture. The yeoman who runs it is called amagnanier or, more recently, a mangnan. The word magnanière, meaning building dedicated to sericulture, is also seen.

The word originated from the Occitan word magnan, as Provence was the centre of French sericulture.

Plat de la manufacture Desmoutiers (18è).

@credits

Saint Amand is known for its faience, produced, in the past, by ancient faience factories who was used the bianco sopra bianco technical.

• 1705 Nicolas Desmoutier built a faience factory, managed by himself and by the family Dorez, descendants of Bartélémy a ceramist from Lille, in the next place. The faience factory equipment was sold to Bécart in 1775, who has been installed this firm in Valenciennes.
• 1718, the Fauquez family built their faience factory. They were natives of Tournai in Belgium. The roads, waterways and forests were favourable for transporting the products, so they set up their firm in Saint Amand. But the Treaty of Utrecht, which set the frontier between Tournai and Saint Amand forbade the transport of faience across the border. The faience was hidden in kegsand hay to cross the frontier. The Fauquez’s factory was closed in 1794.

Le métier Jacquart

@credits

The Jacquard loom is a mechanical loom, invented by Joseph Marie Jacquard in 1801, that simplifies the process of manufacturing textiles with complex patterns such as brocade, damask and matelasse. The loom is controlled by punched cards with punched holes, each row of which corresponds to one row of the design. Multiple rows of holes are punched on each card and the many cards that compose the design of the textile are strung together in order. It is based on earlier inventions by the Frenchmen Basile Bouchon (1725), Jean Baptiste Falcon (1728) and Jacques Vaucanson (1740).

Les essais pratiques de la plus petite voiture du monde, construite par le Duc de Caze, au Parc des Princes : la voiture : [photographie de presse] / Agence Meurisse

Tries for the smallest car in the world, built by the Duke of Caze at the Parc des Princes

1921

@credits

Femme mangbetu “Nobosodnu”

Fonds Haardt Mission Citroën Centre-Afrique - “Croisière Noire”

(C) RMN-Grand Palais / Jean-Gilles Berizzi

@credits

The “Black Cruise” (la Croisière noire), a mix of colonial adventure, long-distance car rally and publicity campaign, was born from the will and determination of one famous industrialist, André Citroën. He decided to finance grand intercontinental expeditions to increase the brand-awareness of his automobiles. During the ten month period from October 1924 to June 1925, the “Black Cruise”, also known as the “Citroën-Centre-Afrique” expedition, went from Colomb-Béchar, through the Ahaggar Mountains and Chad, to Antananarivo. Citroën dreamed up the ambitious project of going right across the “black continent” using his half-tracks. It would also be a mission with real scientific objectives. During the expedition, 8 half-tracks covered 28,000 km across Africa. Seventeen members took part in the mission which was directed by Georges-Marie Haardt with Louis Audouin-Dubreuil as his assistant. The expedition’s participants did not return to Paris until the autumn of 1925, when they were received in triumph in France. Various exhibitions were organized. Thanks to this expedition, 300 botanical illustrations were made, 15 books of sketches were completed, specimens of over 300 mammals, 800 birds and 1,500 insects, mostly never before inventoried, were collected, 9.27 km of film was shot and 6,000 photographs were taken. The 70 minute long, silent film of the expedition, which was released on 26 March 1926, enjoyed enormous success, as did the expedition as a whole.

Oven found in the founder’s office

@credits

During the 16th century, a founder was working in the town of Saint Denis. His office produced bells, but also church funeral monuments as proved by the molds found the shope; some of them were also similar to sculptures by Ponce Jacquio - a French sculptor who participated in the realisation of Henri II’s and Catherine de Medicis’ grave.

View of the Nord-Pas de Calais Mining Basin

© Hubert Bouvet, Région Nord-Pas de Calais, 2012

@credits

The mining basin of the Nord Pas de Calais has been promoted as a World Heritage Site by Unesco :D

Remarkable as a landscape shaped over three centuries of coal extraction from the 1700s to the 1900s, the site consists of 109 separate components over 120,000-hectare. It features mining pits (the oldest of which dates from 1850) and lift infrastructure, slag heaps (some of which cover 90 hectares and exceed 140 metres in height), coal transport infrastructure, railway stations, workers estates and mining villages including social habitat, schools, religious buildings, health and community facilities, company premises, owners and managers’ houses, town halls and more. The site bears testimony to the quest to create model workers’ cities from the middle of the 19^th century to the 1960s and further illustrates a significant period in the history of industrial Europe. It documents the living conditions of workers and the solidarity to which it gave rise.

Tour des anciennes usines Lu, vue depuis les remparts du château des ducs de Bretagne, à Nantes, Loire-Atlantique, Pays de la Loire, France.

@credits

Lefèvre-Utile was founded in Nantes, France, in 1846 by Jean-Romain Lefèvre. Originally he sold biscuits from the English factory Huntley & Palmers and then he began his own production. The name LU comes from Lefèvre and his business partner and wife, Pauline-Isabelle Utile. Their initials were first utilized by Alfons Mucha for an 1897 calendar ad for the Lefèvre-Utile Biscuit Co. That same year the company hired Firmin Bouisset to create a poster ad. Bouisset, already noted for his work for the Menier Chocolate company, created Petit Écolier (“the Little Schoolboy”) which incorporated the LU initials. Bouisset’s poster was used extensively and the image was embossed on the company’s Petit Beurre line of biscuits. Within a few years, the success of the logo resulted in the company becoming known as LU.

The founder’s son, Louis Lefèvre-Utile, took over the company and eventually it was acquired by Générale Biscuit S.A., which in turn was sold to Groupe Danone in 1986. Although an international brand today, LU products are primarily distributed in Western Europe, and in 2005 represented nearly half of the sales for Danone’s biscuits and cereal division.

In November 2007, LU was sold to Kraft Foods.

Grande Forge de Buffon

@credits

In 1768, Georges-Louis LECLERC, Count of Buffon, built the most modern forge in the world at the time.
Indeed, the 3 steps of iron manufacturing were made in the same place :

- in the furnace, the ore was melted for 12 hours at a temperature of 1200°C;
- then, during the refinery process, the very brittle cast iron was melted again and turned into iron;
- finally, in the foundry, the bars of pig iron were transformed into semi-finished items with a hydraulic hammer that shaped the tools.

The conception of the factory is a remarkable example of the Age of the Enlightenment: the lodgings of workers were set nearby the industrial machinery.

Horrible massacre à Lyon, 9 avril 1834.
ANONYME. © Musée Gadagne - Lyon

@credits

Three major revolts by silk workers in Lyon, France, called the Canut revolts took place during the first half of the 19th century.

At the end of 1833, good economic prospects and conditions caused a boom in the Lyonnais silk industry. As a result, the government thought the chances of a second revolt extremely unlikely. In February 1834, owners began to agree that workers’ salaries had risen too high, and they began an attempt to impose a reduction. The results of this were conflict and strikes, the leaders of which were arrested and tried. Their trial began on April 5, while the members of Chamber of Peers were discussing a law which would intensify the repression of republican groups. The Republicans managed to amalgamate several political parties to fall within the scope of this law, as did the mutual workers’ associations to which Lyon’s canuts were very strongly attached. As a result, thousands of craftsmen rebelled on April 9.

The army occupied the town and bridges. Soon after, gunfire broke out, with troops firing on the unarmed crowd. Barricades were quickly erected throughout the town to hinder the army’s progress. The disorganised workers stormed the Bon-Pasteur barracks, the same as in the first revolt, and again plundered the arsenal. The workers barricaded the different districts of the city, including Croix-Rousse, effectively creating fortified camps. Adolphe Thiers, the Interior minister, would use a tactic that he would later reuse in 1871 to crush the Paris Commune: retreat from the town, abandon it to the insurgents, surround it, then take it back.

Conservative estimates put the number of casualties between 100 and 200,while more liberal estimates put it at over 600.10,000 captured insurgents were tried in a “gigantic trial” in Paris in April 1835, and were condemned to deportation or heavy prison sentences.