Broken to the trade: French lacemakers’ tools as sources of pride and pain

Abstract

Abstract Lacemaking in nineteenth-century France continued to be organized on a ‘putting-out’ basis, involving tens of thousands of women working from home. Their tools—pillow, bobbins, pins—were cheap or easy to make, and also highly portable, enabling lacemakers to gather in groups while working. These same tools held strong emotional and symbolic connotations, both for lacemakers themselves and for the art lovers and social crusaders who were determined to protect the trade from mechanization. Pillows, bobbins and other tools could be decorated with sentimental, religious or other messages. Lace tools were anthropomorphized in local dialects, made into ‘servants’. They were exchanged as gifts between couples, lent by neighbours and passed down from previous generations. They invoked and embodied lacemakers’ relationships, as well as their own craft identity. On their feast days lacemakers paraded replicas of their tools as a public statement of craft pride. Yet in lacemakers’ work culture, the tools were sometimes depicted as instruments of torture or as weapons used against those who forced them to work so long for so little. Lacemakers were ‘broken to the trade’ (rompu au métier) by their tools and the bodily attitudes they were forced to adopt. As the market for homemade lace declined and lacemaking became ever more closely associated with poverty, some lacemakers destroyed their tools as a protest at the grinding discipline of the trade.