what mapping reveals: silk and the reorganization …...2020/03/19 · research article what...

RESEARCH ARTICLE

What mapping reveals: silk and thereorganization of urban space in Lyons,c. 1600–1900Bernard Gauthiez*

Université de Lyon/Lyon3 Jean-Moulin, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique Unité, Mixte deRecherche 5600, 18 rue Chevreul 69001, Lyon, France*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]

(First published online 19 March 2020)

AbstractThe article considers where and how the silk industry was located in the urban space ofLyons. It also explores how the changing nature of silk production and manufacture influ-enced the institutional arrangements and physical character of the city. Several sub-periods are considered between the early seventeenth to the early twentieth century, eachwith different spatial logics largely defined by changes in the governance of the trade.This study offers new insights into how a dominant industrial activity reorganized the spacesof a major city and how the resulting social structure affected its spatial pattern. In so doing,space is accorded a more central role in understanding urban development, while recognizingthat social, economic and political forces also modify this materiality. Historical GeographicalInformation Systems (HGIS) facilitate greater precision in terms of urban locations andthereby utilize written qualitative and quantitative sources more effectively.

The scope of this article is to explore how the spatialization of social characteristicsreveals realities difficult to discern otherwise, and thus allows for a better evaluationof their significance and nature. However, social geography is meant here not just asthe location of social phenomena in a given space, but as the interaction with thespace itself. Another central aspect of the article is the evaluation of long-run socio-spatial change. The specific context for this approach is the silk weaving industry,which was a major economic activity and urban sub-system1 in Lyons for morethan three centuries.

For different historical periods, theweavers’workshops, merchant-manufacturers’and brokers’ premises and those of other decision-making places in the industrywere all located using serial sources available in administrative archives. These

Higher resolution, colour versions of the figures in this article can be viewed online as supplementarymaterial. Follow the URL at the end of this article.

1J. Goody, The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society (Cambridge, 1986), xvii; B.J.L. Berry,‘Cities as systems within systems of cities’, Papers in Regional Science, 13 (1984), 147–63.

© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press.

Urban History (2020), 47, 448–466doi:10.1017/S0963926820000176

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records included administrative enquiries, lists of merchants, surveys of quarters,directories, censuses and building permits. Mapping the spatial data these sourcescontained provided a more profound and sophisticated understanding of both theevolving geometry of urban space through time, and the inter-relationshipsbetween the main protagonists in the industry. Some sources were mapped at thescale of the building; in other cases, the data was appropriately mapped at the scaleof the street or district. The account that follows explores the location of this industrialand commercial activity, how its institutions endured and changed over time, and alsohow the spatial relationships between the administrative headquarters of the silk tradeand the weavers evolved. This focus on space distinguishes the work from previousstudies which have been mainly of a socio-economic nature.2

Silk weaving provided employment for between one quarter and one third of thepopulation in the mid-nineteenth century, and Lyons was the largest producer ofsilk-wares in Europe, and world-wide.3 The industry involved tens of thousandsof persons, both women and men, and was hierarchically organized along produc-tion and trade lines: weaving, managing production, establishing market links andsupplying raw silk. Weaving involved several thousand masters, including many ofthe poorest people in the city; a few dozen brokers, dealers (commissionaires) andsilk merchants were among the richest.4 The organization of trade and productioncorresponded with a geographical specialization of workshops and markets inurban space.

The spatial dimension of weaving activity in Lyons is of interest for three par-ticular reasons. First, it sheds new light on local history. Historians of the silk indus-try in Lyons have previously considered its use of urban space in a somewhatsimplistic way, ascribing numbers of silk weavers to districts without any great pre-cision.5 Secondly, the studies of economic activity in modern cities deal generallywith a particular activity at a given point in time. The spatial studies of variousactivities in Lyons by Gascon and Garden published around 1970 were followedby more systematic ones by, for example, Bardet on Rouen in 1983 and Concinaon Venice in 1989.6 The progress of historical mapping is evident in the volumeof the Atlas de la Révolution française, published in 2000, which provides manydetailed maps dealing with crafts and trades.7 More recently, Pinol and Gardenhave made systematic use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS),8 andGribaudi was among the first to use GIS to provide maps at the scale of the

2E. Pariset, Histoire de la fabrique lyonnaise. Étude sur le régime social et economique de l’industrie de lasoie à Lyon, depuis le XVIe siècle (Lyons, 1901); J. Godart, L’ ouvrier en soie. Monographie du tisseur lyon-nais. Etude historique, economique et sociale. Première partie, la réglementation du travail 1466–1791(Lyons, 1899); M. Garden, Lyon et les Lyonnais au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1970).

3G. Federico, An Economic History of the Silk Industry, 1830–1930 (Cambridge, 2009; orig. edn 1994).4Federico draws a line between brokers and dealers in the nineteenth century. The situation is more

blurred in the previous period (ibid., 156). See also P. Cayez, Métiers Jacquard et Hauts-Fourneaux. Auxorigines de l’industrie Lyonnaise (Lyons, 1978), 35–7, 42.

5R. Gascon, Grand commerce et vie urbaine au XVIe siècle, Lyon et ses marchands (Paris, 1971), 1, fig. 39;Garden, Lyon et les Lyonnais, 718.

6J.-P. Bardet,Rouen auxXVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, histoire d’un espace social (Paris, 1983), vol. II, tab. 100, 123,on the mapping of the cotton workers by street; E. Concina,Venezia nell’ età moderna (Venice, 1989), map X.

7E. Ducoudray, R. Monnier, D. Roche and A. Laclau, Atlas de la révolution française, 11, Paris (Paris, 2000).8J.-L. Pinol and M. Garden, Atlas des Parisiens (Paris, 2009).

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building.9 Lastly, Rodger’s Edinburgh Atlas (e-Atlas),10 based on web-mapping, willallow for new insights into the relations between urban space and human activities.In this study of Lyons, the same activity is considered at several crucial momentsover three centuries, and is described and analysed as a system through its maincomponent – the weaver workshops – in relation, spatially and politically, to itsgoverning structures and institutions.

Thirdly, mapping over a period of time reveals significant changes in the silkindustry organizationally and spatially relative to the built-up space. This plasticityhas to be explained. Economic and political factors are also examined in what fol-lows, and this is contextualized through four temporal and spatial phases in whichthe central activities of the silk trade and its administrative headquarters in the citywere relocated. The four stages are (1) a new spatial organization after 1619; (2)polarization around the Hôtel-de-Ville (city-hall) from the mid-eighteenth century;(3) the apogee of the 1820s; (4) the mid-nineteenth-century relocation of produc-tion away from the city.

To understand fully the geographical logic of these locations, a brief descriptionof the silk industry and economy is provided. The raw silk used was producedpartly in southern France, but the bulk of it was bought in Italy, Spain and lateralso in China and Japan. The silk merchants sold the material to the marchands-fabricants (merchant-manufacturers) who numbered around 400 people in theearly nineteenth century, and who organized and oversaw the production of family-based workshops.11 The number of these workshops varied greatly, from a fewdozen in the early sixteenth century to about 6,000 from the 1780s onwards.12

The largest merchant-manufacturers controlled the production of more than 100workshops, equivalent to between 200 and 250 looms.13 In a familial workshop,the weaver could only sell his output to a merchant-manufacturer, according tothe trades’ statutes, and this same merchant supplied him with the silk and paidhim for the fabric according to an agreed price. Before the French Revolution, amerchant-manufacturer could also weave and own a few looms, but the physicalproduction and governing organization (called La Grande Fabrique) was strictlyseparated in the nineteenth century. The transition from simple weaver tomerchant-manufacturer represented a major advance in social status, and wasvery difficult to achieve due to the requirement for capital and know-how.Similarly, the transition from merchant-manufacturer to broker of silk-wares wasalso difficult in terms of capital and social mobility. Some silk fabric brokers and

9M. Gribaudi, Paris ville ouvrière, une histoire occultée 1789–1848 (Paris, 2014), map 42a, 394. SeeB. Gauthiez, ‘A proposito di “Paris, ville ouvrière”, Storia urbana e GIS’, Quaderni Storici, 152 (2016),545–50. See also G. Baics, ‘The social geography of near and far: built environment and residential distancein mid-nineteenth-century New York City’, in this Special Issue.

10http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk/projects?ref=AH%2FK002457%2F1, accessed 19 Jul. 2017.11Archives Municipales de Lyon (AML) HH 159, 436 merchant-manufacturers in Sep. 1752.12There were 5,884 workshops in 1788, R. Verninac, Description physique et politique du département du

Rhône (Lyons, 1801); Godart, L’ouvrier en soie, 25.13AML HH 159, 23 Mar. 1720: list, B. Ganin: 105 workshops and 250 looms; Denis father and son: 130

workshops and 240 looms; J.-B. Lacour, idem; Reverony brothers and son: 100 workshops and 200 looms;Fay and Brossard: 70 workshops and 200 looms. The maximum known number of looms controlled by asingle individual, the merchant Neyret, is about 500 in 1615 or a little later, AML HH 156. Neyret was asso-ciated with Narguys.

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silk merchants also became involved in banking.14 Indeed, the profitability of theLyons silk trade was decisive in the development of banking in the city from thesixteenth century, when the banks were dominated by Italians mainly fromFlorence, Genoa and Lucca, to the nineteenth century with the emergence of theCrédit Lyonnais in 1863.15

The basis of the historical GIS of Lyons has been explained elsewhere.16 It isimportant to emphasize that historical maps have to be modified according to acommon geometry and vectorized in spatial layers of objects (buildings, plots, dis-tricts, features) corresponding to social realities identified in the written record.Manuscript sources were converted into databases and properties identified bytheir owners. A vector map, essentially made of layers of plots and buildings,was created from numerous partial plans of the eighteenth century. The quarterswere mapped from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth. Sources were exploredwith the scope to reconstitute as much as possible the successive order of the pro-prietors of the same plot or building. This mapping could then be used as anaddress system which makes it possible to locate the building permits and varieddata attached to a house known by its owner. As this involves about 3,500 buildings,it is a time-consuming process, but a worthwhile capital investment because of thecapacity to utilize a spatial dimension to explore both established interpretationsand new lines of investigation.

First spatial logic: a new spatial organization after 1619In the sixteenth century, the silk weaving process in Lyons was dominated by thesilk merchants and brokers who controlled the distribution of work among theworkshops until a new by-law was passed by the Consulate (the city government)in 1619.17 This forbade merchants from owning looms, weaving and employingweavers if they were not themselves registered as masters.18 Thereafter, trade wassocially clearly delimited, integrating weavers and merchant-manufacturers. Thischange of statute resulted explicitly from the demands of weavers who sought toretain a greater share of the profits and who were deprived of work by the mer-chants who increasingly controlled workshops in Italy. As a result of this criticalchange and in response to a severe unemployment crisis, the Consulate commis-sioned a survey of the silk weaving industry in 1621 which revealed that 1,187workshops were active, which included substantial enterprises such as those ofthe merchant Jean Jacques Manis who controlled 81 workshops with 201 looms,Neyret (38 workshops; 87 looms) and Ballet (34 workshops; 59 looms). Just

14S. Chassagne, Veuve Guerin et fils. Banque et soie, une affaire de famille, Saint-Chamond-Lyon (1716–1932) (Lyons, 2012).

15A. Plessis and P. Verheyde (eds.), Le Crédit Lyonnais – 1863–1986 – études historiques (Geneva, 2002).16B. Gauthiez, ‘Lyon en 1824–32: un plan de la ville sous forme vecteur d’après le cadastre ancien’,

Géocarrefour, 83 (2008), 57–67 + vector files online. B. Gauthiez and O. Zeller, ‘Lyon, the spatial analysisof a city in the 17–18th centuries. Locating and crossing data in a GIS built from written sources’, in S. Rauand E. Schönherr (eds.), Mapping Spatial Relations, their Perceptions and Dynamics (Heidelberg, Londonand New York, 2014), 97–118.

1711 Jun. 1619, AML BB 155, fols. 313–21. See also fols. 260–3 for the demands of the workers.18AML HH 501, 12 Aug. 1619.

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three merchants controlled 347 looms, almost one third of the total number(Figure 1).19

Silk merchants at that time were located in the area around the Rue Juiverie andthe Loge des Marchands/du Change, close to the Pont de Pierre on the west bank ofthe River Saône.20 Between October 1637 and December 1639, 20 years after the1619 by-law, 133 merchants were involved in the silk trade.21 The majority werevery small traders, as 53 (40 per cent) of them each dealt with no more than fivebales of silk (0.8 per cent of total). The largest, Boulouzon, with 1,019 bales,accounted for 15 per cent of the total number of 6,814 bales and, with nineother Italian merchants, accounted for about one third of the trade. The locationof the silk merchants was also given in a tax list of wealthy residents dating from1640 which corroborates the information contained in the 1637–39 document.22

The locations of merchants in 1637–39 can be compared with those of work-shops as given by the survey in 1621. The new by-law, introduced in 1619, obligedmerchants to become members of the corporation if they wanted to continue toweave, though some continued to flout this by-law.23 However, many merchantscomplied and some others decided to focus exclusively on commerce, abandoningmanufacture altogether. Family members also specialized functionally, as with theManis family where one member continued to control many workshops andbecame a merchant-manufacturer in 1621. Another Manis family member focusedexclusively on mercantile activities to a significant extent amounting to 80 balesbetween 1637 and 1639, and may have supplied other family members.

The Royal Mint, from which gold and silver were supplied for the most luxuri-ous silk fabrics, was located nearby the Change area in what is now the Rue duBoeuf. Other important buildings directly associated with the silk trade were theDouane (customs house), where the raw or reeled silk had to be stored in a ware-house on arrival in the city and, prior to taxation, in the public weigh house estab-lished nearby in the Rue Juiverie with its new premises in 1626.24 Significantly,what emerges from the spatial relations of the Lyons silk trade in the first half ofthe seventeenth century is that in the period prior to 1640 nearly all the silk mer-chants decided neither to move to be nearer to the workshops nor to follow thedevelopment of weaving production that took place in other areas. Actually, duringthis period, particularly between 1575 and 1621, the increase in the number oflooms occurred mainly on the eastern side of the River Saône, in rather peripheral

19AML HH 159.20In 1643, 61 bales of raw silk from Genoa, Leghorn, Rome and Barcelona were intercepted by the

authorities because the custom dues had not been paid in Marseilles. 18 Lyons merchants and proprietorsof the bales are listed. 8 of them also figure among the 245 people in Lyon who had to pay the tax on therich in 1640. They were mainly located in the Change area. This list of rich tax payers also gives a few othernames known to be associated with the silk trade, for example Mey and Manis, also located in the samearea. AML CC 328, 4 Feb. 1640, Taxe sur les Ayzés.

21AML CC 4349, Grande visite des ouvriers en soie.22AML CC 328, Taxe sur les Ayzés.23Chiron and Fay had to comply in 1620–21, AML HH 624_1. Pincety had not yet complied in 1626,

AML HH 501.24Archives Départementales du Rhône (ADR) 10 H 795.




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areas.25 Therefore, spaces of wealth and prosperity associated with the silk weavingindustry were neatly split in the mid-seventeenth century between, on the onehand, an area occupied by the richest and most important merchants and bankers,often of Italian origin, mainly around the Rue Juiverie and the Change, and, on theother hand, the more widely dispersed and peripheral location of the weavers, someof which were recent developments, like those near the Place des Terreaux to thenorth-east of the city.26

Figure 1. Silk weavers and the major locations of the silk trade, 1621. The geography of the silk industryin the context of the 1619 crisis. Major locations of the silk trade, weavers from the 1621 survey (count perquartier) and silk merchants in c. 1640, whose location had remained stable after the crisis. (B. Gauthiez)

25There was an increase of about 300% in the quarter to the north of Terreaux and between Terreaux andCordeliers, 100% on the west bank of the Saône River and 600% between the Cordeliers and PlaceBellecour, AML HH 159, data for 1575, 1601 and 1621.

26AML HH 624_1, 7 Nov. 1665. When the privilege to weave was granted in 1665 to Octavio Mey, amerchant of Italian origin, even though he had not previously been a compagnon, his premises were stilllocated on the Montée St-Barthélémy to the west of the Change.

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The new by-law of 1619 led to the relocation of the silk industry headquartersfrom the Change area to the eastern bank of the River Saône where the numberof looms continued to increase from 1621 (Figure 2).27 This displacement was con-firmed in 1641 with the founding of the chapel of the brotherhood to which allweavers had to be attached.28 Its location (inside the Jacobins church, Place desJacobins)29 was significant partly for its proximity to the workshops and alsobecause it was politically rather neutral given its relative distance from the powernexus of the city centre (the Consulate was at the Hôtel-de-Ville; the seat of gov-ernment, the royal administration and the Change were on the west bank of theRiver Saône). The Royal Mint had recently been relocated from the Change areato a street renamed Rue de la Monnoye close to the Jacobins convent, not farfrom the argue, a machine used to make gold and silver threads, at the nearbyCélestins convent. Similarly, the place where silk had to be weighed before beingsold to the merchant-manufacturers was transferred from Rue Juiverie to PlaceSt-Pierre in 1697, where an old public weigh house was reinstated on the groundfloor of a new building.30 Dangon, an Italian merchant and inventor, was approvedas a master and followed the general shift from the Change area to the Jacobinsconvent area. His workshop was initially located at the Douane, near theChange, then later near the Jacobins convent, Rue Confort.31

The Jacobins chapel functioned as a communal assembly room for weavers, butthe office of the silk trade (communauté) was located within the masters’ prem-ises.32 It was an arrangement that generated friction. With silk weaving expandingappreciably in the late 1710s and 1720s, the master-guards decided to invest in anew building for the offices of the trade.33 A piece of land was acquired by thecommunauté, adjoining the brotherhood’s chapel34 and a building designed by anotable architect (Roche) announced the Corporation’s importance in the publicspace of the city (Figure 3).35 Its frontage, Rue St-Dominique (now RueEmile-Zola) still bears the name of the trade.36 The concentration of the institu-tional buildings around the Jacobins and infrastructural capital associated withthe silk trade clearly encouraged the multiplication of workshops in the neighbour-ing districts, particularly in the proximity of the Hôtel-Dieu hospital, as is evident

27AML HH 159, 20% increase in the quarter to the north of Terreaux from 1621 to 1660, fall of 25%between Terreaux and Cordeliers, fall of 100% south of Cordeliers.

28AML HH 561–562–564–565.29AML HH 624_1, 22 Mar. 1641. Jacobins = Dominicans =White Friars. The chapel was placed beside

the one established by the gold and silver thread makers in 1633, dedicated to St-Eloi, as well as to thechapel of the silk dyers.

30ADR 10 G 802.31ADR 3 H 47. He moved to this location between 1610 and 1623.32AML HH 587, as an example of this practice, the registering of the new compagnons ( journeymen) was

undertaken in the house of Balthazard Berthelier, master-guard of the corporation, in 1678–79.33AML HH 587, 28 Nov. 1724, the plot was acquired on 27 Oct. 1725 from the Jacobins.3427 Oct. 1725, AML HH 624_1.35AM, HH 566, fol. 42, count of the construction works, achieved 1728. AML HH 567, fol. 1v: the total

cost of the building was 99,830 livres, 15 sous, 1 denier.36In three gilded lines engraved over the doorframe are the words: ‘Maison et bureau /des marchands en

étoffes de /soie, or et argent. 1727’.




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from shifting locations of masters between 1621 and 1660.37 So, the Jacobins areadeveloped in the early seventeenth century as an alternative centre for the Lyonseconomy. The development of the west side of Rue St-Dominique in 1658 forvery high-status flats was no doubt also associated with this changing centre ofgravity, and by 1677 had attracted several prominent bankers.38

The change that occurred in 1619 was the crystallization of a major shift in cap-italist organization. Along the lines proposed by Max Weber,39 it conforms neatlyto the passage from mercantilism, an organization dominated by the merchantsdetached from production, to an organization centred on the trade and controlled

Figure 2. Silk weavers and major sites of the silk trade in 1660, number per street. In 1641, the seat of thesilk trade was located in the Jacobins chapel, leading to the creation of many workshops in the surround-ing area. (B. Gauthiez)

37ADR HH 159 for both dates.38AML CC 4187, pièce 31, eight bankers dwelled on Rue de la Monnoye near or within the Royal Mint.39M. Weber, Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus (Tübingen, 1934).

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partly from the inside by the merchant-manufacturers. Increasingly, it was theywho directed local production and, by insisting on a maximum number oflooms, redistributed production to achieve greater efficiency. This phenomenonis well known in the seventeenth century, but its spatial consequences were signifi-cant. The new centre of control for the trade was located independently in a neutralplace in the city, and at a distance from the merchants’ quarter. This conforms tothe notion of the ‘spirit of capitalism’ in the period, but the capitalists in Lyons weremainly Catholics, not Protestants, as suggested more generally by Weber.

Second spatial logic: the polarization around the Hôtel-de-Ville from 1777Nonetheless, the development of the silk organization centred on the Place desJacobins became unsatisfactory to the city government. In the decades followingthe 1720s, the location of the merchant-manufacturers slowly shifted towards thearea around the new Hôtel-de-Ville completed in 1656, and which constituted anew focus for political power. The adjudication of trades disputes had accordinglypassed from the sénéchaussée, a royal administration located on the west side of theRiver Saône, to the Consulate in 1666–67.40 The process of spatial change

Figure 3. The office building of the silk trade, built in 1725–26, Rue St-Dominique (nowadays RueEmile-Zola), Roche architect. (B. Gauthiez)

40AML HH 624_1.




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accelerated significantly from the 1730s, as is clearly visible in a survey of 1744.41

When in 1776 the minister Anne Robert Jacques Turgot convinced King LouisXVI to suppress all corporations,42 the head offices of the silk weaving tradewere abandoned and the building sold.43 Shortly after, when the trade institutionswere reinstated with minor modifications to their previous statute, it was decided tolocate them inside the Hôtel-de-Ville (Figure 4).44 The new location permitted thecity government to exert a greater degree of control over an industry which

Figure 4. The geography of wealth in the silk industry in 1788: poor weavers relieved during the crisis in1787–88 (per quartier) and associate merchant-fabricants, more or less the biggest merchant-fabricants,from the 1788 Indicateur. After the relocation of the silk trade seat to the Hôtel-de-Ville, themerchant-fabricants regrouped around it. At the same time, the poorest weavers had never dwelled fur-ther from this economic centre. (B. Gauthiez)

41AML HH 577.42Arrêt du conseil d’état, 26 Aug. 1776, registered by the parlement of Paris on 20 Jun. 1777.43AML HH 624_3, 5 Apr. 1781, sold to Vingtrinier for a price below the cost of construction.44AML HH 624_3, Mar. 1779.

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provided approximately half of its tax revenues. From the late seventeenth century,the silk industry had also become a source of deep political concern. The relocationof its administration ensured a firmer political response to problems such as theinsurrections of 1744–45 in which the silk weavers, protesting against a new regu-lation of the trade favouring the merchant-manufacturers, had played a majorpart.45 More generally, it made it easier for merchant-manufacturers closely alignedwith the city government to counter the demands of a numerous group of the poor-est weavers. The new administrative location of the silk trade was also driven, how-ever, by a greater degree of gentrification in the area around the Hôtel-de-Villewhere many old structures were rebuilt in the course of the eighteenth centuryby people such as Blaise Denis in Rue Neuve, whose wealth was derived fromthe silk industry.46

The area around the Hôtel-de-Ville also became a central place for high-classsocial activities. Following a fire which destroyed the Grand Theâtre (previouslyRue du Plat, near Place Bellecour), a new theatre was rebuilt during 1753–56 bythe architect Jacques-Germain Soufflot in the garden of the Hôtel-de-Ville. Asquare was established between the two buildings (Place de la Comédie) whichbecame the main focus of high-class luxury entertainment and shops in Lyons.At the same time, a new development was undertaken in 1750 to the north-eastof the Hôtel-de-Ville,47 the Quartier St-Clair along the Rhône riverbank, followingthe construction of a sizeable building in 1746 by Antoine Tolozan de Montfort, amerchant-manufacturer, silk broker and banker, on Port St-Clair.48 A new quay wasbuilt connecting the Port St-Clair to the north with the road to Geneva. This areaimmediately became a major centre for real estate investment by brokers of silk-ware and silk merchants. The Indicateur almanac illustrates in 1788 how the areahad become a major housing and trade area for the highest social classes involvedin trade and banking.

Nearly all the foreign consuls in late eighteenth-century Lyons were located inthis Hotel-de-Ville/Grand Theâtre sector of the city (Figure 5). Several majormerchant-manufacturers and brokers, like Jacques Imbert-Colomès, a key figureduring the Revolution,49 or like Camille Pernon, who dealt with foreign royal courtsand represented the Russian tsar in the city, had established their premises nearby,in the latter’s case at the centre of a block to the south of the Grand Theâtre access-ible through a private passageway affording privacy to distinguished clients andvisitors. A. Vouty (first name unknown), another powerful merchant-manufacturer

45P.-M. Gonon, Vaucanson à Lyon en 1744, documents historiques pour servir à l’histoire de Lyon auXVIIIe siècle (Lyons, 1843); O. Zeller, ‘Géographie des troubles et découpages urbains à Lyon (XVIe–XVIIIe siècles)’, in Actes du 114e Congrès national des sociétés savantes (Paris, 1989), 43–59.

46AML DD 53, building authorization 12 Dec. 1743. Blaise Denis had also been consul of the city. Hisbuilding is still standing.

47B. Gauthiez, ‘Trasformazione dei valori urbani tra settecento e ottocento: il caso di Lione’, StoriaUrbana, 71 (1995), 149–70.

48AML 316 WP 208. The son of Antoine Tolozan, Louis, was treasurer of the city from 1776 to 1784. Hewas replaced as treasurer by Alexis-Antoine Regny, a banker, whose house was located nearby RuePuits-Gaillot (J.S. Passeron, Notice sur Louis Tolozan de Montfort (Lyons, 1837)). Tolozan’s son laterbecame prévôt des marchands, i.e. mayor of the city, from 1784 to 1789.

49Rue Ste-Catherine, ADR 1 L 1031.




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linked to the Consulate, had his premises inside a block near the intersection of theRue Romarin and Rue du Puits-Gaillot, also accessible by means of a private pas-sageway.50 High commerce could thus be transacted discreetly, sheltered from theattention and interests of poor weavers. Several hotels that provided accommoda-tion to foreigners were also located nearby, notably the Hôtel du Parc on thewest side of the Place des Terreaux.51

The office of the organization responsible for the city weights and measures waslocated at the Place St-Pierre. There, the silk was weighed, but its humidity, often a

Figure 5. The centre of the silk trade in 1788 from the Indicateur, around the Hôtel-de-Ville and Place desTerreaux to the west (location at building scale). (B. Gauthiez)

50The premises of Pernon and Vouty still exist today.51B. Gauthiez, ‘Géographie urbaine et espaces du voyage: les voyageuses britanniques à Lyon, fin XVIIIe–

début XIXe siècle’, in I. Baudino (ed.), Les voyageuses britanniques au XVIIIe siècle, l’etape lyonnaise dansl’itinéraire du Grand-Tour (Paris, 2015), 77–96.

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matter of dispute since silk weighed much more when humid and could thus besold at a higher price, was poorly controlled until a new office, the Condition dessoies created by the agronomist Jean-Louis Rast de Maupas, was located in 1779in the same place to improve and standardize quality. These functions were retainedwhen in 1808 the offices were relocated from the Place St-Pierre to a buildingfinanced by the Chamber of Commerce in the Rue St-Polycarpe, to the north ofthe Hôtel-de-Ville. With its responsibilities for the meticulous control of all silkfabrics, the relocation of the Condition des soies further reinforced the concentra-tion of the silk trading activities in the area around the Hôtel-de-Ville.

The displacement of the silk industry organization from the Jacobins area hadpolitical significance in that it implied a closer association with the municipalgovernment, and thus also arguably heightened regulatory control. It correspondedwith the spatial reorganization of the commercial elites of the city, and implied areduced role for the suppliers of gold and silver to the silk industry, as the mainbulk of the production was not using gold and silver threads. Another factor wasundoubtedly the disappearance of religious control. But, if the central activitiesof the silk trade moved, the location of the weavers’ workshops did not. Themerchant-manufacturers, especially the richer ones and their associates, led themove, but the weavers did not follow. On the contrary, thousands of the poorestcolonized the old quarters of the west Saône riverbank, now abandoned by the mer-chants and bankers. That meant that the greater the social distance, the greater thespatial distance was too.

The new organization introduced in 1619 was very successful, as it allowed foran extraordinary development of the trade.52 But the merchant-manufacturerstended to consolidate their power over the weavers, by devoting an increasing pro-portion of their profits in order to ascend the social hierarchy. Their wealth was amajor asset to enter the Consulate and, for some of them, the nobility itself. Theirrelocation, predominantly around the Hôtel-de-Ville, fully expresses this trend.

The effects of the 1793 bombingsThe French Revolution led to a sharp decline in the production of silk-ware, but itwas not until 1793 that its impact on the Lyons population became unbearable.53

The economic difficulties produced impoverishment for many of the city inhabi-tants, and were a strong motivating factor behind the rebellion of Lyons againstthe Jacobin government in Paris in 1793.54 The very nature of the Lyons economyexplains why some of its workers joined the rebellion since a luxury industry couldonly prosper with peace between France and its neighbours.

The reaction to the rebellion was immediate and without pity. The siege of Lyonslasted three months, during which the city central area was heavily bombed. As theHôtel-de-Ville was the seat of rebel command, the area around it was heavilydamaged from a battery situated on the east bank of the River Rhône. The result

52It seems that its development was already very high in the 1600s, after the organizational edict ofHenry IV in 1599. In 1619, it is said that 30,000 persons made their living from the trade, AML BB155, fol. 260.

53AML I2 46bis, report by Déglize.54Named after the Club des Jacobins in Paris from whence had emerged the government.




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was the total destruction of tens of buildings, and heavy damage to hundreds ofothers throughout the city. The silk industry was moribund thereafter.55

Third spatial logic: the apogee of the 1820sThe building permits approved after the siege show a striking pattern.56 The firstones were given to repair damaged buildings and to render them habitable andusable again. Hundreds of repaired buildings thus had new and plain façades inplace of decorated ones, largely because of the shortages of building materialsand skilled workers. The reconstruction of buildings beyond repair occurred intwo phases. Some were rebuilt almost immediately, even by the end of 1794.They included structures in Rue du Garet and Petite Rue Pizay, near theHôtel-de-Ville, still visible today. Others were reconstructed only when the silktrade resumed a degree of prosperity during the Napoleonic era around c. 1810,but the main bulk of rebuilding took place in the 1820s, a period of extraordinaryprosperity for the city associated with an era in which Jacquard looms were widelyadopted in the most modern workshops.57

Not only were some poorly repaired buildings razed and replaced by new struc-tures, but entirely new developments took place in the pre-revolutionary religiousprecincts to the north of the Hôtel-de-Ville and to the west of Quartier St-Clair.These new developments housed different types of economic activities and socialgroups. Generally, the logic of the late eighteenth-century centralization of the silkindustry around the Hôtel-de-Ville was reinforced, so workshop production unitswere largely unaffected, unlike the economic and financial superstructure.Immediately to the north, the Capucins and Feuillants precincts were developed inthe 1800s mainly for merchant-manufacturers and brokers specializing in theParisian market. In les Pentes de la Croix-Rousse, as this area is now called, newbuildings developed along the Rue de la Vieille-Monnaie, formerly occupied mainlyby weavers’ workshops. The Cercle des Fabricants (club of merchant-manufacturers)was established there in a new building in the early 1820s (now Passage Thiaffait).58

Further uphill, the development of Rue Burdeau and Rue des Tables-Claudiennesfrom 1821 was geared towards activities associated with weaving and trading.59

Higher still, streets developed (Rue Imbert-Colomès, Rue Diderot, Rue Lemot andothers) from the late 1820s and were occupied mainly by weavers. The social statusof the activities decreased the further uphill they took place. The area to the west ofthe Jardin des Plantes (outside Figure 6 to the west) was developed in much the sametime-frame, with Rue Pierre-Blanc created in 1820, fully built-up and, only a fewyears later, occupied by hundreds of silk weavers using mainly Jacquard loomsand by which point it was the greatest concentration of workshops in the city.

55ADR 1 L 22.56AML 916 WP 001–002–003–004, building authorizations registers.57Cayez, Métiers Jacquard, 144–5. The Jacquard loom allowed for an increase of up to four times the

production of a single loom.58Thiaffait was previously the owner of a famous café established in the late eighteenth century by

Spreafico Place des Terreaux. It is likely that this café was already the meeting point of themerchant-manufacturers and that Thiaffait had a decisive role in the creation of their cercle.

59Registers AML 921 WP 060 (1820) to AML 921 WP 121 (1828).

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In parallel, the bombed area around the Grand Théâtre and the Hôtel-de-Villewas largely rebuilt. An entire block of 12 buildings badly damaged in 1793 betweenRue St-Claude, Rue Terraille and Rue du Griffon was demolished and replaced by asingle magnificent construction in 1830.60 Here, substantial sums from the silk-ware commerce, mainly from America, were reinvested by Lenoir and Miège, silkbrokers in the 1820s in New York.61 Immediately to the south of theHôtel-de-Ville and the Grand Theâtre, the damaged buildings of the Rue Lafondwere rapidly and fully reconstructed in 1824–26 and indeed occupied from 1824

Figure 6. The centre of the silk trade in 1830 from the annual census (location at building scale). Thebuildings shaded in grey had been rebuilt between 1800 and 1830. (B. Gauthiez)

60AML 316 WP 181, building authorization on 29 Apr. 1829 to Lenoir and Miège. The well-knownmerchant-fabricant Bonnet moved into this building in 1834 (H. Pansu, Claude-Joseph Bonnet. Soierie etsociété à Lyon et en Bugey au XIXe siècle (Lyons and Jujurieux, 2003), 206.

61Cayez, Métiers Jacquard, 178–9.




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by the Hôtel du Nord.62 This high-quality hotel with 85 rooms rapidly establisheditself as the place where the American merchants and brokers resided when onbusiness in Lyons. The extension of the same building in the Rue du Garet in1827 housed the American Consulate in 1836.63

Both restorations were indicative of the growing importance of Lyons silkFabrique for the American market, which accounted for 25 per cent of the silk-wareexports from the city in 1825, rising to 50 per cent in 1835. Only the kingdom ofPiedmont-Sardinia, Switzerland and Brazil had a consular presence in Lyons at thattime and all were located close to the business vortex of the Cercle des Négociants(the Brokers Club) and the Hotel du Nord.64 The fact that Georges Capler, theowner of the Hôtel du Nord from 1830, and Louis Cornnaud, tenant of the cafélocated on its ground floor (the most prestigious café in Lyons in 1835) wereSwiss points to the internationalization of the social activities surrounding thesilk trade in Lyons, and also to the arrival of foreign money.65 Many grand cafésand restaurants were located in the area, as the concentration of leisure facilitieswas considered to assist the conduct of business, as did the presence of a brothelfeaturing femmes publiques (‘public women’) in a nearby backstreet, Rue del’Arbre-Sec.66

A fully renewed and revived business and high-class centre of consumptioneventually developed around the Place de la Comédie in the 1820s, bringingtogether on the one hand prominent merchant-fabricants, brokers, bankers andsilk merchants, and on the other hand the temporary residences of the silk industrymajor clients.67 This trade centre was also associated with the civic authorities inthe Hôtel-de-Ville on the west side of Place de la Comédie, and with the hub ofthe social activities at Lyons, the Grand Theâtre, and its neighbouring cafés and res-taurants. The weavers were of course spatially excluded from this privileged area(Figure 7).

No great change occurred in the spatial structure of the silk trade in the secondquarter of the nineteenth century compared to the years before the Revolution. Amajor consequence of the liberalization of industry and commerce was thereappearance of the great merchants as key players, especially when dealing withmarkets in the United States. But the merchant-manufacturers also remainedpowerful because of their indispensable role as intermediaries between the demandsof the markets and producers, and due to their management and technical skillswhen dealing with many workshops scattered throughout the city.

62AML 316 WP 020, authorization given to Tarpan.63AML 316 WP 021, 24 Sept. 1827, authorization given to Canard, who later bought the neighbouring

Tarpan building. See also Longworth’s American Almanac, New-York Register and City Directory(New York, 1834). In 1835, the company originally named Thompson, Austen and Wymbs became simplyThompson and Austen, probably after the departure of Wymbs to Lyons. Wymbs was still the Americanconsul in 1839, and listed among the main American brokers in silk-ware in Lyons, at the same address 22Rue Lafont: Almanach général de la France et de l’etranger pour l’année 1839 (Paris, 1839), 1087. Americanbrokers were never numerous in Lyons.

64Almanach historique et politique de la ville de Lyon et du département du Rhône pour l’an de grâce 1828(Lyons, 1828), 80.

65Data from the annual censuses, AML 321 WP series.667 Rue de l’Arbre-Sec, AML 921 WP 117, census of 1827, owned by Mrs Plagne, with six rooms.67Cayez, Métiers Jacquard, 421.

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Fourth spatial logic: moving production away from the cityFrom the late 1840s, the city council began to transform the old centre of Lyonswith two main objectives in mind. The first was modernization in the context ofa booming economy; the second was social cleansing. The area south of Placedes Cordeliers was one of the poorest, occupied by populations that had beenvery active in the insurrections of 1831 and 1834, when the workers of Lyons,led by the silk weavers, became for a few days masters of the entire city centrebetween the Hôtel-de-Ville and the Préfecture.68 Some 350 buildings were pulleddown in 1855–56; this entailed the relocation of 15,000 inhabitants. The new street,Rue Impériale (now Rue de la République) was an immense success, politically,economically and also for the role it played in the concerted attempt to develop

Figure 7. Location of the silk looms in 1833, number per building, from the annual census. (B. Gauthiez)

68See B. Gauthiez, ‘La transformation de Lyon et Paris au second Empire: le projet du ministère del’Intérieur De Persigny, les exécutants Haussmann et Vaïsse’, in A. Casamento (ed.), Fondazioni urbane,città nuove Europee dal medioevo al novecento (Rome, 2012), 323–44.




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a new financial and commercial ‘City’ in a similar vein, and with explicit reference,to the City of London. The northern part of Rue Impériale became the place whereseveral banks located, including in 1857 the local branch of the Banque de France,and in 1863 the Crédit Lyonnais, the first major French bank created outside Paris.The Organization of Silk Brokers and merchant-manufacturers moved to the newPalais du Commerce, despite a first relocation in 1857 to a new building at the cor-ner of Rue Impériale and Place de la Comédie. Not surprisingly, the AmericanConsulate also moved to a building neighbouring the Banque de France. But thisimmense change in the city space of the centre of the city did not in the eventinduce a significant change in the location of the administrative structure of thesilk industry. A map published in 1944 of the principal ‘maisons de commerce’(commercial firms) involved in the silk industry shows a striking stability comparedto the 1820s.69 This means that the weakening of the social incentive to be locatedin the Hôtel-de-Ville area was counterbalanced by the conservatism of the areafunctions and inter-relationship of business systems.

This remarkable stability of the main administrative structure contrasts with themove of the production units. In 1833, 90 per cent of the workshops were locatedwithin the limits of the walls. About 40 per cent of them were located on the slopesof the Fourvière hill on the west bank of the River Saône; a further 40 per cent wereon the slopes of the Croix-Rousse district to the north of the city centre; and around20 per cent were located in the area around what is nowadays the Place de laRépublique, which was cleared of its workers in 1855.70 There was a degree of con-tinuity, therefore, with that of the late eighteenth century. But in 1914, only a verysmall number of workshops remained in the city centre, occupied by skilled work-ers and niche producers. In the meantime, significantly, silk entrepreneurs hadtransferred production from traditional familial workshops to manufactories farfrom Lyons in the surrounding départements (Isère, Loire, Rhône) employinglocal manpower – and often womanpower. This made progressively mechanizedproduction possible, accompanied both by lower wages and by employing workersfrom the countryside which diminished the risks of social unrest with its strongassociations in the Lyonnais memory.71

DiscussionMapping the evolution of silk weavers and merchants through the city ofLyons reveals important changes during the three centuries covering the heydayof the industry. In ways unimaginable to the historians Garden and Godart,mapping the dynamics of change of the principal industry and trade of a majorcity over the long term fundamentally alters an understanding of urban

69Ch. Fourniau, ‘“Cité” et “centre d’activité”, étude de géographie urbaine sur le centre de Lyon’, Lesétudes rhodaniennes, 19 (1944), 141–9.

70AML 921 WP 151, annual census.71P. Cayez, ‘Une proto-industrialisation décalée: la ruralisation de la soierie lyonnaise dans la première

moitié du XXe siècle’, Revue du Nord, 248 (1981), 95–103, at 102; M.-L. Bourgeon, ‘Répartition des métiersde tissage de la soie au service de la fabrique Lyonnaise en 1936–37’, Les études rhodaniennes, 4 (1938),215–34, at 226; M. Morand, ‘Statistique des métiers de tissage au service de la fabrique lyonnaise’,Comptes-rendus des travaux de la chambre de commerce de Lyon (Lyons, 1914), 94–110.

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development based on spatial relations. Spaces of power, spaces of influence, con-tested spaces, spaces of sociability and conviviality and their inter-relationshipswith other spaces – of production, belief, belonging – have been identified closely,if not exclusively, with structural changes in the silk industry in Lyons.

There is, of course, a degree of interdependence, too, in the direction of suchsocial and cultural changes with wide-ranging connections often associated withthe evolution of capitalism generally. By-laws and regulatory frameworks obligedmerchants to respond, and the mid-eighteenth-century upturn in merchants’profits was concentrated in conspicuous consumption at the expense of theirworkforce. Workers’ responses, mostly unrest and insurrection, reflected thissectional – or class – divergence. This in turn incited employers to detach theresidential and occupational parts of their lives, by dwelling in Lyons, but alsoprogressively moving the production out of the city.

The system or sub-system of production in the silk trade of Lyons made up ofweavers, merchant-manufacturers, brokers and institutional and financial structuresis nowmore clearly understood in relation to spatial relationships in the city.72 Thereis some endorsement, therefore, of a trade sub-system as described in the modernperiod by Goody.73 Indeed, the silk trade sub-system cannot be separated from thesystem of poverty relief. Other urban sub-systems were also involved – for example,the control of order during moments of upheaval like in 1619 and 1744–45. Some ofthem are less directly associated with the silk trade, like housing and the constructionof new buildings.

In this research, textual information from archival sources has been incorporatedsystematically using GIS to develop a clear view of the overall spatial logic in the socialpatterns of the silk trade. Other sources provide spatial connections to the logic ofsocial and political relations through time. GIS facilitates an analysis of change inthese variables which otherwise would be much more difficult to reveal. The parallelmade between social data and the changing materiality of the city can be greatlyenriched using the locations of building permits. Doing so informs the materialspace of the city, its transformation and characteristics, reveals socio-political andother organizational features so as to widen the scope of urban history and to under-stand historical urban space and materiality more fully and convincingly.

Supplementary material. The supplementary material for this article can be found at https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963926820000176.

72See how O. Zeller studies the sub-systems separately in La ville moderne, histoire de l’Europe urbaine,vol. III (Paris, 2012), 307–56: control, management, food and beverages, health, social relief.

73A sub-system is here understood not exactly like Goody’s ones: ‘religion, economy, politics and rights’(Goody, The Logic of Writing, xvii), but as a group of social constructs, institutions, workshops, etc.,involved in a common production or public service: economic production, public service, religiousorganization.

Cite this article: Gauthiez B (2020). What mapping reveals: silk and the reorganization of urban space inLyons, c. 1600–1900. Urban History 47, 448–466. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963926820000176



https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963926820000176

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963926820000176

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963926820000176


https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963926820000176


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