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“Tread softly, for you tread on my dreams”
It is Lodève's best-kept secret.
Tucked out of sight up the hill behind the unsightly Super-U and charmless new commercial centre is a more successful example of modern architecture – the Savonnerie.
A confusing name – the building opened in 1990 has nothing to do with soap.
It refers to a style of carpet brought to perfection in Paris during the reign of Louis XIV and given a new lease of life in Lodève.
The workshop can be visited every Thursday and Friday. You start with a 15-minute film about a uniquely French institution: the Mobilier national – a department of the Ministry of Culture providing priceless antique furniture for France's official buildings – the palaces used by the president, the prime minister's Hotel Matignon, but also countless other ministries, prefectures and embassies around the world.
The Savonnerie in Lodève is a remote outpost of the Mobilier national. Purpose built for making carpets, the workshop is light, airy, relaxed. A dozen weavers work at looms which rise like a wall of wool in front of them. For the specificity of this technique of carpet-making is a vertical loom, towering over the weaver. Each loom is lit by wide windows and skylights. Each weaver sits with their back to the light, passing the shuttle between the taut rows of warps to tie one knot at a time – 16 knots per square centimetre for some carpets.
But it's the weavers themselves who caught my attention, for they are the reason the Savonnerie came to Lodève 50 years ago. In 1962 France had just lost a bitter, bloody 8 year civil war in Algeria. 900,000 French colonials fled the newly independent country, arriving like refugees in France, where the government was completely unprepared for them. Those Algerians who had sided with them – the harkis – were being slaughtered by their victorious compatriots – 91,000 managed to find a passage out. But they weren't welcome in France either. They were placed in camps. Work was found for the younger, fitter men – but the women? Mostly illiterate, the only things they knew were raising children, cooking – and weaving wool carpets. A North African tradition.
Lodève also had long experience of working with wool. In particular manufacturing the coarse cloth, drap, used for the uniforms of Napoleon's soldiers. Practical if you're invading Russia, but by the 20th century no soldier would be seen dead in it. Lodève slid rapidly and ungracefully into decline. In 1962, since the government was offering money to any town willing to accommodate the luckless, homeless harkis, Lodève's mayor offered to house 60 families. Since the Algerian mothers made carpets, they were set up in the long-abandoned drap works. But the market for Algerian-style carpets was limited. In desperation, the mayor persuaded De Gaulle's Minister of Culture to take them under his wing and thus 50 mostly illiterate Arab-speaking women became part of the highly prestigious, deeply French Mobilier national.
The Minister of Culture was André Malraux – novelist, art theorist and resistance hero. 50 years ago he made a crucial decision which affects everything you see today at the Savonnerie. Instead of churning out museum-ready copies of 17th century carpets, Malraux wanted something alive, vital. So he decreed the new workshop in Lodève would create carpets based on works of contemporary art. Not for sale, they would decorate all those palaces, ministries, prefectures and foreign embassies we saw in the film, reflecting with Gaullian grandeur France's greater glory.
However, Malraux had overlooked an important detail: although north African and Savonnerie carpets are both made with traditional skills, they are not the same traditional skills. Never mind, the newly arrived ex-Algerians in Lodève can be taught. But they couldn't read. They didn't even speak French. So French colonials who had worked in Algerian carpet-factories were brought in to train the women – once they themselves had been taught the Savonnerie technique. The Lodève experiment remains a classic example of the Frenchification of a group of immigrants.
During the visit you will watch the weavers passing the shuttle, counting the knots, checking the regularity of their lines. But it's not a mindless, repetitive occupation. To their right a copy of the painting they are re-creating in wool. They work closely with the artist, together choosing exactly the right colour for each line of the carpet. They have 28,000 shades to choose from. Using a photograph of the painting, enlarged to the size of the future carpet, perhaps 3 metres by 2½, the weaver draws the artist's design on her warps – a combination of mathematics and graphic skill – which is then her pattern. She works for an hour in full concentration, walks around, comes back, works again. The workshop feels like an artist's studio, for that is exactly what the weavers are. They are not copying a painting, they are creating a carpet.
Some of the weavers you see today are the daughters or grand-daughters of the original Algerians, but most are not. Craftsmen working for the state-run Mobilier national are fonctionnaires. You cannot be a fonctionnaire unless you are French. You also have to pass a national, competitive exam – after several years training.
Clearly that ruled out the Arab-speaking mothers newly arrived at Lodève. Over 20 years, the original Algerian women were phased out and replaced by weavers who had completed their 4 years training in Paris and passed the difficult concours. The social fabric of the Savonnerie changed, creating different problems.
The weavers mostly work in pairs, sitting side by side, hour after hour. A carpet based on a contemporary painting will take four or five years to make. 17th century style carpets take ten. That's a long time to be locked together, day after day, and it's not easy, when there are only a dozen weavers, to find someone compatible.
La Savonnerie is unlike anything else you will visit. The carpet you watch edging its way into the world will cost well over half a million in wages alone.
Far more than the value of the painting on which it is based.
A wonderful French paradox – to be walked over in some distant embassy.
©tim kingmarch 2014
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