I have spent the better part of three weeks this autumn in the Vendée and the Charente-Maritime, walking, mostly, between small towns whose names will be unfamiliar even to those who have spent some time on the French Atlantic coast. The journey was undertaken at the suggestion of a colleague at a small museum in Niort, and at the personal cost of a wedding I should otherwise have attended in Marrakech, the absence from which I have not yet been entirely forgiven. I will, in the present essay and in two that are to follow, set out what I went there to see and what, on the longer reflection of the train back to Paris, I take it to mean for the work the Maison conducts.
The Atlantic coast of France, in the stretch I have just walked, is the home of perhaps a dozen crafts that have been practised for several centuries and that are, at present, practised by a sufficiently small number of people that the question of their survival has, in each case, become a serious one. I do not wish to overstate the case. The crafts of which I write have been declared on the brink of extinction, by various commentators of various periods, for as long as printed records are extant. They have, in each case so far, declined to vanish. The present circumstances, however, are in certain respects more concerning than those of previous centuries, and the principal reason is, as it almost always is, the demographic one. The practitioners are old. The apprentices, for the first time in the recorded history of these trades, are not arriving in sufficient numbers to replace them.
I will name three crafts, by way of illustration, and I will leave the others for the further essays in this series. The first is the construction and repair of the small wooden boats — pinasses, plates, and one or two regional variants whose names are local and whose forms are particular — by which the oyster beds of the Marennes-Oléron basin have been worked for several centuries. The second is the production of a particular salt, harvested by hand in the marais of the Île de Ré, by methods that have remained essentially unchanged since the medieval period. The third is the weaving of a kind of linen, formerly produced in a small number of workshops in the Vendée interior, of which there is at present, by my count, a single workshop remaining.
I begin with the boats. The pinasse, in its present form, is a vessel of perhaps eight to ten metres, flat-bottomed, with a small sail and an outboard motor, used principally for the working of the oyster parks. There were, in the basin a generation ago, perhaps twenty workshops in which such boats were built and repaired. There are at present, by the count given me by a colleague in La Tremblade, four. The four workshops are conducted by men whose ages are, respectively, seventy-two, sixty-eight, fifty-nine, and forty-one. The forty-one-year-old is the son of one of the others, and his is the only workshop whose succession is, at the present moment, secure. The others are not.
I spent two afternoons in the workshop of the seventy-two-year-old, who took me through the construction of a pinasse from the lifting of the keel timbers to the fitting of the gunwales, with a patience I had not expected and a precision I had not appreciated. The work is conducted by hand, with planes and adzes and a small number of jigs of his own design, in a building that has stood in its present form since the 1880s. He has had no apprentice for eleven years. He repairs more boats than he builds. He told me, without apparent regret, that he expects the workshop to close when he can no longer work, and that he has made no provision for it to be otherwise.
The salt production at the Île de Ré is a different case, and a more hopeful one. The marais, which extend over several hundred hectares of the northern half of the island, are worked by perhaps fifty saulniers, who harvest the salt by hand, in a season that runs from June to September, and who maintain the system of basins and channels by which the seawater is, by stages, evaporated. The trade has been, in the last fifteen years, the subject of a deliberate revival, supported in part by the appellation system and in part by the willingness of younger people to enter the work — the average age of the saulniers, at the present moment, is meaningfully lower than it was twenty years ago. The work itself, however, is conducted as it has always been conducted, with the same wooden tools and the same long days, and the resulting product is, by the testimony of every cook of any seriousness with whom I have discussed it, of an order that the industrial salt of the supermarket cannot approach.
The linen workshop, which I visited last, is the saddest case of the three. The proprietor is a woman of seventy-eight, whose mother and grandmother conducted the workshop before her, and whose family has been associated with the production of this particular linen since, by the family's own account, the late seventeenth century. The workshop, when I visited, contained four working looms and the proprietor herself. She has had no apprentice in fifteen years, and there has been no member of her family willing to take up the work in two generations. The looms will, when she retires, be donated to a museum near La Roche-sur-Yon. The linen will, simply, no longer be produced.
I rehearse these accounts not because the Maison is, or is in a position to become, an instrument for the rescue of these trades — we are not — but because the trades themselves stand in a particular relationship to the work the Maison conducts, and the relationship deserves to be made explicit. The Maison's members, very often, acquire houses, and furnish them, and develop, over time, a consciousness of the regional materials and the regional practices by which their houses ought to be furnished and maintained. The salt at the table, the linen on the bed, the boat at the small jetty at the end of the garden of the house in the Charentes — these, in many cases, are the things on which a member's daily experience of his house turns. The trades by which they are produced are, at the present moment, in many cases sustained by a single workshop. The decision of any such workshop to close is, for the immediate region in which it operates, a final decision.
What is to be done, in the face of this, is a question I am not equipped to answer in a Journal essay. What I will say, by way of a closing observation, is that the Maison has, in a small number of cases over the last several years, found itself in a position to commission, on behalf of members, the work of practitioners whose continued operation is in some doubt. The commissions are, in each case, of objects the member would wish to acquire in any case — a set of bed linen, a small fishing boat, a quantity of the salt — and the relationship that develops between the practitioner and the member is, in the cases I have observed, valued by both parties for reasons that go beyond the object itself.
I will close with the observation that this kind of relationship is not, in any meaningful sense, a charitable one. The practitioner is paid the proper price for the work, which the Maison is in a position to know and to advise upon. The relationship is, simply, a relationship — the kind of relationship that, until recently, was the ordinary basis on which fine things were acquired, and which has been replaced, in the wider commerce, by the impersonal channels through which most modern objects now move. The Maison's working assumption, in matters of this kind, is that the older relationships are worth the work of preserving, and that they are preserved best by being used.
I will, in a forthcoming essay, take up the question of the second of the trades I have named — the salt-makers of the Île de Ré — at greater length. The third, which is the saddest, I may not write about further. There are some accounts that are better given once.
— Dr. Iskander Alaoui, November 2025