The neighbourhoods of St. Etienne are a great centre for all sorts of industries, and among them the petty trades occupy still an important place. Ironworks and coal-mines with their smoking chimney, noisy factories, roads blackened with coal, and a poor vegetation give the country the well-known aspects of a “Black Country.” In certain towns, such as St. Chamond, one finds numbers of big factories in which thousands of women are employed in the fabrication of passementerie. But side by side with the great industry the petty trades also maintain a high development. Thus we have first the fabrication of silk ribbons, in which no less than 50,000 men and women were employed in the year 1885. Only 3,000 or 4,000 looms were located then in the factories; while the remainder — that is, from 1,200 to 1,400 looms — belonged to the workers themselves, both at St. Etienne and in the surrounding country.205
As a rule the women and the girls spin the silk or make the winding off, while the father with his sons weave the ribbons. I saw these small workshops in the suburbs of St. Etienne, where complicated ribbons (with interwoven addresses of the manufacture), as well as ribbons of high artistic finish, were woven in three to four looms, while in the next room the wife prepared the dinner and attended to household work.
There was a time when the wages were high in the ribbon trade (reaching over ten francs a day), and M. Euvert wrote me that half of the suburban houses of St. Etienne had been built by the passementiersthemselves. But the affairs took a very gloomy aspect when a crisis broke out in 1884. No orders were forthcoming and the ribbon weavers had to live on casual earnings.