“The tanners of yesterday and today have partly built the city, and profoundly modified the Haute-Loire, demonstrating the importance of the industry for the territories. They gave birth to a powerful trade union movement bringing hope and social progress during the development of the company, and capable of resisting despair and difficulties during crises. The harshness of the leather trades and the crisis must not destroy the hope and tenderness of life and the happiness to be built together.”
In 1971, the company had 1,300 employees
Raymond Vacheron has written 60 fascinating pages on the history of the Tanneries du Puy in Social History of Haute-Loire, number 3. The trade unionist, specialist in leather and the textile industry at the national level who was a referent for the CGT, wrote a chronicle of the birth and evolution of this company after consulting volumes of official archives and bringing together several personal collections of former tanners.
Why be interested in Tanneries? Quite simply because since 1948, according to declarations to Urssaf, Tanneries du Puy have employed more than 5,000 people in the Puy basin and the Haute-Loire department. Raymond Vacheron recalls that the growth of the company in the 1960s changed the landscape in Haute-Loire. “The development of tanneries leads to a profound change in the countryside and slows down the exodus with the company's organization of home-work bus transport, small farmers becoming tanners while maintaining, at least initially, a dual activity. » The Puy basin follows the evolution of hiring and it is necessary to accommodate the tanners. The history of the Tanneries therefore leads to town planning. “The Cité du Loup is the first workers’ town with 55 housing units with the possibility for tanners to become owners. This will be followed by the construction of apartments reserved for the HLM of Val-Vert and the La Bouteyre complex, in Chadrac.
Maurice Sidem, Napoleon of leather
During the dark period of layoffs and processions of demonstrations in the city center of the Haute-Loire prefecture, the company was so emblematic that the municipal council voted for aid to the strikers while the merchants drew the curtain and the Bishop Jean Dozolme signs press releases and asks Christians “to have an intention of prayer for the working world”.
Raymond Vacheron rightly points out that leather is an old tradition in Puy. The tanners' corporation was born in 1551 in the Carmelite church. The workshops are located near Dolaizon in the Faubourg Saint-Barthélémy. Rue des Tanneries dates from 1603 in Le Puy, but tanners are also present in Yssingeaux, Paulhaguet, Langeac, Monastier, Arlanc, Saint-Didier, Brioude or Saugues. In 1789, on the eve of the French Revolution, the town of Puy had 29 tanneries which employed 76 people. Then the methods changed over the centuries and, in 1910, “only the Brolles tannery remained, manufacturing thick leather for forge bellows, belts and harnesses” which ceased its activity in 1938, but kept a workshop in Vals.
