Within easy reach of my holiday gîte is Alençon, still famous for the manufacture of Point d’Alençon lace. Typical of the seriousness with which the French take their cultural patrimony, the former College des Jésuites houses a museum where the history is told and the craft demonstrated.
Lace was a must-have fashion accessory in 17th-century France. It was imported from Venice and was so expensive that French nobles were ruining themselves acquiring it. Louis XIV’s minister Colbert persuaded 20 Venetian lacemakers to emigrate and set up workshops in Alençon. Soon more than 8,000 women were employed on a rudimentary production line making a lace of a staggering complexity of design and execution, involving up to 6,000 stitches per square inch. When the Revolution destroyed the market for lace, the manufacturing skills were preserved by nuns, until with Napoleon III’s accession there was a revival of interest in Point d’Alençon. It was shown in the Great Exhibition in London as “The Queen of lace and the lace of queens”.
