Authors: James Essinger
The son of a master-weaver
vertical cords, pulleys, and control rods, were worked from dawn to dusk to produce a few centimetres of precious, beautiful decorated fabric.
On
20
January
1765
, Clémence married a family friend, Jean-Marie Barret, in the church of Saint-Nizier. Barret, a cultured man who adored books, took an interest in Joseph’s education. He taught the twelve-year-old to read and told him of the greater world beyond the silk-weaving workshop. Joseph knew little of that world, but the great ships he saw on Lyons’s rivers, taking the city’s silk fabrics and other merchandize to customers around the world, whetted his curiosity for other places and other lives.
Barret, who became Jacquard’s teacher and mentor, helped to fill in some of the gaps in Joseph’s imagination. Most likely Barret spoke to the boy about politics, too. It was an age when few people outside the privileged nobility or the clergy could see much good in the French political system. Educated but landless people were particularly alive to the outrageous inequalities between those with money and those without. The rich lived lives of preposterous luxury, idleness, and gastronomic and erotic excess. The poor, for their part, dressed like scarecrows. Their diets were so desperately dependent on bread that when its price increased by a few sous they faced starvation.
In
1772
, at the age of forty-eight, Jean-Charles Jacquard died. It was by no means a premature death by the standards of the day. His will revealed more assets than anyone expected: there was possibly something of the miser in his makeup. As well as the workshop and apartment in Lyons, there was a productive vineyard and even some quarries at the nearby village of Couzon-au-Mont-d’Or. In keeping with the tradition of the times, his only surviving son Joseph, now twenty years old, inherited everything.
After Jean-Charles’s death, Jacquard worked half-heartedly at his father’s trade, but without much success. He kept himself largely by living off his dwindling capital, never a good idea. On 23
Jacquard’s Web
26
July
1778
he married a young woman named Claudine Boichon. Their only son, Jean-Marie, was born in April
1779
.
The birth of Jean-Marie evidently did not encourage Jacquard to settle down to making a success of his career. What happened to him over the next four years is not clear, but he certainly went through most of his capital with alarming rapidity. In May
1783
, when he was approaching his thirty-first birthday, Jacquard confessed to Barret that he had spent almost all his inheritance.
Jacquard’s more romantic contemporary biographers attribute his descent into poverty to spending too much time trying to build a better loom, but in fact there is no evidence whatsoever that Jacquard was working as an inventor at this stage in his life.
A sombre chapter in Jacquard’s life followed. He does not appear to have gone bankrupt, but he was certainly forced to sell almost everything that remained of his inheritance: a small house, two drawlooms, as well as his wife’s modest jewellery and even—according to one source—his very own bed. He sank to the level of an unemployed workman, inevitably dragging his family down with him.
It is not known for certain what Jacquard did next. Some nineteenth-century sources have him working as a labourer in a plaster quarry, others maintain that he toiled for a lime-burner in the Bresse area. One alleges that he became a lime manufacturer, another that he worked in a gypsum mine. It is certainly known that Claudine stayed with their son in Lyons, working in a small straw-hat factory. Her wages for this, one franc a day, were barely sufficient to buy bread to keep herself and her son alive.
Jacquard was only saved from this life of poverty and obscurity by the French Revolution, which shattered and transformed France between
1787
and
1799
. It is known that Jacquard helped to defend the city against the Revolutionaries during the siege of Lyons in
1793
, when Lyons went through a counter-Revolutionary phase. The source of these sentiments in Lyons is not hard to identify. It stemmed substantially from the city’s long commercial tradition of having royalty and aristocrats as customers.
24
The son of a master-weaver
During the battle for Lyons, Jacquard’s fifteen-year-old son fought by his side. When the city fell, the two fled together.
Most of the leading counter-Revolutionaries were guillotined. By the end of the siege Jacquard himself had become known as an ardent defender of Lyons against the Revolutionary forces. Had he been caught and identified he would very likely have been booked in for a morning appointment with the guillotine himself.
But with a reversal of loyalties that was as dramatic as it was sensible, he and his son adopted false names and joined the Revolutionary army.
The precise nature of Jacquard’s military career is in some doubt, but it is known that he progressed to an officer rank within a few months of joining. One source claims Jacquard occupied a high rank in the military government of the German city of Worms after the Revolutionaries overran it in
1797
, but there is no evidence to confirm this story. Of course, if Jacquard were using a false name at the time, no evidence is likely ever to come to light. What is known is that during this period of military adventurism for Jacquard and his son, Jean-Marie was killed in a battle or skirmish, probably in Germany and most likely in
1797
.
The death of his son and only child robbed Jacquard of the desire to remain a soldier. By
1798
he had returned to Lyons and to his wife. His health was far from good; he had been wounded in battle and spent several months in a Lyons hospital, ill and grieving. But he recovered, and finally managed to win his dis-charge from the army.
Once Jacquard left hospital he again worked at various odd jobs; repairing looms, doing occasional weaving work, bleaching straw hats, and driving light horse-drawn carts between the Lyons suburbs of Perrache and la Guillotière. It appeared that once again, after his brief military career, Jacquard had lost the plot of his life.
But the career that would catapult him into immortality was just about to start.
25
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Jacquard was a man who was most at home among workmen.
He was always happiest in their company, and to know him as he really was one had to see him in his ordinary clothes in a weaver’s studio, giving the weavers instruction on how to make best use of his loom.
The Count of Fortis,
Éloge historique de Jacquard, 1840
The French Revolution had given Jacquard a taste of adventure, but after the death of his son and the end of his military career, he returned to Lyons with little to his name except grief, poverty, and memories.
Today, even with the gift of hindsight, his rapid rise to fame and wealth appears surprising, almost unbelievable. Yet he was living at exactly the right time. At the start of the nineteenth century, the chaos, butchery, continually gyrating politics, and general fiasco of Revolutionary France were being metamorphosed into a coherent, ordered, disciplined new society that saw rational order as its god.
27
Jacquard’s Web
It was a society that passionately sought to be governed by reason. True enough, experience suggests that it is all too often when people are most claiming to pursue reason that they are at their most unreasonable, and no one who had lived through the Revolution and witnessed any of its horrors could have doubted this. But not even the agonizing memory of the Revolution’s excesses could dull the ardour for building a new, rational society that was so deep-rooted in the French mind at the time.
This enthusiasm even went so far as to extend to something as apparently sacrosanct as the calendar. In
1793
the Revolutionary government introduced a new version. This replaced the Gregorian calendar with a supposedly more scientific and rational system designed to avoid what were regarded as superstitious Christian associations. Each new month was exactly thirty days long. All the new months were given new names. The first month of spring, for example, was known as Germinal (from the Latin word
germen
—‘seed’), while the month in the height of the summer was called Thermidor (from the Greek words
therme
—
‘heat’ and
doron
—‘gift’). The rational calendar was never particularly popular with the people—the Gregorian calendar was re-established on
1
January
1806
—but its very existence shows how widespread and far-reaching the passion for rationality was in Revolutionary French society.
It was a society that had a particular love of new types of machines and for all kinds of completely new inventions. This was only to be expected; after all, machines are the ultimate physical embodiment of reason.
One nineteenth-century biographical account of Jacquard’s life declares that he had already started work on his loom when the French Revolution broke out. But this, like too much that has been written about Jacquard in the past, is at best uncorroborated supposition, and at worst fantasy. The truth is that there is no evidence that Jacquard started work on loom-making before
1799
: the year when Napoleon Bonaparte came to power, united France, and ended the Revolution. Jacquard had spent most of his 28
The Emperor’s new clothes
time during the Revolution struggling to stay alive, a battle that does not allow much leisure for the calm and inspired reflection behind great inventions.
Of course, Jacquard
may
have been thinking for many years about the challenge of building a new type of silk-weaving hand-loom. For all we know this had been on his mind since his childhood days. Some of his contemporary biographers assert, plausibly enough, that he spent time as a young man working for his father as a draw-boy. If this was so he would certainly have had first-hand experience of the mind-numbing complexity and tedium of weaving pictures in silk by manual means. But biography must deal with what can be known for certain, and there is no proof available that Jacquard did, in fact, ever work as a draw-boy. Nor can the onset of Jacquard’s work on
inventing
looms rather than
weaving
with them be reliably dated from any entry in any diary or workshop journal, for not a single word ever written by Jacquard survives.
Yet in place of direct evidence there is some useful circumstantial evidence available. Jacquard took out his first patent for a loom (not
the
Jacquard loom at this point) in December
1800
.
He had not returned to Lyons until
1798
. The months he spent in hospital that year could indeed hardly have been a period when he did very much practical experimentation in loom technology, no matter how much he may have been thinking about the matter. Common sense suggests that he
must
have embarked on his new career as an inventor in
1799
, or at the very latest the following year.
If indeed it wasn’t until the last years of the eighteenth century that Jacquard started trying to build a better silk-weaving loom, the new political and technological mood of the country would have played a crucial role in inspiring him. This new mood had sprung up spontaneously, but had been nurtured by the personality and conviction of one man who seemed to the French to exemplify all that was best about the new society they had created: Napoleon Bonaparte.
29
Jacquard’s Web
The aspects of Napoleon’s personality and vision that mattered most to Jacquard were unconnected with the new leader’s political or military success. Rather, they were related to his respect and admiration for science. This, like the intensity of Napoleon’s own personal ambition, lay at the core of his personality. Indeed, once Napoleon became the undisputed ruler of France in
1799
he deliberately set out to give an enormous boost to French science and industry.
The rivalry between the British and French industrial revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has stimulated a great deal of debate. The consensus today is that France’s industrial technology was, in fact, considerably inferior to Britain’s for much of the period, that it was only from the middle of the nineteenth century that France started to enjoy a dramatic level of industrial growth and expansion. At the start of the nineteenth century, the French economy was again starting to expand, but France’s major area of manufacture remained the market for hand-crafted luxury goods aimed at the wealthy in Europe and America. This included items such as jewellery and—of course—
silk, which was in fact France’s largest export commodity in the early nineteenth century.
These observations give us a crucial opportunity to set Jacquard’s work in perspective: he was trying to effect a vast improvement in a machine that played a key role in the economy of his native land because it manufactured the fabric so prized both at home and abroad. If he could succeed, any significantly improved loom would have a claim to be the most precious, and important, piece of machinery in France.