When Geneva became a vast Fabrique
“Geneva’s most thriving fabrique is watchmaking. It employs more than 5,000 people, which is over one fifth of the citizens.” So reads the lengthy article on Geneva, published in 1757 in the Encyclopaedia of Diderot and d’Alembert. Despite being written with a lower-case f, fabrique (manufactory) no less refers to the multitude of watchmakers, goldsmiths, jewellers and other craftsmen whose cabinets (small workshops) had spread along the right bank of the Rhône in the eighteenth century, and who combined their skills to produce watches and jewellery.
Geneva was a vast workshop where the people, techniques and businesses whose commerce was the measurement of time, the manufacture of jewellery and the decoration of objets d’art worked in a network based on interpersonal relations. Geneva boasted a highly-skilled workforce of craftsmen, assisted by apprentices and compagnons.
But let us not rush ahead. When Calvin came to Geneva in the sixteenth century, he quickly set about banishing such manifestations of luxury as jewellery and ornamental objects, forcing goldsmiths to turn to watchmaking instead. This transition was made easier by the exodus, as of 1550, of French Huguenots who were past masters in the watchmaker’s art. Circa 1560, forty masterships were created; in 1601 watchmakers left the goldsmiths’ guild to establish the world’s first guild of watchmakers, the Maîtrise des Horlogers de Genève. As Estelle Fallet, curator at Geneva’s Musée de l’Horlogerie et de l’Émaillerie, explains, the Ordonnances et Reiglement sur l’Estat des Orlogiers (Ordinances and Regulations for the Condition of Watchmakers) laid down the terms for the organisation of the profession, apprenticeships, compagnonnage, admission to the rank of master and standards of bienfacture, meaning the skill and craftsmanship with which an object is made. After an apprenticeship of at least five years, candidates for the rank of master were required to produce “a small clock with an alarm to wear around the neck, and a square clock to stand on a table.”
Over the years, the division of labour within the Genevan Fabrique became more marked, and this gave rise to new masterships: that of case assembler in 1698 and engraver in 1716. Until 1785, only men could exercise watchmaking’s professions; women contented themselves with producing chains, and it was in this quality that they were admitted to the watchmakers’ guild in 1690.
A century later, in 1790, Geneva was already exporting more than 60,000 watches. The reputation and success of its Fabrique was such that the city’s watchmakers’ guild could do nothing to prevent workshops from springing up along the north bank of Lake Geneva and throughout the Arc Jurassien.
