From sheep to knitting, the revival of French wool<

When the first cold winters began to turn pink on the cheeks, the knitting needles emerged from the bottoms of the drawers. Knitting is like curling up next to an imaginary fireplace. It also means regaining control over the manufacture of one's clothes, giving them back value, far from the infernal spiral of fast fashion. However, the quest for balls of wool without synthetic fibers (and therefore from petroleum) and made in France quickly turns into an ordeal. After several hours of research on the web, the observation is dizzying: the French wool industry has almost disappeared in a few decades. This while France sees grazing more than 6.8 million ewes in its meadows.

You can still hear this breeder in the Médoc regret throwing away his tens of kilos of sheep's wool from old breeds every year. The alternative for farmers? Sell ​​it at a discount so that it is exported, exploited, and very often mixed with synthetics, in China or Turkey.

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However, isn't the work of wool one of the economic activities where human needs and those of animals are most in line? If you've ever seen a sheep struggling with its wool caught in brambles, risking starvation if not freed, you can only say yes. "Descendants of wild mouflons, domestic sheep have not always had a woolly fleece: they were initially hairy, explains the National Institute for Agricultural Research (Inra) in a 2017 study. The current attributes of sheep are the result centuries of genetic selections and crossings.”

For their well-being, sheep should be sheared once a year, in the spring. But it costs French breeders more than what the sale of the fleeces brings in. To be exploitable, the wool must also be washed, carded, then spun or felted. There is thus only one factory in France to wash wool, Lavage du Gévaudan, in Haute-Loire, and it was relaunched in 2018. The other stages are also gradually coming back to life.

Clouds of cotton candy

In a small valley resplendent with autumn colors, 70 kilometers northwest of Clermont-Ferrand, in Creuse, the Fonty spinning mill is valiantly surviving the competition Italian, German and Scandinavian. One of the last factories to spin and dye wool in the country (they can be counted on the fingers of one hand), it now employs 22 people in a region where work is scarce.

Behind the large windows of the white-walled building, between the purring machines and the smiles of the busy workers, it is hard to imagine that the factory is emerging from three decades of economic depression, having come close to compulsory liquidation in 2006. However, spinning is an essential step in this metamorphosis, from animal fleece to its human use.

Benoit de Larouzière, 50, his calm gaze behind his rimmed glasses, gives a tour of his 140-year-old factory, like a museum curator. This former high-ranking Airbus executive decided to drop everything two years ago to take over this spinning mill and its Fonty brand, a must in the 1960s. "Touch this wool, how soft it is", invites he in the middle of huge bales from which escapes what looks like clouds of cotton candy. Merino from Arles, alpaca, Mongolian yak down, cotton, silk, hemp, nettle. “At open houses, the first thing people ask me is if it hurts the sheep when you shear them. On the contrary. And then the animal, if you feed it well, it will make good wool. It's a virtuous circle." The texture and color combinations, crafted in a cafeteria-like lab, seem endless.

We follow the piles of hair, their evolution, in the factory underground. Once the last impurities have been cleaned, they resurface, clouds of tangled animal hair, ready to pass through the mechanical fangs of the carding machine. “A very dangerous tool”, warns the director, alongside Eric, a very energetic little dry man in charge of handling the monster that hammers our eardrums. From it comes a “prefil”, the outline of what, in about ten meters, four machines later, will take the well-known form of the balls.

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"Rediscovering the wealth of French livestock"

Short gray hair, brush cut, rosy cheeks, looking jovial in big overalls, Alain, 56 years old, 38 of whom in spinning, s case on a huge scrap machine responsible for twisting the wires so that they hold together. Watching that no knot forms, he says with a smile: "My father also worked in the factory and my partner is right there", pointing to a small woman who passes behind us. Until last year, he held both ends of the wool, maintaining a herd of 72 sheep in addition to his work at the spinning mill. "For the meat," he says.

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This choice of breeders in the region, Jules Kister, knows it by heart. For a month in the factory, this tall dark man with broad shoulders is above all a shearer by trade. Wool, he could talk about for hours. "You know," he explains, pointing to a thread speeding through a 50-year-old machine. Under the microscope, wool looks like a banana tree. It is these scales that allow such cohesion of the thread. A member of the Lainamac association, he has made the revival of the wool industry in his region an act of activism.

In the middle of the white zone, the Fonty spinning mill is also the point of convergence of human environments in crisis. “La Creuse has the level of development of Seine-Saint-Denis, asserts Jules. We must recreate links between the few activities that remain in the region, it is a question of survival. Its objective: to convince breeders to have their wool processed in the area rather than throwing it away. “French wool has a bad reputation abroad,” he continues. So farmers are surprised how much they can do with theirs – clothing, mattresses, insulation. We must rediscover the richness of French livestock. A sheep in the high mountains will not have the same wool as in the plain.” And to add: “Wool is a material with incredible properties. She served the sheep before the man. Unlike cows and pigs, it allows them to live outside longer during the year and guarantees them better living conditions on farms.”

French wool products from elsewhere

Currently, the vast majority of wool used in French products comes from Australia and New Zealand for merinos, from Latin America for alpaca and Mongolia for cashmere. “We use 30% French wool in our balls, admits Benoit de Larouzière. We hope to reach 50% soon. But it is valid for the whole sector. Beautiful materials are produced in the southern hemisphere and consumed in the northern hemisphere.”

Curly yarn, thick yarn, bushy, smooth, silky or twisted yarn, the tufts of the sheep gradually take shape under the agile hands of the Fonty workers. And it is women who ensure the finishing stages. Magalie, a baller for five years, sees the balls that do not weigh the standard 50 grams and puts the others in plastic bags, ready to send.

Buying 1.50 euros per kilo of raw wool from breeders (i.e. twice the cost of shearing), paying the minimum wage for the 22 employees, paying for the creation of the dye, the maintenance of the machines and the shipping of the orders inevitably affects the prices of the balls. Benoit de Larouzière has decided to no longer do "in oil", no synthetics at Fonty. So much so that, for example, their flagship product, the BB Merino ball, is sold for 6.10 euros. To knit a sweater for women, it costs just over 40 euros. A crippling price for many French people.

Laetitia Modeste, 32 years old and creator of the young brand bearing her name, has the same problem. The "Tricòt", the new sweater in its collection, 100% merino sheep raised on the Crau plain (Bouches-du-Rhône), undyed, spun in the spinning mills of the Park and knitted in the Missègle workshop, in the Tarn, she sells it for 190 euros… “I asked myself the question of the price a thousand times, argues the young woman who has been living in Montpellier for a year. We have to change the way consumers look. I can't lower my prices if I want to properly compensate all the craftsmen involved in the manufacturing and the breeders. I prefer that people buy me a garment to keep it for a long time and that they are aware that this price is necessary to preserve know-how on the point of disappearing.

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Like Fonty's director, the designer left Paris and quit her well-paying job at a major fashion company to "find meaning again." They are citizens in the same dynamic that they target with their products. “We don't do luxury, but top-of-the-range, craftsmanship,” defends Benoit de Larouzière.

The growing concern for animal well-being, as well as local concerns and respect for the environment, could well achieve the feat of reviving the French wool industry. And why not revive the passion for knitting that so many grandmothers have tried to pass on.