The history of Vallabrègues basketry

The cane

Cane is a raw material harvested around the village, still today. It is the cane of Provence that grows on the canniers on the edge of fields or roads. It is cut in winter, it is scraped by women, in the open air. Before being worked, it is split into 4 branches, it is a dangerous job. These objects fall into the category of round basketry.

The Banaste

Let's stop for a few moments on this object, a Vallabrègues specialty, banaste. As we have already seen, in the 15th century, Vallabrègues was famous for making banastes, and the basket maker was called banastie. Banasta is the packaging that farmers still used, a few decades ago, to ship their cherries. You had to see this line of banastes all full of red cherries under the trees of the Calade market! A wicker boot was needed to make 3 pairs of 24-inch banastes.
During the basketry festival, old banastes are hung in the streets as decoration.

The book

Two essential elements come into play in basketry: armour or armaturo is the chain of a weave, in basketry, it is the posts with the vertical wires that we see when the basket is formed. It is made up of wires called the posts or mountant, because of their vertical position.
The fence or closesoun, the weft of a weave, are the mobile and active wires that instead intertwine horizontally to raise the basket.
A basketry work has three essential parts: the bottom, lou founs, the body, lou cors, the opening, the gulo. You can add handles, li maniho, a lid, lou curbecèu.
A distinction is made between heavy basketry and fine basketry.
In big basketry, several categories: Baskets and baskets, gourbins, banastes, bressets or redelets, fishmongers, traps, dames-jeannes. But also baskets, whether round, long or oval. The basket is mainly used for fruit picking, a cherry basket still used in the village, the olive basket requested in the Alpilles. The basket, the best known object in basketry, originally used to preserve bread, is a small structure with a large handle.

Let's listen to Charles Thome known as' Babé ', 96 years old at the time, certainly the oldest French basket maker who worked at Crouzet with Marceau Equin, Gervais Niquet, Pierre Nini, Pierre Nini, Victorin Fontanier, Victorin Fontanier, Victorin Fontanier, Marius Lacroix, Sylvain Mangin, known as Le Grand Mangin...' I started working at 16, right back in the middle of the First World War, in 1916. We made 30 banastes a week, on average, everything depended on the quality of the wicker... and the skill of the basket maker. On Monday, the boss distributed the wicker boots for the week, we announced what we were going to manufacture, the 'tax' and we were paid for the number of pieces made on Saturday noon. Sometimes, we had been too pretentious, either because we had worked less well, or because we had been fishing, or because wicker had been harder to work. In the workshop, there was a good atmosphere. '
“I made a living in twelve inches,” explains Emilienne Monleau, who made 12-inch bathroom bags at Vanel's girls' workshop. This type of suitcase was made in two hours, one hour for the case, half an hour for the lid and as much for the bottom. By marrying Marie Boyer, Henri Vanel became the boss of the VANEL - BOYER workshop. Among the girls about fifteen, including Emilienne Monleau, known as Titine, Eliette Vanel, Julette Monleau, Audette Raymond... ' We sang while working and making jokes to the boys who worked next door; for example Lou Nisan thought that his head swelled up after work because the girls had fun tightening the ribbon on his hat! 'tells us Emilienne who worked in this workshop from 13 to 25 years. The boss, Henri Vanel, mayor of the town under the Popular Front and the Liberation, lent them books by Zola, Victor Hugo, Baudelaire, J-J Rousseau and others. Politics was also talked about, especially in the men's workshop.

The basketry workshop

Let's describe the atmosphere that reigned in the large workshops, at VANEL-BOYER, at CROUZET or at L'ARTISANE, for example. First, there were men's workshops and women's workshops, perhaps less because of sexism than because the productions were different.
Women began to enter the profession during and after the First World War, due to the lack of male labor force so far. They specialized in fine basketry, small works with fine wires, requiring greater agility but less strength, let's think of toilet or travel suitcases, fashionable at the time, over bottles. They also rebounded as they said in Vallabrègues, that is to say, using a special knife, they removed the twigs and split the canes. This work was done in groups either in the pen or in the street directly.
Instead, men worked large basketry with large pieces that required more force to braid, such as banastes, baskets, anything that was used as packaging for fishing or regional agriculture. Speaking of strength, you should know that a good basket maker can be recognized by the size of his thumb. 'When your thumb covers a shield worth 5 francs, you will be a basket maker' was the custom to say to the apprentice. The inch has remained a unit of measurement for basketry, we are talking about a 14, 16, 20 inch suitcase; but the basket maker's inch differs slightly, almost by 2 mm more, from the old French measure. And for good reason, a basket maker's thumb is bigger because it's the finger of the hand that works the most!

The work of men and that of women

Heavy basketry is mainly human work, an essential production for the Vallabrègues basketry, which had difficulty converting when demand fell due to competition from other raw materials.
Fine basketry, an essentially feminine job, produces mainly square products such as travel trunks, toilet bags, objects that were in high demand at the beginning of the last century with the development of rail travel. In Vallabrègues, it was the production of girls' workshops or workshops specialized in this field such as the Atelier Crouzet-Claverie, which came from Aramon in 1911. Marcel Vanel's studio also turned to fantasy basketry and art basketry. You just have to look at the illustrations of these books shown in the attached documents to realize the great variety of objects made in Vallabrègues or sometimes only sold in the village's basket maker shops.

The atmosphere in the workshop

Let's listen to Charles Thome known as' Babé ', 96 years old at the time, certainly the oldest French basket maker who worked at Crouzet with Marceau Equin, Gervais Niquet, Pierre Nini, Pierre Nini, Victorin Fontanier, Victorin Fontanier, Victorin Fontanier, Marius Lacroix, Sylvain Mangin, known as Le Grand Mangin...' I started working at 16, right back in the middle of the First World War, in 1916. We made 30 banastes a week, on average, everything depended on the quality of the wicker... and the skill of the basket maker. On Monday, the boss distributed the wicker boots for the week, we announced what we were going to manufacture, the 'tax' and we were paid for the number of pieces made on Saturday noon. Sometimes, we had been too pretentious, either because we had worked less well, or because we had been fishing, or because wicker had been harder to work. In the workshop, there was a good atmosphere. '
“I made a living in twelve inches,” explains Emilienne Monleau, who made 12-inch bathroom bags at Vanel's girls' workshop. This type of suitcase was made in two hours, one hour for the case, half an hour for the lid and as much for the bottom. By marrying Marie Boyer, Henri Vanel became the boss of the VANEL - BOYER workshop. Among the girls about fifteen, including Emilienne Monleau, known as Titine, Eliette Vanel, Julette Monleau, Audette Raymond... ' We sang while working and making jokes to the boys who worked next door; for example Lou Nisan thought that his head swelled up after work because the girls had fun tightening the ribbon on his hat! 'tells us Emilienne who worked in this workshop from 13 to 25 years. The boss, Henri Vanel, mayor of the town under the Popular Front and the Liberation, lent them books by Zola, Victor Hugo, Baudelaire, J-J Rousseau and others. Politics was also talked about, especially in the men's workshop.

Thanks to our historian Georges Sudres for this magnificent report.