1665-1789
A workshop goes industrial
Louis XIV signed the letters patent establishing the Manufacture des Glaces de Miroirs in Paris in October 1665 – and founded another 25 such establishments that year.
The Royal Glass Works
Minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s underlying political and economic agenda involved undermining Venice’s supremacy in Europe’s glassmaking industry. He accordingly granted this Manufacture a number of tax breaks and advantages (including a temporary but renewable monopoly) to help it keep pace with the demand of mirrors for homes and royal buildings. That protection, the government had hoped, would reassure the private investors backing this workshop – but it finally took 37 years and 5 changes of legal status before finally becoming stabilised, in 1702. The workshop nevertheless received an impressive and symbolic order in 1684: 357 mirrors for the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles.
The invention of glassware casting
The glassware casting, a home-grown invention, was the opportunity this Manufacture needed to carve out its niche in the European market. The Glassware casting process slowly but surely replaced blown glass, and eventually dethroned rival Venetian alternatives. Buoyant demand from building companies and, in particular, decorators, paired with its technical monopoly on its European markets, explain the fact that the Manufacture’s sales quadrupled from 1720 to 1786 – and that it grew into France’s capitalisation leader. It was still the world’s only glass casting manufacturer, and in its prime, at the time of the French Revolution.
