by Laurent Guise, Schneider Electric , France
Internet, History and Art
hobby
94
A Journey
Through Time
and
a Popular
Website
Laurent Guise shares
with us his amazing
hobby of entering history
of thousand of villages on
the Internet. In his own
words:
"Bringing a new study
to people to better
understand their history
is fascinating."
1 A post card from 1896
showing Rhône flood and how Sablons
village had disappeared under the water
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2
Laurent Guise ,
working on his website
A journey through: painting history and the 19th century’s
industrial revolution. At the beginning, the history of a very small
French village where part of my
family lives was just a pretext for
learning Web technologies. I began publishing my early results
on the www.art-et-histoire.com
website. However, what began as a
very simple website is now a quite
complete site of thousands of pages
embracing a part of history of the
cubism painting movement and an
in-depth analysis of one facet of the
industrial revolution in France!
Sablons - a small village on
the Rhône river in France, not so
special at first glance … The real
point of this journey was to get to
know better the history of a village
located in the Rhône valley, more
specifically on the Rhône river, in
France, 50 km south of Lyon. Lyon
is one of the most important cities
in France … after Paris. A very pretty landscape was a first good reason
for publishing pictures.
I thought that this village didn’t
have a really specific history: as
many villages in France, it has its
church and its castle. In the XIX
century, people were either peasants, or employed in pulling boats
(halage) with horses along the river.
Few people were also employed in
helping others to cross the river,
using a specific mean called “bac
à traille,” a way using the current
of the water and a cable set between the rivers, to automatically
force the boat to go from one river
to the other. However, because it
was located on the Rhône river,
this village suffered from Rhône’s
swellings many times. Until the
river was controlled, the village
had often been flooded. Especially
in 1840, a large part of the houses
of the village (136!) were totally
destroyed, because they were made
of clay: this was reported in detail
by the parish priest of this village.
The same happened again five years
later, in 1856. See Figure 1.
These frequent floods explain
much better why one quarter of
this village is called “Moly Sabata,”
which means “wet foot” in the older local “slang.”
Another pretty interesting story
I discovered comes from the very
old history of the village, at a time
when both banks of the river didn’t
belong to the same kingdom!
In the early Middle-Ages (year
1032), the eastern bank of the
Rhône was attached to the German
95
Empire while the western bank
belonged to the French Kingdom.
Since that time, people living close
to the river were used to calling
these banks “Empi” for the eastern
and “Riaume” for the western part.
This is still present in some boat
games happening on the Rhône.
"Pique à l'Empi et bute au Riaume!
» is a current order given to the boat
manager to indicate which direction to take! You need to get back to
very old history to understand its
real meaning!
Before entering the 19th century history, let’s make a journey to
the painting history and the birth
of cubism. What is the relationship
with Sablons, the village I was focusing on?
Cubism, Albert Gleizes,
Moly-Sabata and Sablons: I discovered that in 1927, Albert Gleizes set up an artist community in
Sablons in the quarter of Moly Sabata! (See Fig ure 3). Who is A. Gleizes and what was his contribution
to the Cubist Painting Movement ?
He was born in Paris in 1881, and
his first exhibition took place at the
"Salon d'Automne" in 1903. Since
1908, A. Gleizes has tried to make
his vision of art simpler and simpler. Even if Guillaume Apollinaire
wrote for the first time the word
"Cubisme" in 1910, this pictorial movement was really initiated
by Cezanne in 1904. Then Picasso (1906), with the "Demoiselles
d'Avignon” and Braque (1908),
working at the Estaque, started
some works, only known by very
few well-informed art lovers having access to these workshops. Albert Gleizes belonged to them and
also Metzinger, Delaunay, Le Fauconnier, Léger, Gris, La Fresnaye,
Lhote, and Villon. While fighting
against the indignation of the public during the 1911 “Salons des Indépendants” of Paris and Brussels,
Albert Gleizes managed the "cubist"
group with the Duchamp brothers,
Kupka and Jean Metzinger, through
the “Section d’Or”.
His reputation as a theoretician
of the cubism movement comes
from his writings, including “Du
Cubisme” (About cubism) -an essay written with Jean Metzinger
and published in 1912. Albert
Gleizes' work had been variously
appreciated during the first half of
the XXth century, and curiously
his awareness was (and still is)
more important in the US than in
Europe. Albert Gleizes married Juliette Roche, born in Serrières, the
village in front of Sablons, on the
other bank of the Rhône river. This
explains why Gleizes chose MolySabata to settle in 1927 a community of artists-craftsmen (Figure 4).
Moly-Sabata's house: the
center of a cubism community. Albert Gleizes wrote: "First, we should
admit that everything that we see as
separated is definitely united. Music, painting, scultpure are different
modes of a unique spirit direction"
- 'La forme et l'histoire' – 1930.
One can say that his initiative of
building-up this artist community
in Moly-Sabata (Sablons) is a clear
translation of this principle!
Moly-Sabata is a big house,
Louis XVI style, listed, located on
the bank of the Rhône, in the south
quarter of Sablons. This quarter
was, long time ago, a Roman port.
But Moly-Sabata became really
known thanks to Gleizes' initiative.
First, Gleizes, who had decided to
make it an artistic center, had rent-
3 Rhône bank - Sablons and Moly-Sabata
I would never have
expected that the
Internet could make
such a work possible.
ed it since 1927 then bought it in
1938. Gleizes hosted a number of
artists here from very diverse origin, in a sort of utopia. His goal was
to offer them a means for expressing their art, but also sharing their
vision of art. Albert Gleizes had
then a lot of pupils, coming from
many countries, one of the most
famous being Anne Dangar from
Australia, who lived more than 20
years in Sablons and applied cubism art to pottery. The community
tried to apply these principles to
other art techniques:
Pottery by Anne Dangar
Singing by Cesar Geoffray
This artistic community still
remains active, under the management of the French Ministry of
Culture and also the Albert Gleizes' foundation (set up 23th March
1984). All this information is published on my site, pulling 10% of
the visits.
An amaizing bridge: One of
the very first suspended bridges
in the world, with iron-wires cables, was built in Sablons in 1828.
When I had a look at Sablons’ history, I learned that a suspended
bridge was built there and I discovered that it was the 4th such bridge
built in the world. This is due to an
amazing invention made by Marc
Seguin, born in Annonay, 20 km
far from Sablons, in a mountainous region (Massif Central). This
important fact leads me to dig into
two directions: the study of the impact of this invention in France, and
globally the work of Marc Seguin.
Let’s start with the first one.
The potential of iron cable!
When I noticed the huge number
of new bridges created during this
period, I felt that there was some-
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The Internet
offers not
only unique
capabilities
to find
information,
but also offers
free tools for
publishing
results. It
also makes it
accessible to
an unlimited
number of
people, and
facilitate
getting
feedback.
Internet, History and Art
hobby
96
All this
information is
now published
on:
www.art-ethistoire.com
thing unusual, and so I decided to
really get an in-depth picture. This
is possible thanks to the thousands
of books from the XIXth century
or before which are scanned and
freely available on the Internet. US
libraries as well as French libraries
are unique research centers. I read
tens of books and finally published
the description of about 1400
bridges built or still in use in XIXth
century.
And the conclusions are not so
well known: the invention of ironwires cable for suspended bridges
completely changed the way and the
challenges of building bridges.
It reduced the cost of such work
by a factor of five, made the process
two times faster (18 months) than
for conventional bridges (3 years). It
extended the longest possible span
to more than 200 meters compared
to 40 achieved with stone, enabling
people to easily cross large rivers.
This also made bridges more robust against flooding, because they
are higher, present less resistance
to water flow, and in any case, are
easier to repair. In the mean time,
the French government set new
types of contracts with concession
durations able to last up to 99 years.
The guarantee of income due to the
fees for such a long period of time
attracted a lot of new investors.
By analyzing in detail the impact
of this invention, we can conclude
that within about 20 years (1830-
1850), 400 bridges were built in
France, a number equivalent to
what was built in total during the
previous eighteen centuries (year 1
to 1800)! The most surprising fact
is that this invention didn’t have
any impact on the yearly rate of
building-up conventional bridges
(in stone) (Figure 7a).
During the XIXth century, before a bridge was built over a river,
it usually took half a day to cross it,
with a high risk to lose your equipment in the river, or with the risk of
unavailability of the crossing mean
due to swelling. This of course was
a handicap for industrial growth,
and is one of the main reasons why
Marc Seguin, who was managing a
textile company in Annonay, decided to build his own bridges to
make the link with an important
industrial path (the Paris-LyonMarseille road) much easier!
Before Marc Seguin started his
work on iron cable, only 3 fixed
bridges existed on the Rhône!
Twenty years later, 38 bridges were
built and the growth was mostly
due to suspended bridges! Thirteen
of them were built and owned by
the Seguin brothers (Figure 7b).
Iron cable and suspended
bridges certainly had improved
tremendously the infrastructure in
France during the XIXth century,
and surely helped the industrial
revolution. While trying to better know the history of bridges,
4 Moly - Sabata 5 Bridges' history website
As far as we know,
Moly-Sabata had
first been a house for
bargemen. Then it
became a convent.
More recently, in 1890,
it became a catholic
school, closed in 1906
after the decision in
France to separate
Church and State in
1904.
The embankment - 2001
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Visit the website for more information
Sablon's bridge: The 4th in the world !
Built in 1829, and suspended by iron-wires cable.
(Post card 1906 – Edition Jacquelin)
in many cases, I also got information
about the history of the town which
hosted the bridges. Thanks to GoogleMaps technology, it was possible to
show the evolution of the topography
of the concerned towns (Figure 5). In
the meantime I also learned how to
create dynamic Internet pages, manage
databases, produce on demand JPEG
graphics, use GoogleMaps positioning,
etc… For presenting the results, I created thousands of programming lines,
PHP pages and pictures with free tools.
This theme pulls about 60% of visitors,
most of them being students!
Marc Seguin - an amazing entrepreneur and inventor: As we
have just seen, Marc Seguin was the architect of the suspended bridge built in
Sablons in 1829, and was also the inventor of iron-wires cables. We already
saw that in 1850 the Seguin brothers
owned 13 bridges built on the Rhône,
but they were also very active in other
parts of France and Europe: about 70
bridges, some built in Spain and Italy!
How was this possible? Actually
Marc Seguin and his four brothers accomplished a lot of work by inventing
and managing amazing projects and
companies. First, how did Marc Seguin
get the idea to have a look at other
countries’ technology to get the best?
We will first discover that Marc
Seguin, born in 1786, was the grandson of one of the Montgolfiers brothers, the inventors of the montgolfiere
(French name for hot-air balloon),
which were the first aircrafts flying in
the world in 1783! Jacques de Montgolfier offered Marc the opportunity
to study in Paris. On his return to Annonay, Mark worked with his father in
conventional textile and while trying
to improve the business efficiency,
Marc Seguin detected very soon the
by Laurent Guise, France
97
power of steam, for textile machine.
In 1825 he bought one steam engine from an English manufacturer
to set the first steam boat company
on the Rhône. To improve the efficiency of such motors, he invented
the tubular boiler steam motor,
which increased the quantity of
steam produced by the boiler, and
therefore the mechanical power
delivered, by a factor of six.
Then he decided to set up the
first steam-powered railway in
France, between Saint-Etienne and
Lyon, with the objective to bring
coal to Lyon. He completely led
this project (achieved in 1831), dug
the longest tunnel in France at that
time (1300 meters), created a new
quarter in Lyon (Perrache-Figure 6)
to host the first railway station. He
also led during the period 18361840 the setting-up of the railway
between Paris and Versailles going
along the left bank of the Seine.
To make the piles of the bridges he
built more robust, M. Seguin also
invented the reinforced concrete
(1825) with his friend Mr. Vicat (a
grandson of Mr Vicat who founded
the Vicat cement company).
As entrepreneurs, Marc Seguin
and his brothers are amazing:
Predicted the importance on
improving the infrastructure of
communication
Managed more than 50 companies in France, Italy and Spain
from Annonay, impressive considering the difficulty to communicate
at that time
Managed the connections
with other European countries
Finally, through this study, I
demonstrated how important the
work of Marc Seguin and his brothers was in the context of the French
industrial revolution!
and
We are far from my original goal
focusing on Sablons village!
Marc Seguin by Hyppolite Flandrin 1809-1864
The tubular boiler steam machine invented by
Marc Seguin
6 An example of Lyon’s evolution through centuries
Lyon in 1750 Lyon in 1830 Lyon in 1834 Lyon in 1848 Lyon in 1863
Lyon Today
The Perrache part of Lyon’s town
also hosted the first heavy industries of Lyon, which later became
one of the most important industrial cities in France!
7 Analysis on the iron cable invention
The impact on the invention in France
Suspended
a
bridges
Growth comparison of
bridges built in France
between 1800 and 1880.
Conventional bridges
Suspended bridges
8 France during the XIXth century
Travelling improvement
Figure 8:
On the left is a very
concrete representation of how much
travel was improved
during XIXth century.
Conventional bridges
b
Suspended
Laurent Guise
graduated from
Supelec (ESE) Engineering school
in 1981 (France)
and from ICG
(company management school)
in 1994. He has
been working for
Schneider Electric
in Electrical
monitoring and
control systems
for 15 years. He is
currently leading
the deployment
of IEC 61850
technology within
the group. L. Guise
is also member of
IEC TC 57 committee (WG 10 and
WG19).
After his own
family, Laurent’s
passions are
history, old books,
art movements,
photography.
He is also an
enthusiast of any
new technology,
including software
technology. He
also paints but
this may be the
opportunity for a
new article.
Number of bridges on
the Rhône from 1700 to
1880 .
Suspended bridges.
bridges
Conventional bridges
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