French furniture? Foreign artisans in Paris during the ancien regime.

Throughout the ancien regime, French manufacture of luxury goods was advanced by emigre artisans. In the furniture trade, the most influential were the German Kunstschreiner (or cabinetmakers) who contributed not only to the wide array of objets d'art offered in Paris but also to the formulation of the Louis XV and Louis XVI styles. Although this phenomenon is well known among cultural historians, a focused study of the German and French cabinetmakers' guilds, in particular their stipulations and educational requirements, has never been made to explain how foreign expertise shaped the golden age of "French" furniture making in the eighteenth century.

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An early arrival from the Rhine to the Seine was Jean Francois Oeben, who trained in both wood- and metalwork in Germany before he came to France in the mid-1740s and settled in the Paris suburb of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. There he seems to have been employed first by the ebeniste Francois Vandercruice (or Vandercruse; d. 1755), whose daughter Francoise Marguerite (d. 1775) he married on July 28, 1749. (1) Vandercruice may also have been the person who introduced Oeben to Charles-Joseph Boulle (1688-1754)--the youngest son of Andre-Charles Boulle (1642-1732)--who rented workshop space to the German cabinetmaker, and most probably employed or subcontracted work to him. From 1751 Oeben worked in the royal workshops, first at the Louvre (1751-1754), then at the Gobelins (1754-1761) and the Arsenal (1756-1763), where he made marquetry, cabinetwork, and metalwork unrestricted by guild regulations. (2) This privilege, combined with his clients' interest in extravagance and their ability to purchase costly furniture, allowed Oeben to produce pieces of highly elaborate design incorporating sophisticated mechanical devices.

One of Oeben's most important innovations was the mechanical table, which he invented in the early 1750s (see Fig. 1). (3) Later in the decade he invented the rolltop desk, a new form derived from the French bureau plat. He went on to produce individual pieces of such technological complexity that he earned the titles of ebeniste du roi in 1754 and ebeniste mecanicien du roi in 1760. Although the bureau du roi in the French royal collection, the most famous of all writing desks, was begun by Oeben and completed by his journeymen Jean-Henri Riesener and Jean-Francois Leleu (1729-1807) and delivered to Versailles in 1769, six years after his death, it was Oeben who created and popularized the new form. (4)

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These technical advances were made possible in part by the freedom Oeben enjoyed at the royal workshops and his exemption from the strict guild regulations in Paris that would have obliged him to work in a single profession carefully defined by a regulating company. Instead, he worked in or oversaw four processes: cabinetmaking, marquetry cutting, bronze casting, and the manufacture of the mechanical devices that decorated and operated his sophisticated pieces. (5) Importantly, his varied interests were formed by the education and experience he obtained in woodwork and metalwork in Germany prior to his immigration to Paris.

Like Oeben, the furniture makers Jean-Pierre Latz, Joseph Baumhauer, Guillaume Benneman, Matthieu Guillaume Cramer, Guillaume Kemp, Francois Rubestuck, Jean-Henri Riesener, Jean-Georges Schlichtig, Jean Chrysostome Stumpf, and Adam Weisweiler all went from the Rhineland in the west of Germany to Paris in the eighteenth century. Their technical expertise and high-quality production, especially of mechanical furniture, reflects the German workshop culture exemplified by the internationally renowned enterprise of Abraham (1711--1793) and David Roentgen in Neuwied, also in the Rhineland (see Fig. 4). (6) Examining the German guild system--its obligations, rules, and regulations, and the nature of the training of apprentices and journeymen--sheds new light on why so many talented young craftsmen immigrated to France and the impact they had on the expatriate community in and around Paris. (7)