RAGS BONES AND OTHER TREASURES PART TWO, by Leslie Wilson

Last month I posted about the chiffonniers, the rag-pickers (or informal recyclers) of Paris and their lives: this month I am going to describe some of the processes by which the waste materials they collected became treasure, by which Louis Paulian, who documented these things in his La Hotte du Chiffonnier, meant usable items that could be sold for good money. Most of the money thus earned enriched the middlemen, of course, the humble collectors remaining at the bottom of the heap - and yet, there was always the possibility that they might move up the hierarchy and get as rich as old Harmon in Our Mutual Friend.
I can't précis all of the processes described in La Hotte without writing a pamphlet, rather than a blog post, so I am going to concentrate on bones.

fan parts from recovered bone

This handy diagram of the grinning cow is about the uses for the bones inside her, rather than the more familiar diagram of beef cuts, which it is assumed have been already taken, either for human or dog consumption depending on the animal's age. So: the omoplate or chuck-steak bone will be used to make buttons. The humerus is used for buttons and objets de tabletterie, which could be things like dice and counters for games. The radius is used for more tabletterie, also brush-handles - other uses for the bones include parts of fans and knife handles. So: your treasured antique fan or bone-handled knives quite possibly came from someone's thrown-out Sunday roast bone.
The chiffonnier cleaned off any remnants of fat and meat to be sold off; this fat was made into tallow candles and what was known as 'economical butter' ie, the kind of margarine you got in those days, though Paulian calls this 'inferior margarine', so there must have been a superior kind.
Getting down to the bones now; it is no longer possible for us to visit the splendid factory of Messieurs Dupont and Co at Beauvais, but these gentlemen employed more than fifteen hundred workers and who had outlets in Paris and branches in London, New York, Montreal and even Melbourne. Paulian did, and waxed enthusiastic about the process.
When the bones arrived at Dupont and Co they were boiled clean of all fat residues and then further cleaned with benzine; finally bleached in the sun. Then they were made into the desirable craft objects I have mentioned above.

Toothbrushes were another product, but buttons were perhaps the most important bone product. Machine-cut and carved into shape, they were then polished on a lathe; another machine pierced the holes in them.

lathe for cutting out buttons

As far as brushes and knife-handles went, France was not very good at conserving the large bones that were necessary to produce them, since French butchers tended to cut them up before selling them to customers. It was left to Britain, America and Australia, with their tradition of giant roasts, to supply objects made from these bones; though one praiseworthy butcher, the Maison Duval in Paris, boned its joints and thus was able to to keep the tibias and humeruses (or humera?) intact and sell them to Dupont and their competitors.

machine for making holes in buttons

Women sorting bones

The bones that were burned gave three products; fat, gelatine or glue, and noir animal, or animal blacking, which was used for pigments and black polish. Phosphorus was also obtained from animal bones, also from the trimmings when the bones were worked, and used mainly as fertiliser in agriculture. Tiny chips of bone were burned in a closed flask, treated with potassium carbonate, burned again, then cooled and washed with warm water to produce a liquid from which Prussian Blue was produced, for paints and printing.
Nowadays we think we are doing well if we can achieve a recycling rate of 50%, but in those days, in Europe (for the chiffonniers had their equivalents everywhere, as they do nowadays) what was left behind was mainly ash (which also had its use). The mesh of hair that the chiffonnier picked out of the rubbish was used to make switches for the same ladies to pin onto their heads, or else to make sieves for straining fruit juice. Rags were made into fine-quality paper, or shredded, sometimes to make new luxury fibres, sometimes to make felt (for hats, mainly) or shoddy, which is still used for mattresses.

fabric-shredding machine

The old red trousers of French Zouave soldiers were felted and sold to Near Easterners, who made colourful peasant hats out of them. Used paper, among other things, was made into ceiling-mouldings. Glass bottles were re-used (the chiffonniers were expert in knowing which factories to sell them back to) as milk-bottles used to be, which is by far the most energy-efficient way of recycling glass, only nowadays the manufacturers don't want to have the bother of paying for old bottles.
It could be easily done, of course; I am old enough to have been given bottles to take back to the shop, the bribe being, I got the deposit for extra pocket-money. Old tins, animal skins; there was a use for everything. Even snail shells. Fat from the sewers was reprocessed into soap; animals who drowned there were made into soap and glycerine. The chiffonniers were heroes of recycling and the 'progress' of twentieth-century municipal disposal systems that succeeded them meant that recycling levels plummeted (though a certain amount of reclamation, or totting, was still carried out by dustmen on their own account).
During the period when the chiffonniers were most active, the authorities made several attempts to suppress them or limit their numbers. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries they were seen as potential criminals - out at night with hooks, that could break into houses, baskets to stash the swag, and lanterns to case the joint with? This was the reason for the first lot of ID discs. The factory owners, resenting the money they had to pay them - three francs per chiffonnier per day, which added up to a considerable sum - proposed that all wastes should be municipally collected, sorted, and delivered to them. Their profits thus increased, they would pay the municipality a portion of the profit. The chiffonniers, having no more source of income, would have to seek (badly-paid) employment with the municipality. It is easy to see the logic of turbo-capitalism at work; you get taxpayers to subsidise you. However, the Prefecture of the Seine were enthusiastic about the idea - the figures clearly added up as far as they were concerned. The Prefect of Police opposed it, pointing out the social costs of increased vagrancy (chiffonniers who couldn't or wouldn't become employees) and of unrest fomented by angry chiffonniers, who preferred their independence.

The chiffonniers mounted a major PR campaign, enlisting journalists and politicians, and won. All the same, there was a law passed in 1884 that obliged householders to put their refuse into bins, and the chiffonniers found themselves racing the municipal collectors for the bins' contents. These poubelles, named after the Prefect of the Seine who introduced an earlier version, were cumbersome and difficult to lift, also had no lids, so they would have stunk and attracted vermin just as much as heaps of refuse on the street. Here is a rather Heath Robinson apparatus for loading them into the collection vehicles. I can almost hear the Paris street echoing to the crash of the dropped poubelle, and the curses of the collectors who would have to put all the refuse back into it, not to mention the one who would be hopping on one leg, and maybe be taken off to hospital because it had fallen on his foot.

An interviewer once asked my husband: 'Isn't it disgusting to see waste as a resource?' Clearly a lot of people think so, even to the point of finding it distasteful to separate their own waste into different receptacles. Put it away with your eyes shut and forget about it, and let someone take it away and never see it again. No doubt the Parisians of Paulian's time thought the same way, and they weren't aware, till he published it, that their wastes often did come back to them, looking handsome and desirable in shop windows, too. But if you find waste recovery and re-use disgusting - is it really cleaner to dump refuse into more and more holes in the ground, which may cause emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, and will be a colossal waste of the earth's shrinking land-space and resources?

RAGS AND BONES AND OTHER TREASURES; INFORMAL RECYCLERS OF YESTERYEAR, BY LESLIE WILSON

Photograph of a chiffonnier by Eugene Atget, (1857-1927,
Getty Archive

'In Paris you only have to bend down to pick up money in the streets. Truly, the Parisians are such prodigies that they throw away more than fifty thousand francs a day on the public thoroughfare, which represents eighteen millions per year.'
These are the opening words of Louis Paulian's The Rag-picker's Basket (La Hotte du Chiffonnier,1885) an extraordinary book which describes the work of what we would nowadays call 'informal sector recyclers', (otherwise rag-pickers, scavengers), and the products of their labour. The first appellation is preferable, being more respectful of the professionalism of these largely very hard-working and knowledgeable people ('specialists,' Paulian justly called them). Born in 1847, Paulian (later secretary of the Chamber of Deputies) came to Paris when he was twenty, to study law. He was drawn to the study of social questions and political economy, but he was dissatisfied with the learned books he read about the poor, and decided that if he was to get an accurate account of their lives, he should get alongside them and live their lives with them. It was typical of his method that when he wrote about prisons, he had himself locked in a cell, in order that he should find out exactly what was wrong with the system. If La Hotte du Chiffonnier is anything to go by, he had a gift for getting people to talk to him.

My own edition of Paulian's book is a rather pretty one, the kind people buy to put on their shelves for decoration, as you may see from this picture. What is inside is much more exciting.
'The chiffonnier is as old as the world,' says Paulian, and certainly they are still with us. Walking down the street in Moqattam, a town of modern-day informal recyclers in Cairo,I saw sights that reminded me of the pictures in La Hotte du Chiffonnier, and indeed, this picture in the book of one chiffonniers' quarter in Paris, reminds me strongly of parts of Moqattam. 

Here are the specialists engaged in the hand-sorting of refuse. They knew how to distinguish between different fibres; knew which bits of bone could be used for buttons, and which had to be boiled down for glue; which bottles could be returned to which factories for refilling, and what kind of glass should be broken up for various purposes. 

The Parisians, before Monsieur Poubelle invented his useful bin, used to tip their rubbish out directly onto the street outside their houses, and it had to go out at the same time at night; and then the chiffonniers had a few hours to rummage through it before the public service vehicles came along to take away the residual material. The chiffonnier with whom Paulian set off, at nine pm, to go along the streets in Paris, a 'coureur' or 'runner' he was called, carried a basket with straps on his back, also a lantern, and a hook for fishing in the heaps. If they were a nice 'sugar-loaf shape', the coureur knew that the heaps were undisturbed and full of treasure. These are some of the things Paulian's companion unearthed from them: a mesh of women's hair, a bone (which he had to fight a dog for); paper, wine-corks, woollen rags, bits of flannel, rags from sheets, sardine tins. He didn't like restaurants: they were too thrifty and would boil a bone, for example, till there was nothing left in it at all. He also picked up crusts of bread. 

 Paulian exclaimed: 'But the bread-crusts have got all wet in the gutter!' 'Oh, monsieur!' the chiffonnier answered, 'that doesn't matter. If the bread we find is clean, we eat it, and if it's dirty, we make the middle classes eat it. We never waste anything.’
In Parisian households, the cooks usually gave clean bread straight to the chiffonniers, but threw the dirty bread in the bin. Clean bread went home and was dipped in soup to soften it and make it fit to eat – this is hard stale baguette we’re talking about! If there was a surplus of good quality waste bread, it was sold on, via a middleman, mainly to feed the children of poor Parisian tradespeople who were being reared by women in the suburbs. 

Another coureur with his hook
and basket

Soiled bread had plenty of uses; the best was fed to pigs, rabbits and poultry, and the chiffonniers’ horses, if they had them. Bread that was so filthy that the animals would refuse to eat them would be roasted in an oven and then sieved. The coarse crumbs that wouldn’t go through the sieve were sold to restauranteurs in the Quartier Latin for breadcrumbs. These restaurants were used by students, who bought their dinner for 90 centimes, and neither knew nor (Paulian suggests) cared that their hams and cutlets were coated with bread that had been rejected by animals. The burnt powder that was the residue of this process was made into tooth-cleaning powder and ‘chicory’ which was sold in grocers’ shops. Major yuk factor, but the roasting probably got most of the bugs out of the bread, at least, and there wouldn't have been oil in the gutters as there would be nowadays.

The chiffonnier also found a chicken head, which would make a pot-au-feu for his family's dinner. Like a Chinese gourmet, he thought chicken head was a pretty good dish. Another time, he found some thrown-out calf's liver, which made wonderful eating. Other things in his haul; an old umbrella, a lady's corset, a soldier's epaulette, a gilt button - and so on. Small things which, collected together, represented a mine of metals, foodstuffs, raw materials.

There was a hierarchy of informal recycling work; the coureur, who you have just met, was at the bottom of it. Then there was the placier, who came every day to better-class houses. He would run errands for the cook and generally help out, and was effectively a member of the staff. Of course he put the rubbish out (having sorted it out himself and got the pick of the refuse.) The placier would often have a horse or donkey, as here illustrated, and a cart to take his stuff home in, and might aspire to raise himself to the next echelon, which was the middle-man. These entrepreneurs bought from the collectors, and then sold on to the factory-owners who processed the refuse, some of whom had once been humble coureurs. Like old Harmon in Our Mutual Friend, the entrepreneurs could become wealthy men. 

Rags being weighed and sold to an middlewoman

The coureurs themselves, sometimes people who had come down in the world, sometimes sons and daughters of other chiffonniers, lived a pretty hand-to-mouth existence, and tended to drink heavily in their leisure time. But they valued their independence. Though they consented to wear the metal ID discs the authorities insisted on (the idea was to restrict the numbers of chiffonniers), these were made a mockery of when the possessor of the disc took his whole family out collecting with him, and attempts to prevent them collecting at all, reducing them to employees who would sort refuse and sweep the streets, were strenuously and successfully resisted. In practice, the ID discs rarely held the details of the chiffonnier who was actually using them.

The chiffonniers went by nicknames, like 'Poil aux Pattes' (Hairy Paws) or 'Gras d'Huile,' (Oil Grease) - this latter was the moniker of an old woman called Rosalinde Famion. 'Sac d'Os' (Bag of Bones) was another one. They took the refuse they gathered up to their townships, and Paulian estimated the accumulated income of one of these townships at 12,000 francs a year. The rooms were often windowless, and were no bigger than a prisoner's cell, with earth floors. They were furnished with things picked out of the rubbish, 'the richest,' Paulian tells us, 'contain a bed, a table and a chair, or rather something that resembles a bed, a table and a chair.' The poorest had only the bed. Some had nothing except a thin heap of straw picked up in the street. So lived most of the men and women whose hands gathered from the throw-outs of bourgeois society, the raw materials of recycled wealth.

It's been hard to keep this blog within some kind of bounds, so I have decided to split it into two. Next month I shall describe in more detail the products that were made from the rubbish, with illustrations of the machines that processed them.