Rodama: a blog of 18th-century & Revolutionary France

Although he is scarcely more than a name, working-class Lyon has long celebrated the life of the "virtuous canut" Denis Monnet.   ...

It would be impossible to establish a silk manufacture anywhere but Lyon, for nowhere else would one find people who neither eat nor sleep, ...

 Anonymous depiction of a silk weaver' s atelier, 1820s. Musée Gadagne, Lyon The weavers of Lyon represented the impoverished u...

With increasingly ambitious silk design, came a drive to improve weaving technologies.  The breakthrough design, the Jacquard loom, is a phe...

English aficionados of French silk are eagerly awaiting the opening of the new European galleries at the V & A scheduled for later on t...

Ever wished you could walk the streets of an eighteenth-century town?  Soon your wish can come true! Lyon en 1700 is an ambitious and ...