The primary school now hosts the Scrabble club. Every Thursday, a handful of « seniors », as they say at the town hall, finds himself in the classroom where some already sat, children. Here, it is not the municipal school, but the school which was reserved for the children of the workers of Saint-Gobain, whose Royal Ice Cream Factory was installed in the 17th century.e century in this small village in the Aisne, which gave its name to the company.
At the heart of a clearing, this remote place in a thick forest of oaks was then the best defense against the industrial espionage that worried Colbert so much. So that for more than three centuries, the life of the municipality and that of the company have been inseparable. Until 1995, when the two large brick chimneys, taller than the church tower, ceased to spit their smoke for good. The site closed quietly: only a hundred workers remained. Two-thirds have been placed on early retirement. The others sent further, to other sites.
Nearly thirty years later, retirees make up a large third of Saint-Gobain’s population. They have become the main economic wealth, in a deindustrialized region where employment is devastated. They are the ones who run the local economy, deprived of comfortable tax revenues since the closure of the site. Employment there is now focused on health, social issues and old age. At least for now.
“When the factory closes, the economic value of a territory disappears, but the consumption of retirees continues to drive the economy, summarizes the economist and geographer Laurent Davezies. It absorbs the shock. The real tragedy is the death of pensioners, it can last forty years. It is a cancer that eats away at the territories. »
It is not difficult to imagine what was the golden age of the former royal ice cream factory, of which retirees are the last living witnesses. The industrial footprint is omnipresent in the village, almost entirely built by the group of the same name. A dozen or so worker housing estates, each with its row of houses flanked by small gardens, still criss-cross the site, a remnant of a lost paternalism, intended to retain families as much as to improve their living conditions, the oldest dating from 1762.
“In a few years, everything disappeared”
The old cinema was taken over – at a loss – by the town hall and continues to welcome around fifty spectators each week, but the factory’s dispensary has long since closed. The Economat, a grocery store formerly reserved for factory workers, where the girls were also trained in housework, is crossed out with a sign ” For rent “ after being occupied by various transient tenants. “In the 1960s, there were almost a thousand people working on the site, says Frédéric Mathieu, the mayor of the town, son of a worker and former teacher. In a few years, everything disappeared. »
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