Tulle - Lace, Accordions, and Memory

A town between the river and the lampposts

The road comes off the descent at Souilhac and meets the river it has been hearing for the last kilometre. The Corrèze runs here through what the town's geographers call, with a certain dryness, a very narrow strip several kilometres long. There is room, on the valley floor, for the river, the road, the railway, and the town, in roughly that order from south to north; there is not, by any honest measure, room for much else. The walls of the gorge rise on either side. The town fits itself between them lengthwise. It is the largest town the route has touched since Brive at the start, and the only prefecture on the course.

A place hemmed in like this acquires its trades from what the country can carry in and what its people can carry out. Tulle would, over the next three centuries, acquire three. The lace came first, in the form of a needle technique called point de Tulle, a fine square mesh, which the town gave its name to and which the language of dressmaking has kept ever since. By 1667 a Tulle-born scholar named Étienne Baluze, librarian to Colbert and one of the formidable archive minds of the century, had reached the court of Louis XIV; tradition has him carrying samples north. The lace did well at court. It did better still in the histories that followed, where the noun tulle outlived its town in any number of European languages, and now turns up in wedding-dress catalogues that have no idea where the word came from. Baluze, for his part, kept cataloguing manuscripts in Paris and writing histories of the dukes of Auvergne. The town remembers him with a street and the quiet pride of a place that occasionally exports a mind.

The arms came next. The Manufacture d'Armes de Tulle was founded in 1690, on the river at Souilhac, where the same water-driven hammers that had worked iron for centuries could be turned to musket barrels. The factory was raised to royal manufactory status under Louis XVI; it survived the Revolution, the Empire, and the long nineteenth century, and made the rifles French infantry carried at Sedan, on the Marne, and at Verdun. By 1939 it employed several thousand. Of the three trades, it was the one that gave the town its industrial spine, the wages that filled the houses up the slopes, the male population that the morning shift counted in and out.

The accordions came last, and almost as a postscript. In 1919, returning from a war the arms factory had been busy supplying, a young craftsman named Jean Maugein opened a small workshop with his brothers and began making accordéons diatoniques. The factory grew. By the middle of the twentieth century Maugein was making the instruments the bal-musette dance halls of Paris ran on, and the name was, for a particular generation, what one meant by an accordion in France. Three trades, three centuries, one ribbon of the same town between Souilhac and the centre. The riders pass through the lower of the two, on the valley floor, in something under five minutes.

The ninety-nine

What follows belongs to the same ribbon of street.

On the morning of 9 June 1944, three days after the Allied landings in Normandy, the 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich, withdrawing under Maquis attack from the previous days, ordered the men of Tulle aged eighteen to sixty to assemble at the Manufacture d'Armes. The factory yard at Souilhac, which had been making rifles for two and a half centuries, took in nearly three thousand men that morning. From them, one hundred and twenty were chosen. In the afternoon, ninety-nine were hanged from the lampposts and balconies of the central streets of the town, along several hundred metres of pavement the Tour will ride through this afternoon at racing speed.

A further one hundred and forty-nine men were deported in the following days. One hundred and one would not return from the camps. Counting also those killed by other means in the days around the hangings, the Comité des Martyrs records more than three hundred victims in all. The next day, 10 June, the same division crossed into the Haute-Vienne and committed at Oradour-sur-Glane the larger atrocity by which the war remembers it. Tulle, the day before Oradour, is the lesser-known of the two.

The town keeps the day in its place-names. The Rue du 9-Juin-1944 runs through what was the centre of the killing. Outside the city, on a slope above the valley, the Champ des Martyrs at Cueille holds the mass grave and the annual ceremony, which is held without speeches. Wreaths are laid; the names are not read out; the silence does the work the speeches would do badly. The convention is that the ninety-nine are spoken of as the ninety-nine, and not as anyone in particular. A cyclist riding through the centre of Tulle on a July afternoon will not see any of this unless they are looking. The streets carry the date and the title; the rest is in the town's keeping.

That the men of the town that built the factory were assembled at the factory by an army using the rifles the factory made, before being hanged in the streets the rifles had been carried out into, is a symmetry the town has had eighty-two years to make sense of. It has not arrived at sense. The annual ceremony continues to register, instead, what cannot be made into sense, which is its discipline.

The accordion came back

I came down through Tulle on a cold Tuesday in early April, two days after L'Agglomérée. The cyclosportive had run on 4-5 April 2026, organised by Tulle Cyclisme Compétition, with eighty-five and one-hundred-and-five-kilometre routes that both took in forty kilometres of the actual Stage 9 road, the Suc au May climb included. It was, by arithmetic, the hundred-days-before. The town had its barriers half-down by Tuesday morning and the bakery on the Avenue Victor-Hugo was selling the leftover sportif rolls at half-price. I bought two and walked down to the river.

The accordion factory is two streets back. In September 2024 Maugein went into judicial liquidation, after a hundred and five years of continuous production and a succession of corporate owners who had each in turn failed to reckon with the long slow contraction of the bal-musette market. The town treated it as a death; the national press wrote the obituaries. Then, in January 2025, a former employee named Christophe Sirgues, with three associates, took the manufacture over and reopened the workshop. By 4 March the doors were open to the public again. By the end of 2025 the reduced team of five had made over seventy instruments. They are now one of the last accordion manufacturers in France. L'un des derniers fabricants d'accordéons en France is the phrase the local press uses, and it is the kind of phrase that means more, in the place that produces it, than translation can quite carry.

I had thought, walking past the workshop window with my bakery rolls, that I would write something about endurance here, and then thought better of it. The Maugein reprise is not endurance; it is three people choosing, in a particular January, to put their savings into something the market had given up on. The distinction is not small. Endurance is what some Limousin crafts have done by inertia. What Maugein did in January 2025 is something else, and the right word for it has not, I think, settled yet.

The other thing the town has, as of 2024, is its former mayor back as deputy. François Hollande, first elected deputy of Corrèze in 1988, mayor of Tulle from 2001 to 2008, President of the Republic from 2012 to 2017, returned in the 2024 legislatives as Socialist candidate for the first constituency of Corrèze and won. He lives in a nineteenth-century house in central Tulle with a 2,800-square-metre garden, a detail that belongs to an older idea of what political life is for. He attends the 9 June commemoration every year, and has done since 1988, which is to say across his whole adult career, including the five he was head of state. The deputy walks up to Cueille; the deputy lays the wreath; the deputy goes home to the garden.

The Baluze pattern, lightly drawn, has not gone away. A Tulle mind goes to Paris; a Tulle mind comes back. I would not push the parallel any further than that. But the through-line is honest in this much: a town that lays its dead without speeches, that has remade its accordion factory because three people decided it should be remade, and that received its mayor back from the Élysée without remarking on the round trip, is a town that knows what continuity is for. The Tour comes through this afternoon at racing speed. The town will be standing where it is standing when it leaves.

Sources

• Tulle (Wikipedia) - town geography, industries, demographics
• Tulle massacre (Wikipedia) - 9 June 1944 events and casualty figures
• June 9, 1944: The Events (Comité des Martyrs de Tulle) - Tulle Martyrs Committee account
• The high place of Cueuille (Comité des Martyrs de Tulle) - history of the Cueille mass grave site, exhumation, and handover to the city in 1950
• Manufacture Nationale d'Armes de Tulle (Wikipedia) - MAT founding (1690) and history
• Musée de la Mémoire et des Industries Tullistes (POP — Plateforme Ouverte du Patrimoine) - Tulle museum holding MAT firearms, machine tools, apprenticeship pieces, and Resistance/Deportation collections
• Maugein (Wikipédia) - Maugein founding (1919) and accordion production
• Tulle: la reprise de la manufacture d'accordéons Maugein a été validée (France Bleu) - 2025 reprise, Christophe Sirgues, three associates as co-shareholders
• Diffusion et renouveau du poinct de Tulle (Tourisme Corrèze) - point de Tulle history
• Le tulle et le Poinct de Tulle (Dentelles Confédérées) - lace-research article on the relationship between tulle (the fabric) and the Poinct de Tulle technique
• François Hollande (Wikipedia) - political career
• Législatives 2024: l'ancien président François Hollande candidat (France Bleu) - 2024 candidacy
• L'Agglomérée revient les 4-5 avril 2026 (Tulle Agglo) - cyclosportive, dates, routes
• Retour en images sur la 4e édition de l'Agglomérée de Tulle Agglo (La Montagne) - local-press photo coverage of the 5 April 2026 sportif
• Etymology of "tulle" (the fabric, named after the town) and the word's spread into other European languages: Wiktionary entry for "tulle".

Pair-written by Justin Simpson and Claude Opus 4.7. Voice registers: tls-essay + madrid-review (registers-framework).