This factory operated for almost a century, while belonging to the same family of wealthy owners, the
Le Coat de Kerveguen.
At the end of the 19th century, they owned a very large amount of land cultivated with sugar cane on the island, in competition with the Crédit Foncier Colonial. This banking establishment, managed from Paris and represented locally by a shareholder, had received a large stock of factories and land through bankruptcy from other landowners and industrialists.
Focus on the Workers
The workers of these factories were immortalised in 1861 and 1866, for some of them, in a series of beautiful watercolours, preserved in the Departmental Archives of Reunion Island.
These watercolours were done by Hippolyte Charles Napoléon Mortier, who became Duke of Treviso.
He was the son-in-law of Gabriel Le Coat de Kerveguen whose daughter, Emma, he had married.
The Duke of Treviso was chamberlain to Napoleon III, and ambassador, while managing the colonial estates inherited from his father-in-law from 1860.
more information on Hippolyte Charles Napoléon Mortier, the Duke of Trevise
In these watercolours, we were intrigued, and indeed seduced, by the blue cloth clothes worn by the farm and factory workers: they bear an uncanny resemblance to those worn by male and female slaves until the French abolition of slavery in 1848.
Our question is the following:
Where did these blue fabrics, known as "Toiles de Guinée", come from?
It is known that they were dyed with indigo, the trade of which partly contributed to the prosperity of the French trading post of Pondicherry. There were close links between India, Reunion Island and Mauritius, its neighbour in the Mascarene Islands. In particular between 1852 and 1882, when the British stopped recruiting indentured labor.
