Paul Jeantet SA

Paul Jeantet SA is an ebonite mouthpiece factory founded in Saint-Claude, France's pipe capital. It stands apart in being not a workshop that made pipes, but an industrial concern that supplied parts to those who did: it was born at the start of the twentieth century with the aim of turning into domestic production the mouthpieces French makers had been forced to import from Germany.

A Factory Founded Against German Imports

At the end of the nineteenth century, Saint-Claude was the world center of the briar pipe; yet mouthpieces remained outside this picture. According to inventory records, nearly all of the mouthpieces the town used in those years came from German factories. To break this dependency, a facility aimed at ebonite mouthpiece production was built in the Faubourg des Moulins district in 1905-1906. The venture ran into financial trouble from 1908 and was taken over by Paul Jeantet, son of pipe manufacturer Raymond Jeantet. In this way the long-established Jeantet family entered the mouthpiece business as well, after already being in pipe bodies.

Paul Jeantet restructured the business under the name "Manufacture de Caoutchouc et d'Ebonite Paul Jeantet-Morard et Cie." The plant also took part in wartime production during the First World War and grew rapidly afterward; inventory records indicate that by the 1920s daily mouthpiece output had reached around 120,000 units. This scale was enough to localize the mouthpiece supply of Saint-Claude houses such as Chacom and Butz-Choquin.

From Ebonite to Technical Rubber

Ebonite is rubber hardened with a high proportion of sulfur, and in the pipe world it is most often called vulcanite; among mouthpiece materials it remains the most common. The factory's job was to turn this material, in cast or rod form, into mouthpieces; the workshop-scale equivalent of a similar process is described in the drilling the vulcanite rod entry.

Rising competition after 1930 forced the business to give up depending on a single product. Combs, surgical and radiology supplies, and clarinet mouthpieces, among other items, entered the lineup. The business continued to be known in records as "Paul Jeantet et Cie," and in later years turned into a joint-stock company. From the 1950s, the emphasis shifted to soft rubber products, cannulas, appliance gaskets, and shoe soles.

Today

The company still operates today under the name Jeantet élastomères, again in Saint-Claude, and gives 1905 as its founding year in its own promotional material. Specialized since the 1970s in rubber-to-metal bonding and overmolding processes, the business forms a group together with Ixemer and Perrot; it is reported to have taken over the client portfolio of Swiss firm Dufour Industries in 2014. The pipe mouthpiece is no longer the company's main business, but it is counted among the few facilities in Europe still producing ebonite. That the division of labor that turned Saint-Claude's briar pipe into an industry extended to the mouthpiece as well as the body is, to a large degree, this factory's doing.