“I pass down memories,” said Thierry Mirtain, co-president of the Maison de la gemme, an association and ‘living museum’ in Lesperon (Landes) dedicated to the local tradition of resin extraction.
The retired teacher is one of several people working in similar heritage organisations that aim to preserve the craft of a resin worker (résinier or gemmeur), of which there used to be many in the south-west.
Résiniers or gemmeurs (the words are interchangeable) extracted resin from pine trees in the Landes de Gascogne, a forest sprawling over the departments of Gironde, Landes and Lot-et-Garonne.
Lesperon itself had 300 gemmeurs in 1920 for a total population of 1,000, Mr Mirtain said. This was the golden age of the craft, dating from 1850 to World War Two.
By the 1960s, however, it had almost completely vanished. Workers were unable to compete with the outsourcing of materials and workforce in foreign countries.
Gabriel Dupont, the last résinier in Lesperon, retired in the 1990s.
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Keeping the work of a résinier alive
For Mr Mirtain, the thought of a new generation growing up ignorant of a résinier’s craft was dispiriting.
“I would see these kids in classrooms who did not know the trees’ names or the history of their region,” he said. “So I started out organising school trips with a retired gemmeur in the early 2000s.”
Maison de la gemme, founded in 2014, now organises weekly demonstrations, workshops and trips into the forest to better explain the craft.
Golden age of the gemmeur
Its history dates back to June 19, 1857, when Napoleon III passed a law that transformed vast portions of the south-west, then arid soil and swamps, into a huge forest through heavy plantation.
The forest grew from 200,000 hectares to 1.4 million, putting an end to farming. Shepherds turned gemmeurs.
Between both World Wars, 30,000 people were reported to be engaged in the craft, each managing from 3,000 to 4,000 trees and living in secluded cabins in complete autonomy.
The season ran from February to late October or early November, depending on temperatures. Over spring, the gemmeur would trim the trees’ bark as much as possible in an effort to eliminate sand residues that can damage his tools.
A small pot was then installed, called a cutchot in the Gascon language, with a bottleneck guiding the resin inside. This was called the Hugues system, from Bordeaux lawyer Pierre Hugues who patented it in 1844.
The resin itself was collected during the summer by cutting into the underlying wood to ‘bleed’ the tree. The gemmeur used his hatchot – another Gascon term to describe the swan-neck-shaped blade attached to a handle used to scrape the wood.
Making sure his cuts were neither too deep nor too many, the gemmeur came once a week to refresh the tree ‘wound’ and keep the resin flowing.
This art took about a year to master,” said Mr Mirtain. It was learnt on the job, with reputations hinging on those who could do it well, and those who massacred the tree.
The cutchots were taken every four to five weeks, an activity performed by all members of the family from the youngest to the oldest. Mr Mirtain is one of many grandchildren to have collected pots as a seasonal family job.
The pots are scraped with a palique, a small shovel, before the resin was put in barrels to be taken to a nearby distillery and transformed into turpentine, pitch and colophony (or rosin).
The latter, a solid form of semi-transparent resin, has multiple uses, including in printing inks and to rub onto the bows of stringed instruments to make the strings vibrate more clearly.
Some 178 million litres of resin were extracted in 1921, according to a news segment broadcasted that year.
The final harvest, called the barrascatge, saw the gemmeur collect the remaining solid resin with a barrasquit – a sharp, curved blade attached to a 1.5-metre handle.
Vandalised résinier cabins
The life of a resin worker was gruelling and lonely, and gemmeurs increasingly shunned the craft in favour of factory jobs. No machine was able to accelerate productivity or sharpen the tools.
Sulfuric acid was briefly introduced in the 1950s to slow down the trees’ healing and produce twice as much resin, but it was eventually deemed too harmful for both the environment and the craftsman’s lungs.
Globalisation also slashed the prices of colophony and turpentine, which could be made much cheaper in China. Many gemmeur cabins are now decaying and even vandalised.
A case in point is the cabane de Corbineau in the Forêt de Maransin (Gironde), which has been targeted multiple times.
Built of wood and cob and with a single living room, it was once home to a family of resin workers and had been lovingly renovated to preserve their traditions.
Maison de la gemme is, along with the Musée de la gemme in Luxey (Landes) and the Maison du Patrimoine in Mimizan (Landes), also trying to shine a spotlight on this dying craft.
A trail, called the Sentier du résinier, was established in Biscarrosse and two-hour visits are available from April to September.
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One distillery is also being renovated and a firm making health products, called Holiste, is trying to revive the industry under its BioGemme brand by establishing a model that is economically viable on a regional scale.
Mr Mirtain noted that the younger generation is slowly taking an interest in the craft too.
Recently, his workshops have been booked by a violin maker and chemistry students. The former wanted to produce his own varnish for Stradivarius’ fiddles, while the second group were looking to make colophony for ballet shoes.
However, it remains very niche, Mr Mirtain said.
Even the efforts of Claude Courau, a former resin worker in the Médoc who came up with a revolutionary new harvesting method, an advanced distillation process and techniques to obtain resin unpolluted by chemical products, have not made a huge difference.
“The craft, as it existed, will never come back,” fears Mr Mirtain.
