How the glove craft of Grenoble spontaneously sprang up, took firm root and grew until it controlled, to a great degree, the fortunes of that city, has been shown in the foregoing brief summary of events. The many phases of life with which glove-making was bound up in mediæval days, its social and economic importance to the community and its pre-eminence among the early industries, cannot have failed to be apparent. From about 1600 the chief city of the Dauphiné underwent an astonishingly rapid development.
But, if the seventeenth century was little short of phenomenal in glove history, glove-making in Grenoble was not fated to become one of the leading enterprises of the world without a struggle. The hundred years that followed were at once the most sterile and the most fecund in the annals of the trade—and, for that matter, the same is equally true of the eighteenth century as regards its bearing upon the destinies of Europe. Destructive of immediate results and of contemporary prosperity, this era which endured the birth throes of modern states and the upheavals of the Revolution, was, nevertheless, big with prophetic good. And it is to the everlasting honor of the glovers of Grenoble that they bore their part in this vast social and political movement, which temporarily threatened death to their personal interests, with their eyes fixed, not upon gain, but upon those high ideals and principles to which their faith clung, even in the midst of business paralysis and social chaos.
While the flame of the Revolution did not break forth until nearly the close of the century, the spirit of modernity and unrest attacked the French people fully a hundred years before the fall of the Bastille. In Grenoble the transition from the old order to the new was anticipated as early as 1691, in response to a proclamation of the king that the business of the country be taxed to refill the royal treasury.
After the brilliant victories of his early reign, Louis XIV. had suffered severe reverses. He was gravely in need of money to repair the military organization. New resources must somehow be found, and that immediately. The only adequate answer which presented itself took the form of taxation imposed upon the business interests of the realm. The glovers of Grenoble, accordingly, in 1691, organized themselves into the _Corporation des Gantiers_, or Corporation of Glovers, to determine how heavily their industry should be taxed in support of the régime. While they felt loyally obliged to contribute all they were able to the king’s cause, by the very act of their organizing and by virtue of the funds they furnished, they became masters at home, respected by the monarch, independent and self-governing. Their sacrifice of money to the government had, in the same hour, bought them their freedom in all that pertained to their local affairs.