the end of the empire

The Boussac Empire is part of the history of the Vosges. From 1918 until the end of the 1980s, the group's textile factories - at their peak in the 1960s - supported a good part of the Vosges. We were born Boussac, we were Boussac from mother to daughter or from father to son and we died Boussac.

The paternalistic textile empire designed part of the streets of the villages of the department with workers' housing estates which still exist today. Set up between the two wars, they made it possible for up to sixty years to house families for low rent. From the seventies, tenants became owners for very reasonable prices.

The red brick chimneys are dismantled one after the other as industrial wastelands are converted over the years. But in some municipalities, we want to keep them.
An empire that we owe to Marcel Boussac, captain of industry born in Châteauroux in 1889. A documentary is also in preparation on this colorful boss who loved racehorses and drove a Rolls Royce.

In the department, Marcel Boussac has been able to count all these years on Jean-Marie Compas, the group's social director. A patriotic and humanist man to whom the Vosges were deeply attached.

Apart from the workers' housing estates which make crossing the villages a bit monotonous, there are still some beautiful vestiges of the Boussac era. Like the old Vincey spinning mill, a building built around 1900 in the purest English style. Bought by the group in 1938, it closed in October 1981. Today, a small part of this beautiful building houses a military museum.



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