An early morning tour of the historic Sèvres porcelain factory was part of a recent work day for Hervé Lemoine, the president of Manufactures Nationales, a decorative arts organization established in January by the French government.
“To understand the richness of these crafts, you have to see them practiced,” Mr. Lemoine, 63, said on a video call from the factory’s 19th-century complex on the outskirts of Paris. Since 7:30 that morning, he had been watching the factory’s artisans create the crushed quartz and mineral clay paste used in Sèvres’ celebrated porcelain and finish items with 24-karat gold, powdered in-house from ingots.
Such savoir-faire, developed in ateliers throughout France over centuries, is precisely what the Ministry of Culture wants the new organization to safeguard, champion and transmit.
The organization is a merger of two of France’s well-known institutions: the Mobilier National, an aggregation of factories, ateliers and a collection of 130,000 antique and contemporary furnishings and objets d’art, and the Cité de la Céramique — Sèvres et Limoges, which included Sèvres and two ceramics museums.
It has come at what appears to be a positive time for the decorative arts. Demand for the skills of France’s almost 250,000 craft businesses is strong, Mr. Lemoine said, noting that the sector represents several tens of billions of euros in annual sales. But very small ateliers can have difficulty meeting demand, so the industry remains fragile.
“The vast majority (80 percent) of art workshops are one-person businesses,” Stéphane Galerneau, the president of Ateliers d’Art de France, an association of more than 6,000 manufacturers and artisans, wrote in a recent email. “They are the ones who restore but also create the heritage of tomorrow. It is important to support them.”
Direct support, Mr. Lemoine said, will come from renewed efforts to acquire exceptional pieces by the country’s artisans and designers to add to the Mobilier National collection, employing private workshops to restore significant pieces in the collection, and helping workshops to find and to manage national and international clients. The organization’s objective, he said, is to be “an establishment at their service.”
Its initiatives include a sustainable practices laboratory, introduced last year, that is developing replacements for pollutants and toxic substances such as glues, solvents and some dyes (its findings are to be part of a materials library database, scheduled for introduction in 2026). It also intends to open in September a training center for so-called orphan crafts, professions such as parquet floor installation and weaving machine programming, which lack training programs and could disappear.
Mr. Lemoine said he was looking forward to having the new organization facilitate collaboration among the government-owned factories and ateliers now part of the Manufactures Nationales. “Porcelain, furniture, tapestries, textiles, gold- and silversmithing, bronze — all these crafts that revolve around the decorative arts will now, finally, find themselves brought together again,” he said.
As an example, he referred to the parts of the new organization that will work on two seven-meter (23-foot) tapestries conceived by the artist Stéphane Couturier to celebrate the 800th anniversary of the Cathedral of Saint-Pierre in Beauvais, France. Weavers at the Beauvais tapestry factory will begin work on the designs this year, he said, and plan to incorporate both lace made at a workshop in Alençon, France and porcelain pearls by Sèvres. (The tapestries are expected to be finished in 2030.)
“We feel there is a real dynamic blowing over the establishments,” Mr. Lemoine said. “And that is really what we wanted.”
