Cellatex SA is a former French rayon spinning company, founded in 1981 on the basis of a business established in 1902 in Givet, Ardennes (France), and liquidated in 2000.
Cellatex was the last name of a company that changed its name several times, following mergers, takeovers, changes of shareholders and restructuring. The closure of Cellatex marked the end of the chemical and textile industry in France, born of innovative approaches in the late 19th century, which prospered between the wars and during the Trente Glorieuses.
In 2000, the liquidation was marked by an occupation of the Givet plant, with workers threatening to use the chemicals to blow up the installations or pollute the Meuse river. This rather hard-hitting movement received considerable media coverage, and enabled the former employees to obtain more significant support measures.
Invention of artificial silk Silkworm imitations were sought after for several centuries. In the mid-19th century, changes in clothing habits and difficulties in silk supply, following the outbreaks of pébrine and flacherie diseases,In the second half of the 19th century, these diseases decimated silkworm] farms in France, Europe (in French)and Asia. Despsummaryuis Pasteur's research and advances in microbiology, they led to the decline of French sericulture. heightened the interest in this research..
A Frenchman, Count Hilaire de Chardonnet, Louis Pasteur's assistant in his research into silkworm diseases. perfected the first industrializable process for dissolving cellulose, passing the resulting product through a spinneret and solidifying it at the end. In 1890, considered the father of artificial silk,. he founded the "Société anonyme pour la fabrication de la soie de Chardonnet", with workshops in Besançon. This was the first factory to produce artificial silk industrially, using the nitrocellulose process (also known as the collodion process)..
Following on from this, Germans, Americans, and English developed very similar industrial processes, differing in the way cellulose was solubilized and regenerated.
Three main processes competed with the approach developed by Comte Hilaire de Chardonnet:
copper process; rayon process; cellulose acetate process.
In March 1902, a second plant was set up in France, in Givet, under the name "La Soie Artificielle", to manufacture silk using the so-called copper silk process. The company's founders were industrial and financial players with an eye for developments in the textile industry: the Schlumberger, Noack-Dollfus, Jordan, Bernheim, Frémery, Herbelot and Monod families, and the economist Edmond Théry.. The chosen industrial site was located three kilometers from the town of Givet, at a place called "les Quatre Cheminées", and two kilometers from the Belgian border, along the road linking Givet to Namur. The same group of shareholders joined forces with Lyon dyers, the Gillet family, to set up another company using the same process, "Soie Artificielle d'Izieux", in near Saint-Chamond..
In 1911, together with their competitor, the Carnot group,This rival group, the Carnot Group, was founded by Ernest Carnot, of the Carnot family. Ernest Carnot (1866–1955) was a civil mining engineer, son of former French President Sadi Carnot and grandson on his mother's side of the economist Charles Brook Dupont-White. At the beginning of the 20th century, Ernest Carnot founded the company "La Viscose française", and subsequently set up subsidiaries in Spain, Italy, Belgium and Switzerland. the Gillet family set up the "Comptoir des Textiles Artificiels" (CTA),. a company specializing in the marketing of artificial textiles. This CTA also bought out other factories, including the historic Besançon plant..
In 1912, the Givet and Izieux plants switched from the copper silk process to the rayon process. The Besançon plant followed suit. Rayon had the advantage of being obtained from wood pulp, and required only inexpensive chemicals. Its cost price was lower.. In addition to these three companies, the entire French artificial silk industry converged on this technique shortly before World War I. The production of rayon and viscose silk in France was a major step forward. Between 1900 and 1913, the quantity of artificial silk produced in Europe increased tenfold, and just before World War I, represented a third of the quantity of natural silk produced. The surface area of the Givet plants increased from 8,000 to 21,000 m² in ten years.. This plant also employed 790 people in 1914.
From 31 August 1914 Givet found itself in occupied territory, and the plant was transformed into a hospital and a fat, margarine and canned food factory. Textile-related industrial equipment was requisitioned and shipped to Germany. Transmissions and engines were removed. Equipment that could not be shipped was broken up on site, after having been stripped of its lead, copper, bronze and other parts..
Development of the rayon process The rebuilding of Givet's industrial textile facilities began in early January 1919, two months after the Armistice. In June 1919, the company's management sent a delegation to Germany to try to recover the equipment requisitioned by the occupying forces during World War I, with the help of the services of the Ministry of Industrial Reconstruction, set up in Wiesbaden specifically for this purpose. Sixty-five wagons of equipment were shipped back to Givet, facilitating the restart of operations on 1 December 1919.
Throughout France artificial silk production, temporarily disrupted by the war, expanded. By 1920, the weight of artificial silk production exceeded that of natural silk. The scarcity of bombyx silk, and the development of luxury and faux-luxury in all social classes, created a dynamic for viscose (later called rayon) production. The two artificial silk companies in Givet and Izieux, sharing the same shareholders, merged in 1922. But as the original patents fell into the public domain, new producers appeared.. The number of plants increased, and some fifty industrial sites were created in France, including, again by Gillet,At the end of World War I, the Gillet family in Lyon owned a large number of industrial companies in the textile and chemical sectors. Enemond Bizot (1900–1988), Edmond Gillet's son-in-law, joined forces with his cousin Lucien Chatin (1868–1947), director of the company "La soie artificielle d'Izieux", to found the "Société Nationale de la Viscose" and build the factory in Grenoble. a major plant in Grenoble, more precisely between Grenoble and Échirolles..The factory was built on Grenoble territory, on the boundary between this territory and that of Échirolles . The cité-jardin de la Viscose was locaten on Échirolles. In the early 1980s, a bypass, the rocade sud, was built between the two sites, culminating in a huge interchange. The site was large enough for the Société grenobloise de tramways électriques (Grenoble electric tramway company) to provide special double-track service from the Rondeau.
During the 1920s–1930s, 300 housing units were built nearby in Givet, the "Cités de la Soie",Aerial photograph in external links. as well as a chapel in 1932. Buses criss-crossed the region, in France and Belgium, to bring the workers to work. When Georges Simenon described a plant in Givet in 1932, in his novel Chez les Flamands, he was clearly inspired. by the artificial silk factory on rue du Bon Secours. Making artificial silk thread from sheets of wood pulp was hard work, in heat, humidity, acids and the "rotten egg" smell of hydrogen sulfide.
The economic crisis of the 1930s halted the creation of new artificial silk plants. The boom was over. Plants closed.. In 1934, under pressure from traditional silk manufacturers, a law prohibited the use of the name "artificial silk": viscose yarn was henceforth called "rayon" (and "fibranne" for short fibers). During World War II, French industry, unable to obtain sufficient supplies of natural fibers, turned even more to artificial fibers..
Creation of Cellatex From 1950 onwards the emergence of synthetic fibers such as nylon and polyester, and their success on the market, led to the decline of artificial silk, later known as rayon. In 1959, Soie Artificielle Givet-Izieux merged with Viscose Française (which had acquired the Grenoble plant) to create Compagnie Industrielle des Textiles Artificiels et Synthétiques. This new company also included the Comptoir des Textiles Artificiels, and adopted the acronym of the latter (CTA). At the end of the 1950s, this holding company brought together a dozen industrial sites producing rayon. Faced with competition from synthetic textiles, certain plants, such as the Saint-Maurice-de-Beynost plant,The Saint-Maurice-de-Beynost textile and chemical plant was an artificial silk factory founded like so many others before the crisis of the 1930s, quickly surrounded, like so many others, by a Cité de la Soie created by shareholders to retain a workforce close to the plant, bought out like so many others by the CTA. were converted and sold. CTA's various industrial centers also benefited from the innovations developed within the Group, starting in the interwar period with the wet strength of rayon fibers and their resistance to repeated washing, followed by high-tenacity yarns, enabling entry into new markets such as tires, and polynosic fibers, with less sensitivity to water and better mechanical characteristics..
In 1971 the Compagnie Industrielle des Textiles Artificiels et Synthétiques merged with Rhodia to form the Rhône-Poulenc group. This was the group's apogee, which employed 115,000 people, including 75,000 in France.. As a result of mergers and cross-holdings, Renaud Gillet,. a descendant of the Gillet family, became vice-chairman and then chairman and CEO of the group.. Textiles represented 63% of sales, but the corresponding industrial heritage was heterogeneous. The number of factories was significant and while some centers were relatively modern, particularly for nylon and polyester, others were more obsolete, especially for rayon. Once again, plants were closed or sold off, notably in Izieu, Arques-la-Bataille and Vaulx-en-Velin (the Tase plant in the Carré de soie district).. Rhône-Poulenc also liquidated the land and property assets held around these divested plants: the housing and land of the workers' housing estates created between the wars..
In 1979 despite the closures and disposals, the economic situation of Rhône-Poulenc's textile branch remained worrying. A textile leading to a series of rayon plant closures at Roanne (France-Rayonne plant), Lyon-Vaise, etc. was drawn up.. Also, a legal restructuring based on McKinsey's (the group's management advisor since 1969) recommendations was carried out. This restructuring meant that: activities were isolated in legal entities, which made it easier to identify their real profitability; they were then grouped into divisions corresponding to branches of activity (e.g. textiles), with these divisions being attached to the holding company. The holding company took long-term strategic decisions and the divisions implemented them, and employee representative bodies were limited to comparatively divided legal entities to embody the checks and balances..
In 1981 Cellatex was created for the rayon sector within Rhône-Poulenc's textile branch. Following closures, this sector was organized as a specific legal entity, with only two plants remaining: the Givet plant and the Grenoble plant. The company had a capital of one million francs, a workforce of 900 at the two sites, and estimated sales of around 250 million francs. It was headed by Marcel Charrin.. Rhône-Poulenc Textile was restructured into three subsidiaries: Rhovyl, Cellatex and Rhône-Poulenc Fibres.