Saint-Claude and the Jura: the French Tradition of Wooden Chess Pieces

When people speak of chess pieces “from the Jura”, they often blur two neighbouring places: Saint-Claude, historic capital of woodturning and of the pipe, in the Jura département, and Dortan, a village in the Ain some twenty kilometres to the south-west, where the main chess piece makers settled. Both belong to the same mountain range and the same culture of turned wood.

Why Saint-Claude? From pilgrims to turners

Saint-Claude grew up around an abbey founded in the fifth century by the monks Romanus and Lupicinus. The body of Abbot Claude, who died at the end of the seventh century and was found intact in the twelfth, drew crowds of pilgrims. For them the inhabitants turned devotional objects in wood: rosaries, statuettes, small souvenirs. This activity, at first carried out by peasants during the long winters, spread to the neighbouring villages where boxwood grows, a dense, fine-grained wood ideal for turning.

By 1811 there were already about 500 workers in turned wood in Saint-Claude, often peasants at the same time. Over time, turners and makers of small wooden goods diversified their output: bobbins, buttons, toys and games, including chess sets. From the middle of the nineteenth century, the briar-root pipe made the town’s name, and it still styles itself the “capital of the pipe”. The arrival of electricity in the early twentieth century speeded up the lathes and multiplied the workshops: in 1911 there were some 7,600 turners within a radius of about thirty kilometres around Saint-Claude.

Woodturning trade (tournerie)

The activity of making wooden objects shaped on a lathe (handles, bobbins, toys, game pieces). In the High Jura, it gave rise to fancy-goods turning (tabletterie), to the pipe and to the making of chess pieces.

Dortan, the village of chess pieces

In the nineteenth century Dortan lived on boxwood working, to the point of being nicknamed the “capital of chess”. Several of the village’s mayors were themselves turners or timber merchants. On 22 July 1944 the village was burned to the ground by the occupying troops, after several days of atrocities; the workshops had to be rebuilt.

Two names dominate the history of Dortan:

• Lardy, a maker of Staunton-type boxwood pieces, which exported widely after the Second World War, notably to the United States and the United Kingdom, often under other brand names. The company has disappeared, but its sets are sought after by collectors (see the historical styles).
• Chavet, still in business, whose history is set out below.

Chavet Chess: the story of a family firm

Chavet works mainly with beech and boxwood, but also birch, lime, maple and walnut, largely from the Jura massif. The house promotes a one-piece knight, made in a single piece thanks to a special machine, and its “weighted and felted” pieces numbered by size, including the famous No. 5 (see weighting and sizes).

The site Le Royaume des Échiquiers has no connection with the Chavet company. The dates above come from the history published by the company and repeated by its retailers; we have not been able to cross-check all of them against independent archives.

What characterises Jura pieces

• Boxwood, long harvested locally, for its density and fine grain (see ebony and boxwood).
• The Staunton pattern in the French manner, made for club play and for export.
• Serial turning, which made it possible to equip generations of clubs and schools at a reasonable price.
• Numbering by size (No. 3, 4, 5, 6…), which became a habit of the French market.

A craft that had to reinvent itself

Like all Jura woodturning, the making of chess pieces suffered, from the 1950s and 1960s, from the arrival of plastics and moulding, then from competition from low-cost countries. The Saint-Claude region turned to plastics processing and diamond cutting; a few makers of wooden sets kept going. To understand the movements of this craft, see our page on how chess pieces are made. To see wooden pieces turned and carved in several traditions, Le Palais des Échecs offers a selection of wooden chess sets in different woods.

Sources: Jura Tourisme (history of woodturning and the pipe in Saint-Claude), Wikipedia (articles “Saint-Claude (Jura)” and “Dortan”), history of the Chavet company published by its retailers.