Patron of Many

The breadth of St. Claude’s patronage — wood-turners, toymakers, whistle-makers, tanners, and others — and how it grew out of the pilgrimage economy of the town that bore his name; the geographic spread of the cult, from Franche-Comté to a Manitoba village named Saint-Claude; and the cautions a source-critical treatment must keep about misattributed and folkloric patronages.

Tradition: Pre-Schism Western (Gaul) / Orthodox reception

A Word of Disambiguation

Before the patronages can be sorted, one confusion must be cleared. Many popular sources conflate the abbot of Condat (this saint, feast 6 June) with St. Claude de la Colombière (1641–1682, the Jesuit confessor of St. Margaret Mary, feast 15 February), and misattribute the craft-patronages to the Jesuit. The craft-patronages belong properly to the abbot of Condat, because they run through the town of Saint-Claude that grew around his shrine (catholicsaints.info; fr.Wikipedia). Keeping the two Claudes distinct is the first requirement of an accurate account.

The Craft-Patronages

St. Claude is patron of an unusually concrete and homely set of trades. The patronage lists give: gingerbread sellers; linseed (flax) growers; tanners; toy makers; whistle makers; and wood turners, together with the places Besançon, Franche-Comté, and (in Italy) Castiglione Torinese (catholicsaints.info, “Saint Claudius of Besançon”). The French tradition confirms the most distinctive of these specifically: “Il est le saint patron des tourneurs sur bois, qui sont nombreux dans le Haut-Jura” — he is the patron of the wood-turners, who are numerous in the high Jura (fr.Wikipedia, “Claude de Besançon”). He is named, alongside St. Claude de la Colombière and St. Nicholas, among the patrons of toy makers (catholicsaints.info, “Patrons of Toy Makers”).

A caution belongs here in keeping with the collection’s method: there is no documented patronage of children or prisoners for this saint, despite occasional popular claims, and the collection does not attribute them.

The Mechanism: From Pilgrimage to Tournerie to Pipes

The craft-patronages are not arbitrary; they record a real economic history, and tracing it explains why a seventh-century abbot became the patron of toymakers and pipe-turners. The mechanism is the pilgrimage economy.

A community of craftsmen formed around the monastery and shrine, and — surrounded by the dense forests of the Jura — turned to woodworking to serve the pilgrims. Their early production “was mainly focused on religious items like rosaries” and crucifixes, turned in wood for the faithful who came to the shrine, Saint-Claude also being a station on the Way of St. James (pipe.fr, “Saint-Claude history of pipe making”). From this devotional turnery the trade diversified across the eighteenth century into snuffboxes, trinkets, whistles, and toys — the small turned objects of the tournerie — and then, with the introduction of briar (bruyère) around 1858, into the manufacture of smoking pipes. The pipe industry exploded: within fifty years the number of pipe craftsmen “went from 20 to more than 6000,” and Saint-Claude became, in the words of en.Wikipedia, “the world capital of wooden smoking pipes crafted by hand from the mid 19th century to the mid 20th century” (pipe.fr; en.Wikipedia, “Saint-Claude, Jura”).

The patronages thus encode the town’s whole economic genealogy: the abbot’s shrine drew pilgrims; the pilgrims bought turned wooden devotional objects; the turnery became a great craft tradition; and St. Claude, the saint who had drawn the pilgrims, became the patron of the turners, toymakers, and whistle-makers whose trade his shrine had called into being. (The explicit causal framing — patron because the pilgrimage generated the turnery — is a sound inference from the craft-history sources rather than a single verbatim statement; the underlying facts are well attested.)

The later flowering of this craft tradition is a remarkable coda to the saint’s story. By the mid-nineteenth century Saint-Claude had become the world center of the briar smoking-pipe — the bruyère pipe turned from the root-burl of the tree-heath — and the town’s name became, in the pipe-smoking world, a byword for quality (pipe.fr; en.Wikipedia, “Saint-Claude, Jura”). The genealogy is direct and well documented: from the rosaries and crucifixes turned for medieval pilgrims, through the snuffboxes and toys of the eighteenth-century tournerie, to the briar pipes of the industrial age, the craft was one continuous tradition of fine wood-turning, and its origin lay in the pilgrimage to the shrine of an abbot dead more than a thousand years before. There is an irony worth noting, given the modern associations of the pipe, in a seventh-century desert ascetic standing as the patron of an industry of tobacco-pipes; but the irony is only apparent. The patronage is of the craft — the turner’s skill — not of its every product; and the turner’s skill at Saint-Claude was, in its origin, the skill of making holy things for pilgrims at the saint’s shrine.

The Geographic Spread of the Cult

The cult of St. Claude spread well beyond the Jura, carried in part by emigration from Franche-Comté. The clearest documented instance in the New World is St. Claude, Manitoba (Canada), which “was named for Saint-Claude, Jura in France” and was settled by French and Belgian homesteaders in the late nineteenth century; the Manitoba village even echoes its namesake’s pipe heritage with a giant smoking-pipe monument (en.Wikipedia, “St. Claude, Manitoba”; Manitoba Historical Society). The name traveled with the people of the Jura to the Canadian prairie — the cult of a Burgundian abbot transplanted to Manitoba farmland.

Two common claims require caution. Saint-Claude in Guadeloupe appears to be named (c. 1858–59) for a Carmelite Father Superior called Claude, not for the Jura abbot, and should not be cited as evidence of his cult’s spread without that caveat. And the popularity of the given name “Claude” as derived specifically from this saint is plausible folklore but is not verified in the sources consulted — though the case of Anne of Brittany naming her daughter Claude of France in thanksgiving to the saint (see the-shrine-and-the-town.md) shows that the name was given in his honor at the highest level.

The Pattern of the Patronage

The patronages of St. Claude form a coherent picture once the pilgrimage is understood as their root. He is the patron of the homely crafts of a mountain town — the turners, the toymakers, the whistle-makers, the tanners, the gingerbread-sellers — the trades that a pilgrimage economy breeds. He is patron of his city and region — Besançon, Franche-Comté. And his cult traveled with the emigrants of that region to a village on the Canadian prairie. Beneath the various patronages lies a single fact: a great medieval shrine made a town, the town made a craft tradition, and the saint of the shrine became the patron of the crafts. The devotion that this patronage expresses, and what the town and region kept of St. Claude after the Revolution stripped away the relic, is the subject of the companion file.

See Also

References

  • catholicsaints.info. “Saint Claudius of Besançon”; “Patrons of Toy Makers.” catholicsaints.info. (The patronage list: gingerbread sellers, linseed growers, tanners, toy makers, whistle makers, wood turners; Besançon, Franche-Comté, Castiglione Torinese.)
  • “Claude de Besançon” (fr.). Wikipedia. (“saint patron des tourneurs sur bois.”)
  • pipe.fr. “Saint-Claude, history of pipe making.” pipe.fr/en/blog. (The pilgrimage-rooted turnery; rosaries and crucifixes; the briar pipe industry from c. 1858; “from 20 to more than 6000” craftsmen.)
  • “Saint-Claude, Jura.” Wikipedia. (The town as “the world capital of wooden smoking pipes.”)
  • “St. Claude, Manitoba.” Wikipedia; Manitoba Historical Society. mhs.mb.ca. (Named for Saint-Claude, Jura; the pipe monument.)