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Lyon is an amazing city nestled in a region that seems endless to explore; yet, beyond the scenery, a city is defined by its people -and they have many ways of preserving their cultural heritage, one of which is music.
Today, The Grandma wants to talk about Lyonnais folk music -a wonderful, beautiful music that tells the story of how the people of Lyon have shaped the city as it exists today.
Lyonnais folk music is vast and varied, but perhaps one of the most significant songs is La Marche des Canuts.
There are many ways to tell the history of a city. We can read its monuments, walk along its streets, visit its museums or study the names engraved on its buildings. But sometimes, to understand a city, we simply have to listen to it.
Lyon has its own sounds. Among them is the rhythmic noise of the looms that once filled the workshops of the Croix-Rousse: the bistanclaque-pan evoked in one of the best-known songs of Lyon's popular tradition, La Marche des Canuts.
The canuts were Lyon's silk weavers. During the nineteenth century, thousands of men and women worked in the silk industry, particularly on the slopes and the hill of the Croix-Rousse. Their work produced some of the most luxurious fabrics in Europe, yet the people who made them often lived precarious lives. This contradiction would become one of the defining episodes in Lyon's social history.
In 1831, Lyon's silk workers rose in revolt after a dispute over the establishment of a minimum tariff for their work. Their motto was striking: Vivre en travaillant ou mourir en combattant. Live working or die fighting.
Further uprisings followed, particularly in 1834. The Canut revolts would eventually occupy an important place in the history of the European labour movement. They were not merely protests against poverty: they expressed an emerging consciousness that workers shared interests, problems and the possibility of collective action. But history is not preserved only in political documents. It survives in language, gestures, neighbourhoods -and songs.
La Marche des Canuts appeared towards the end of the nineteenth century. Its words are attributed to the Lyonnais performers Ambroise Girier and Louis Chavat, while the music was composed by another Lyonnais, Hermand Brun.
The song became particularly popular in the Croix-Rousse in the early twentieth century. Rather than describing the uprisings directly, it gives a voice to the everyday Canut. The singer tells us that he is a weaver from Lyon and that his wife is a dévideuse, a woman involved in preparing silk thread. He mentions familiar Lyonnais places -the Gourguillon, the Montée, the Pierres Plantées, Saint-Just and the Croix-Rousse.
The geography of Lyon becomes part of the song. So does its language. And so does its work. Its famous refrain imitates the sound of the loom: Et bistanclaque-pan! La navette et l'battant!
Bistanclaque-pan is more than an amusing expression. It transforms labour into rhythm. The shuttle and the beater of the loom become percussion instruments, and the sound that once filled the workshops of the Croix-Rousse enters popular memory.
The song speaks about checking the fabric, watching for damaged threads, handling bobbins and working continuously at the loom. It preserves words belonging to the vocabulary of the Canuts and to the Lyonnais way of speaking.
In this sense, the song is almost an oral archive.
There is another song that inevitably accompanies the memory of Lyon's silk workers: Aristide Bruant's Le Chant des Canuts, written decades after the first uprising and performed in Lyon in 1894. Its tone is considerably darker.
Bruant contrasts the luxury produced by the workers with their own poverty. The Canuts weave golden vestments for the Church and fine clothes for the powerful, while they themselves lack even the most basic necessities.
The image is brutally simple: those who create wealth do not necessarily share in it.
That contradiction turns the Canut into something larger than a nineteenth-century Lyonnais silk worker. He becomes a symbol of labour itself -of the anonymous hands behind beautiful objects, prosperous industries and comfortable societies.
This is why the memory of the Canuts survived. Their struggle belonged to Lyon, but the questions behind it were universal: What is a worker's labour worth? Who benefits from it? What does dignity at work mean? And what happens when those who produce wealth discover that they can act together?
This is perhaps what makes folk music so important. Official history traditionally remembers kings, generals, politicians and battles. Folk songs remember something else. They remember how people worked. How they spoke. Where they lived. What they feared. What made them laugh. What they protested against. And what they hoped for.
Every culture has songs like these. Their melodies may be simple and their authors sometimes forgotten, but they carry something extraordinarily valuable: collective memory.
A folk song can preserve a dialect after words have disappeared from everyday speech. It can preserve the name of a street, an occupation that no longer exists, an old grievance or a forgotten way of understanding the world. It can even preserve a sound.
In La Marche des Canuts, we can still hear the loom: Bistanclaque-pan.
The workshops have largely fallen silent. The great age of the Lyonnais silk weavers belongs to history. But every time the song is sung, the shuttle moves again, the loom beats again, and somewhere on the Croix-Rousse a Canut returns to work.
Perhaps that is the real power of folk music. It does not simply tell us where we come from. It allows our ancestors to speak again.
More information: Maison des Canuts
Faut soigner sans repos.
With your eyes fixed on the fabric,
you must tend it without rest.
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