The History of Sabatier Knives and Thiers

Thiers, Auvergne, France

Long before "Sabatier" became the name cooks around the world use for a French chef's knife, it was simply a surname in Thiers, a steep little town in the hills of Auvergne where knives have been made for at least six centuries. This is the story of that town, of the two Sabatier families who made the name famous, and of how one family name ended up on knives from more than a dozen different workshops.

A town built on a torrent

Thiers clings to the side of one of the last spurs of the Forez mountains, between about 300 and 800 meters above sea level. It has none of the natural gifts of Sheffield: no iron ore, no coal, no good grindstone. What it has is the Durolle, a small river that rises near Noirétable and, in the narrow granite gorges below the old town, drops more than 150 meters in about five kilometers.

From the Middle Ages that fall of water drove flour mills, tanneries and paper mills, and then the cutlers' hammers and grinding wheels. Workshops were cut into the rock along the banks and fed by channels. A local legend even held that the water of the Durolle was especially good for hardening steel.

Six centuries of knives

Nobody knows exactly when knifemaking started in Thiers. Old stories credit crusaders returning from Damascus with the secret of turning iron into steel, or survivors of the Black Death fleeing nearby Châteldon. The first hard evidence is a land register of 1379 that mentions iron and steel sold in Thiers.

How a Thiers knife was made

Thiers developed a very particular way of working. Instead of gathering every trade under one roof, the materials traveled and the people stayed put. Tilt-hammer operators by the river drew out bars of steel from the Dauphiné and iron from the Berry. Smiths shaped blades, others hardened and tempered them, grinders gave the edge, and polishers, often women, gave the final shine. Farmers in the surrounding uplands, the Montagne thiernoise, shaped handles or assembled knives at home between their work in the fields.

At the center sat the fabricant, the knifemaker who supplied raw materials, handed out the work, assembled and finished the knives, and usually kept two jobs for himself: hardening the blades and striking his mark on them. That mark was his reputation, which is why marks have always mattered so much in Thiers.

Two families called Sabatier

Sabatier comes from the Occitan word for a cobbler. In Thiers two unrelated families carried it, and both rose to the top of the trade. Historians who went through the archives found no family link between them.

The Sabatiers of the Moûtier

The Moûtier is the lowest quarter of Thiers, down by the Durolle. The earliest known ancestor of this line is a Jean Sabatier, born around 1612. His descendants were master cutlers through the hard years of floods, famine and epidemics. One of them, Joseph (about 1689 to 1741), was later presented as the founder of the house: the family's Paris shop would print "Maison Sabatier fondée en 1728" on its letterhead.

The family changed scale with another Jean, born in the Moûtier in 1780. He settled in Paris, married the daughter of a maker of surgical instruments, and by 1829 ran a cutlery shop at 84 rue Saint-Honoré, selling kitchen knives whose blades were most likely forged in the family workshops in Thiers. He collected awards at the national exhibitions from 1819 onward.

His son Jean Augustin (1811 to 1879) brought the business home and modernized it. In 1859 he asked permission to install a steam engine to drive his grinding wheels, the first attempt of its kind in Thiers, against the protests of neighbors who feared smoke, noise and explosions. His large works in the Moûtier brought almost every step of knifemaking under one roof, which is why Emperor Napoléon III chose to visit them on 24 July 1864. The family's best-known mark was the trumpet, La Trompette, which they bought in 1846. Sold out of the family in 1899, the business carried on under other owners for much of the twentieth century.

The Sabatiers of Bellevue

The second family started out not as cutlers but as grinders. The earliest name found is Durand Sabatier, a master grinder who died in 1676 aged about 68, working at a mill along the Durolle. In the 1820s two brothers, Gabriel and Bonnet, settled at Bellevue in upper Thiers. In 1833, together with a cutler named Louis Dumas, they registered a set of marks built around the letter K, a sign that a family from nearby Celles-sur-Durolle had used since the 1700s.

Bonnet's sons traded as Sabatier Frères and registered the mark K Sabatier in 1858. When they split in 1885 the marks were auctioned between them. The K passed down through the Perrier family and is still made in Thiers today by Sabatier Aîné & Perrier. The younger brother's house, Sabatier Jeune, used a crowned K and a bunch of grapes.

From family name to a kind of knife

Both families specialized in professional knives for butchers and cooks, and that is what made the name travel. For a long time Sabatier kitchen knives were made in the Nogent style: a solid blade with a long tang hammered out under the tilt hammer and set into an ebony handle. In the late nineteenth century came the flat full tang with riveted handle scales, which collectors call the "Canadien", and with it the shape we now know as the chef's knife: a long triangular blade with a bolster.

Around 1920 a smith named Dulac, working in an old workshop at La Monnerie, up the valley from Thiers, made the decisive change. In his idéal knife the bolster was no longer added on but forged in one piece with the blade and tang, which made the knife much stronger. He never patented it. The Sabatier firms were among the first to adopt it, and for years Thiers was the only place making forged knives this way. The forged chef's knife went on to dominate in North America, where people started calling it simply "a Sabatier", the way Americans said Frigidaire for a refrigerator. By 1930 even the Solingen firm Henckels offered knives in the "Sabatier shape".

The Sabatier Elephant knives we sell today are still made in this idéal tradition.

Why there are so many Sabatiers

The name was never anyone's exclusive property. When French trademark law arrived in the nineteenth century, a Sabatier mark could only be registered together with a word or a picture, and many firms did exactly that. Some marks came from real Sabatiers, others from people who happened to carry the name. In 1906 a blacksmith and cutler called Gabriel Sabatier, of Chabreloche, registered five marks including Sabatier ★★★★; he could neither read nor write, and someone had to hold his hand while he signed. Three weeks later he sold all five to a knife factory for 400 francs. That four-star mark is the one Thiers-Issard owns today.

Courts have confirmed the situation more than once. In 1969 the court in Clermont-Ferrand ruled that the name Sabatier was part of so many marks from Thiers makers that no single manufacturer could claim it alone. In 1979 the holders of Sabatier marks formed an association to defend the name and agreed that a Sabatier knife should carry a distinctive sign, be made in the Thiers area and be marked France or Made in France. In 2023 the French trademark office cancelled one firm's registration of the plain word "Sabatier" for knives, on the grounds that the word had long been used by many makers for a type of knife.

The main Sabatier marks and the firms that held them when the 2023 reference book on the subject was published:

Thiers today

The Thiers area still counts around 80 cutlery manufacturers and fewer than a hundred subcontractors, employing about 1,300 people and turning out some 350,000 pieces a day, from razors and pocket knives to industrial blades. The workforce halved between 1980 and 2018 under pressure from imports, but the last few years have seen a revival built on quality, design and knives made entirely in France. The town has a cutlery museum, the Musée de la Coutellerie, hosts the Coutellia knife fair every year, and gave its name to Le Thiers, a pocket knife designed in the 1990s that any qualifying local maker can produce.

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Main source: Sabatier: les fabricants et leurs marques, au cœur de l'histoire de la coutellerie thiernoise by Sylvie Vissà and Jean-François Faye, with Gilles Reynewaeter (Les Amis des Bois Noirs, 2023). Additional sources: Thiers-Issard, French Wikipedia (Coutellerie de Thiers) and INPI decision NL22-0112 (2023).