There is an old quarrel in France among the Laguiole forges. It is rarely conducted loudly, almost never in public, and beyond the country's borders hardly anyone hears about it. But it exists, it is bitter, and it runs through the whole trade. Anyone who wants to understand why a pocket knife needs a certificate of authenticity at all has to know about this quarrel.

A name that belongs to nobody

Laguiole is first of all a village. It lies in the Aveyron, in the south of the Massif Central, on a windy plateau where more cattle live than people. It was there, almost two centuries ago, that the shape everyone knows today came into being: the slender curved silhouette, the tapering handle, the bee on the spring.

What never came into being there, however, is any protection for the name. Laguiole is not a protected designation of origin. Unlike champagne, which must come from Champagne, unlike Parma ham, which must come from Parma, any knife in the world may call itself a Laguiole. One from Thiers, one from the village of Laguiole itself, and equally one that has never seen a French workbench.

For the buyer this is a trap that closes without his noticing. He buys a Laguiole and believes he is holding a piece of France in his hand. On the knife there is a French name, in the description there is a French story, and both are allowed to be there no matter where the knife was made. The trade in Laguiole pocket knives is enormous, and a considerable part of it lives on precisely this confusion.

The quarrel does not only face outwards

The French forges are therefore fighting cheap goods from China and Pakistan. So far the front line would be clear. Unfortunately it does not run only there. It also runs straight through France, and that is the genuinely painful part of this story.

For enterprising suppliers realised long ago that you do not have to falsify origin if you construct it cleverly enough. Three routes are taken, and they differ considerably in how brazen they are.

Three ways to turn foreign goods into a French knife

The first route is the crude one. A finished knife is imported from China, the importer's own name is printed on it, done. That is not manufacturing, that is trading, and anyone looking closely will usually recognise it by the workmanship: by joints that do not sit right, by a bee that was stamped instead of cut, by a steel that shows its first spots of rust within a fortnight.

The second route is the more refined one. It is not the finished knife that is imported but its parts. Blades, liners, springs, bolsters, handle scales, each separately, all cheap, all from the Far East. The assembly then genuinely does take place in France, at a French workbench, by French hands. And there the knife stands on the shelf as Made in France. Formally this is often unassailable. For a collector who wanted to buy the craftsmanship of a French forge it is a disappointment all the same, because he did not get it. He got an assembly job.

The third route is the most disagreeable. Here there really is production, with its own machines, its own people, honest skill. Only not enough of it. Whatever the workshop cannot manage is bought in, from China, and the entire stock is then presented as own production. Everything from our own house, everything Made in France. That is the claim, and it is true for part of the knives. For which part, the buyer will not find out.

In the end the customer stands in front of three knives that look confusingly alike, with three labels claiming the same thing, and a difference in price he cannot explain to himself. He has no way of resolving it. He would have to know the forge, the supply routes, the quantities. How could he.

What is permitted, and what we demand

A distinction is needed here, and we take it very seriously. Some of what stands above is legally permissible. Whoever imports parts and assembles them in the country may well be operating entirely within the rules. We reproach nobody who keeps to the law as it stands.

But we are not the legislator, and a certificate is not a court judgment. A certificate is a promise. It says: this knife is what you imagine it to be. And that is why our standard is allowed to be stricter than the legal minimum. It is.

That may be different for this or that online shop or high street business. For us it is not. If we have even the slightest doubt, a manufactory does not enter the A.I.P.C.L. certification. Not provisionally, not subject to conditions, not with an asterisk. It does not enter. We would rather have a shorter list than one that cannot be relied upon.

The sharpest tool is not ours, it belongs to the forges

It would nevertheless be presumptuous to claim that we can judge this on our own. We sit in Germany. We have been moving in this world for decades, we know the workshops, we have stood in many of them, and even so: what really goes on in Thiers and in the Aveyron, the people on the ground know better than we do. They know the suppliers. They know the quantities. They notice when more knives leave a door somewhere than can possibly have gone in.

That is exactly why the OL Round Table exists.

When a new forge comes up for admission, we put the question to those we have worked with for a long time and who already sit at that table. They vote on whether the new forge is admitted. The majority decides.

That we do not require unanimity is not an oversight but a deliberate decision. These houses are competitors. It would be naive to assume that every vote is carried by the merits alone. If we required unanimity, a single forge could block any admission out of pure rivalry, and the Round Table would no longer be an examining body but a doorman with an interest of his own. A majority evens out such motives.

And when a member has findings that seriously argue against an admission, the arithmetic stops. We then examine those findings thoroughly and we decide. In case of doubt, against admission. A certificate that says yes when in doubt is worthless.

Our maxim, as plainly as we can put it

In our view a Laguiole counts as Made in France only if the parts are made in France and the knife is assembled in France. Both. Not one or the other. Assembly alone is not enough for us.

There are exceptions, and they are not loopholes but simply a matter of nature:

• Handle materials. Snakewood grows in Guyana, ebony in Africa and southern Asia, olive around the Mediterranean. A ram's horn does not grow in France merely because the knife is made there. To demand that the handle come from France as well would mean the end of almost every beautiful handle material.
• Blade steel from Sweden. Sandvik supplies the steels from which a considerable part of Europe's good blades is made, and Damasteel the Swedish damascus. Both are among the finest there is.
• Damascus from Germany. The stainless damascus from Balbach comes from Germany and is found in many of the most beautiful blades that French forges fit.

Nobody conceals these origins, quite the opposite: they are stated, because they are a mark of quality. That is precisely the difference from the three routes above. Here something is bought in because it is better. There something is bought in because it is cheaper, and then kept quiet.

Why we owe this to the collectors

People who collect Laguiole knives rarely do so out of reason. They do it because they see something in them: a shape that has stayed the same for generations, a bee cut by hand, a piece of wood from a tree that existed only once. Those people deserve clarity. They deserve the certainty that what stands in the cabinet is what they believed they were buying.

The A.I.P.C.L. certificate of authenticity is therefore more than a sheet of paper with a number on it. It stands for French tradition, for love of the craft and for the cutler's art of a country that has cultivated it for centuries. We hold ourselves to that standard, and we bring to it what we have: our experience, our connections to France and the voices of the forges that work there.

If you own a Laguiole that was not bought from us and you want to know where you stand: submit it to us. We will look at it. And if we cannot certify it, we will tell you just as plainly.

← Back to all cases