What does Laguiole Made in France mean?

There is an old dispute in France among the Laguiole cutleries. It is rarely fought loudly, almost never in public, and outside the country hardly anyone notices it. But it exists, it is bitter, and it runs through the whole trade. Whoever wants to understand why a certificate of authenticity for a pocket knife is necessary at all must know this dispute.

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. There, almost two centuries ago, the shape everyone knows today was born: the slender, curved silhouette, the tapering handle, the bee on the spring.

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

For the buyer this is a trap that snaps shut without him noticing. He buys a Laguiole and believes he is holding a piece of France. On the knife stands a French name, in the description stands a French story, and both are allowed to stand there no matter where the knife was made. The trade in Laguiole pocket knives is enormous, and a considerable part of it lives from exactly this confusion.

The dispute is not only with the outside

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

Resourceful sellers realised long ago that you do not have to fake the origin if you construct it cleverly enough. Three paths are taken, and they differ considerably in their audacity.

Three ways to turn foreign goods into a French knife

The first way is the crude one. A finished knife is imported from China, the seller's own name printed on it, done. That is not manufacturing, that is trading, and whoever looks closely usually recognises it by the finish: by joints that do not sit, by a bee that was stamped instead of cut, by steel that shows rust spots after two weeks.

The second way is the more sophisticated one. Not the finished knife is imported, but its components. Blades, liners, springs, bolsters, handle scales, everything separately, everything cheap, everything from the Far East. Assembly then indeed takes 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 cutlery it is a disappointment nonetheless, because he did not get it. He got an assembly job.

The third way is the most unpleasant one. Here production really happens, with own machines, own people, honest skill. Just not enough of it. What the own workshop cannot manage is bought in, from China, and then the entire stock is passed off as own production. All of our own making, all Made in France. That is the claim, and it is true for part of the knives. For which part, the buyer never learns.

In the end the customer stands before three knives that look confusingly alike, with three labels claiming the same thing, and a price difference he cannot explain to himself. He has no way of resolving this. He would have to know the cutlery, the supply chains, the numbers. How could he.

What is permitted, and what we demand

A distinction is needed here that we take very seriously. Some of what is described above is legally permissible. Whoever imports components and assembles them in the country may be acting entirely within the rules. We accuse nobody who abides by the applicable law.

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

That may be different for some online shop or some retail store. Not for us. If we have even the slightest doubt, a manufactory does not enter the A.I.P.C.L. certification. Not provisionally, not with reservations, not with an asterisk. It does not enter. We would rather have a shorter list than one you cannot rely on.

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

It would be presumptuous, however, to claim we could judge this alone. We are based in Germany. We have moved in this world for decades, we know the workshops, we have been inside many of them, and still: what really goes on in Thiers and in the Aveyron, the people on the spot know better than we do. They know the suppliers. They know the quantities. They see when somewhere more knives leave through the door than can have come in.

That is exactly why the OL Round Table exists.

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

That we do not demand unanimity is not an oversight but a deliberate decision. These forges are competitors. It would be naive to assume every vote is carried by the matter alone. If we demanded unanimity, a single cutlery could block every admission out of pure rivalry, and the Round Table would no longer be an examining body but a doorman with interests of his own. The majority balances such motives out.

And if a member has findings that seriously speak against an admission, the counting stops. Then we examine those indications, thoroughly, and we decide. In doubt, against admission. A certificate that says yes when in doubt is worthless.

Our maxim, as clearly as we can put it

In our view a Laguiole only counts as Made in France if the components 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 owed to nature:

• Handle materials. Snakewood grows in Guyana, ebony in Africa and South Asia, olive wood by the Mediterranean. A ram's horn does not grow in France just because the knife is made there. Whoever demanded that the handle also come from France would demand the end of almost all beautiful handle materials.
• Blade steel from Sweden. Sandvik supplies the steels that make up a considerable part of good European blades, and Damasteel the Swedish Damascus. Both are among the best there is.
• Damascus from Germany. The stainless Damascus by Balbach comes from Germany and is found in many of the most beautiful blades French cutleries mount.

Nobody conceals these origins; on the contrary, they are named, because they are a mark of quality. That is exactly the difference to the three ways above: here something is bought in because it is better. There something is bought in because it is cheaper, and then concealed.

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. These people deserve clarity. They deserve the certainty that what stands in the display case 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. It stands for French tradition, for the love of the craft and for the knifemaking art of a country that has nurtured it for centuries. We set this standard for ourselves, and we bring to it what we have: our experience, our connections to France and the votes of the cutleries that work there.

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