Thiers and Laguiole: the two capitals of the French knife

Two names that mean two things at once

When we speak of a Laguiole and of a Thiers, we are referring first of all to two knife patterns. But both words are place names before anything else: a village in the Aveyron and a town in the Puy-de-Dôme, a little more than 190 kilometres apart.

These two places are far more closely connected than most collectors realise. Anyone who knows the connection understands at once why our certificate of authenticity is issued for knives from both origins. And they also understand why the question does not embarrass us when someone asks whether a Laguiole made in Thiers is really a Laguiole.

Laguiole: a village on the high plateau

Laguiole lies in the north of the Aveyron department, on the Aubrac plateau, a good thousand metres above sea level. Around a thousand people live there. The winters are long, the land is grazing country, and the village is known for three things: its breed of cattle, the cheese of the same name that goes into aligot, and the knife.

It was here, in 1829, that the folding knife bearing the village's name was created, developed from the peasant capuchadou. How that invention became a name anyone may use today we have described in detail elsewhere: Why do so many forges take part in the A.I.P.C.L. concept?

Thiers: the town that supplied France with knives

Thiers lies in the Auvergne, in the Puy-de-Dôme, clinging to a steep slope above the Durolle. That fast little river made the town: for centuries its fall drove the water wheels of the grinding workshops lined up one after another along the valley. The grinders worked lying face down on planks above the water, often with a dog resting on their legs to keep them warm.

Cutlery has been made in Thiers since the Middle Ages, more than six hundred years without interruption. For centuries, anyone in France who wanted a knife bought a knife from Thiers. To this day by far the largest share of French cutlery production comes from there, and many patterns carrying the name of an entirely different region were and still are made in Thiers.

Thiers is therefore not the rival of the Aveyron. Thiers is the workshop in which France kept its knife-making craft alive. That not everything sold in the town is French for all that is another story, and we have told it through a real case: Bought in Thiers, made somewhere else.

The decades when no Laguiole came from Laguiole

This is the part of the story most buyers do not know, and it is the most important one.

The First World War hit the village hard. Many of the craftsmen who marched away never came back. From the 1920s onwards came the added pressure of production in the Thiers basin becoming increasingly mechanised and divided into separate steps. Against that kind of manufacturing the few remaining smiths on the Aubrac could not survive. The making of the knife moved away.

A single figure shows how far it went: at the beginning of the 1980s there were still two places in the village of Laguiole selling Laguiole knives. Both of them sold knives that had been made in Thiers.

Thiers carried the pattern through a time when its home village could no longer make it. That is not a footnote. That is the reason the Laguiole still exists at all.

1984: the young people of Laguiole go to Thiers to learn

The return began in the 1980s, and it began with a political decision. In 1984 the elected representatives of the Aubrac joined forces to bring knife making back to the village. Their first step was neither a building nor a machine, but training: they sent young people from Laguiole away to learn the cutler's trade, among other places to Thiers and to Nogent.

In 1985 the first assembly workshop appeared in the village, and in 1987 the Forge de Laguiole followed. Everything rebuilt in Laguiole after that grew on this knowledge.

The skill did not come back to Laguiole as a licence or through a contract of sale. It came back in the hands of young people who had gone to fetch it where it was still alive.

And today? The name belongs to the place again

Since 2024 the name of the village has been legally tied to the village. The geographical indication "Couteau de Laguiole" protects it for a narrowly defined area in the north of the Aveyron. Thiers is expressly not part of it.

At first glance that sounds as though it contradicts everything you have just read. It does not.

How this protection came about, which houses carry it today and what the stamp on the blade means, we have set out at length in a separate article: The IG "Couteau de Laguiole" explained.

Why our certificate covers both origins

The A.I.P.C.L. certificate of authenticity answers a different question from a geographical indication. It does not say which name a knife may carry. It says what this one piece is: that this particular knife, under this particular number, was made by hand in France, in a forge we know by name and which stands behind it.

Faced with that question, the Aveyron and the Puy-de-Dôme rank equally. A Le Thiers by Claude Dozorme is not half an original, and a Laguiole from a Thiers workshop is no less one either. Both come from a French manufactory, both are the result of the same centuries-old school.

The dividing line that concerns us runs somewhere else entirely. Not between two French regions that have kept the craft alive for each other over generations, but between a knife built in France by a human being and a knife that carries nothing but the name, with no forge, no engraving, and nobody answering for it. Where exactly we draw that line, and what we require of a forge, can be read in What does Laguiole Made in France mean?

That is why our certificate does not name a region, but a workshop.