Thiers was once the world capital of cutlery. It nearly died. Today, a new generation of knifemakers is firing up the engines again. Not out of nostalgia, but out of conviction.
The town clings to a hillside above the Durolle river. Rooftops stack upon each other, narrow lanes drop steeply toward the water. In winter, fog rises from the valley and wraps around the workshops. In summer, you can hear the grinding wheels from the street.
Thiers, Puy-de-Dôme, population 11,000. France’s cutlery capital since the fifteenth century. If you have a knife in a drawer somewhere, there’s a good chance it came from here.
What Thiers once was
By the mid-twentieth century, Thiers produced 70% of all French cutlery. Workshops lined the banks of the Durolle, whose current powered the grinding wheels. The grinders worked lying flat on planks over the water, bellies pressed against stone, for hours on end. The trade killed as surely as it fed. Silicosis, accidents, cold. Men died young. They made good blades.
The craft was passed down from father to son, from one workshop to the next. Every family had its specialty. One forged the blades, another fitted the handles, a third did the polishing. The entire town was a decentralized manufactory, each house a link in the chain.
Then globalization did its work. One-euro Chinese knives flooded the market. Workshops closed one by one. By the 1990s, Thiers had lost half its knifemakers. The Durolle valley fell silent.
Those who stayed
Thiers didn’t die. That’s the first thing worth saying. The town still produces more than half of all French cutlery. But the nature of the output has changed.
The low end is gone. There’s no reason to make an ordinary table knife in Thiers when you can produce it ten times cheaper elsewhere. What remains is the high end. Art pieces, pocket knives, professional kitchen knives. The segment where the craftsman’s hand matters more than volume.
Au Nain Couteliers has been in Thiers since 1903. Four generations of the same family. Their kitchen knives equip Michelin-starred tables, serious butcher shops, the kitchens of people who cut for real. No marketing, no storytelling. Steel blades, wooden handles, fair prices.
L’Atelier Perceval chose a different path. Table knives of radical elegance, clean lines, noble materials. The kind of knives you look at before you cut with. Bruno Cressard founded it in 1994, right in the thick of the Thiers crisis. It was a gamble. It paid off.
The CFAI and training
The real surprise in Thiers is the CFAI. The Centre de Formation des Apprentis de l’Industrie trains dozens of young people in cutlery every year. Not reluctant heirs. People who chose this.
They come from all over France. Some left desk jobs to learn forging. Others are fresh out of school and want to work with their hands. The profile has changed. These aren’t sons of knifemakers taking over the family workshop by default. They’re passionate people who arrive in Thiers the way you’d arrive at an art school, with a calling.
The training lasts two years. Forging, grinding, assembly, tempering. The gestures are the same as in the nineteenth century. The wheels still turn. But the conditions have changed. Nobody works lying on a plank over the river anymore. The workshops are heated, ventilated, well-lit. The craft has modernized without losing itself.
Coutellia, the international art cutlery fair, is held in Thiers every May. This is where young knifemakers show what they can do. One-of-a-kind pieces, hand-forged damascus, handles sculpted from impossible materials. Prices climb fast. Collectors travel from far away.
High-end as a survival strategy
Thiers’ strategy is clear, even if nobody wrote it into a strategic plan. It’s a natural truth. You can’t compete with China on volume. You can compete on craft.
A knife forged in Thiers by an artisan who masters tempering, who selects his own steel, who carves his handle from a century-old walnut burl - that knife has no equivalent in any industrial catalog. It costs 200, 500, sometimes 2,000 euros. But it’s unique. It cuts. It lasts. It gets passed down.
Forge de Laguiole, based in the nearby Aubrac region, understood the same thing. Its laguiole knives are made one by one, in a building designed by Philippe Starck - an anecdote, but not an irrelevant one. The architecture says something: cutlery is not a relic, it’s a living art. Laguiole en Aubrac, a few kilometers away, makes the same case. Each knife bears the initials of its assembler. It’s a signature, not a serial number.
La Cité des Couteliers
La Cité des Couteliers in Thiers is showing until June 2026 the exhibition Talents, dedicated to the “new guardians of Thiers art cutlery.” The title is a statement of intent. It doesn’t say “the last knifemakers.” It says “the new guardians.” The distinction matters.
The exhibition showcases the work of a generation aged between 25 and 45. Knifemakers who’ve been established for five, ten, fifteen years. Varied backgrounds. A former engineer who switched to forging. A knifemaker trained at the Beaux-Arts before turning to steel. A knifemaker’s son who traveled the world before coming back to take over the family workshop.
These aren’t heritage curators. They’re artisans who live from their work. Their knives sell, their order books are full, their waiting lists keep growing. The market exists. It’s small, but it’s solid.
The future of a town
Thiers will never again be what it was. The thousands of nineteenth-century workshops, the grinders lying on their planks, mass production - that’s over. And maybe that’s for the better.
What’s emerging is different. Smaller, sharper, more ambitious. A town that no longer produces in quantity but in quality. Artisans who aren’t surviving but thriving. A training program that attracts rather than retains.
The sound of the grinding wheel in Thiers is not an echo of the past. It’s the sound of the present. Someone, in a workshop on rue de la Coutellerie, is forging a blade right now. He’s thirty, came from Bordeaux or Lyon, learned the trade here. His knife will cost 300 euros and end up with a Japanese collector or a Michelin-starred chef in Lyon.
The next generation is here. And it forges.