Timeline

Key figures

Origin and history

The Forges des Salles, founded in 1623 by Henri II de Rohan on the communes of Perret (Côtes-d'Armor) and Sainte-Brigitte (Morbihan), is a rare example of a Breton steel village from the 17th to the 19th century. This industrial site, fed by local resources (iron mining, charcoal, hydraulic power), was a major economic centre until its blast furnace was finally shut down in 1877. Its spatial organization reflects an autarchic working town, with workshops, housing, school and chapel, integrated into the Quenecan forest.

The origin of the Forges des Salles dates back to the desire of Henri II de Rohan to structure a mining operation then anarchic, recruiting the master of Protestant forges Geoffroy de Finement, originally from Liège. The latter introduced innovations such as splitting, adapted to the production of nail irons, a Breton specialty. The site had a strategic location: proximity to the ore, forests for coal, and river to operate the bellows. After the death of Finement, the forges were developed by successive leases, responding to military orders (arsenaux de Brest and Lorient) and agricultural needs.

The French Revolution marked a turning point with the departmental redistribution, dividing the village between Morbihan and Côtes-du-Nord, and a violent episode in 1795 when the Chouans, led by De Boishardy, looted the forges and carried weapons and ammunition. In the 19th century, under the direction of Louis Henri de Janzé (owner from 1802), the site reached its peak with the construction of a "new forge" (1815) and a new blast furnace (1844), despite increasing challenges: shortage of wood, competition from coke forgings, and Franco-British treatise of 1860 reducing the prices of cast iron.

The decline began with the shutdown of the blast furnace in 1877, a victim of outdated processes and low competitiveness. Janze's family tried to convert the workers into forestry or moulding, but the site was "fossilized", preserving its condition until the 20th century. Occupied by Germans during the Second World War (explosion of an ammunition depot in 1944), the village saw its last inhabitants leave in the 1980s. Since 1992, the Association des Amis des Forges des Salles, created by the family of the Pontavice (descendant of Janze), restores the site and opens it to the public.

The architecture of the Forges des Salles illustrates a social and technical organization typical of the Ancien Régime: the workers' dwellings (such as the "Rangée des forgeons"), the coal halls, the Protestant chapel converted to a Catholic place, and the home of the master of forges with his garden on terraces. The workshops (founding, moulding, carpentry) and the artificial ponds bear witness to sophisticated hydraulic engineering, while the canteen and school (opened in 1833) reveal a structured community life. Partly classified as historical monuments (1981 and 1993), the forges today symbolize the deindustrialisation of Brittany and the preservation of a unique industrial heritage.

Natural resources were central to the work of the forges: the water, captured via ponds and a 4 km bib, operated the wheels with blades; the wood, exploited in the forest of Quenecan, was transformed into coal to feed the blast furnaces; the iron ore, extracted within a radius of 20 km, was washed and melted on site. However, overexploitation and water scarcity (limiting production to 8-9 months per year) accelerated the decline. The trades linked to the forges – coalsmiths, sackers, marketers, blowers – formed a hierarchical society, supervised by the forge master, the manager, and clerks, in a paternalistic system offering housing, care, and education in exchange for a stable workforce.

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