L’ancienne manufacture d’allumettes d’Aubervilliers

At the beginning of 2015, some of the buildings of the former state match factory at Aubervilliers, a suburb to the north-east of Paris in the Seine-Saint-Denis department, became home to the restoration department of the French national heritage institute (Institut national du patrimoine). For the installation of this department’s workshops, the institute’s review, entitled Patrimoines, published a presentation of the history of the industrial site. Its buildings date from the first decade of the twentieth century and were used for match production up to 1962. From 1967 to 2010 the buildings were occupied by an official documentation service, la Documentation française. The site was then purchased by the municipal authority which sold it on to the Sirius firm of developers. This firm’s reconversion of the buildings offers an interesting example of the way adaptive re-use can preserve historic industrial buildings and provide an opportunity for their interpretation. This present contribution written for In Situ is the complete version of the abridged text published in number 11 of the review Patrimoines (2015). It aims primarily at providing a better understanding of the context in which the buildings were built, at the intersection of a broad range of explanatory considerations, calling on industrial history, chemical history, fiscal and administrative history, medical history, social and trade union history and techical and architectural history