Louis Motte-Bossut, the major manufacturer from Roubaix, testifies to the difficulties of his profession

Letter from Louis MOTTE-BOSSUT (1817-1883), textile industrialist, founder of the Motte-Bossut spinning mill in Roubaix (closed in 1982).

On the daily difficulties of a major textile manufacturer in the North. He received the work from his correspondent and congratulates him, as he himself is incapable of such an exercise. “[…] To write literature as an amateur, without expecting it to be a daily bread, seems to me the most pleasant of states […]. We, on the other hand, drag ourselves along, pushing a furrow in rocky soil, at every step we encounter resistances that change daily. Today it's the rise in raw material costs driven by the emancipation of Black people who no longer want to work or produce; yesterday it was poor sales; another time it's material difficulties, machines breaking down, generators lacking power; then everything seems to smile upon you for a moment, demand is reborn, prices are profitable, but your production is hampered by a lack of manpower and on the front lines from morning till night, your ideas absorbed by all the real worries I've listed, you find yourself overwhelmed by events, you find your burden too heavy and you envy the sweet tranquility of mind in which the poet's existence flows […]. Autumn is often pleasant in our country, In winter, the appearance of our town is desolate; the mud is black and viscous, the sky leaden; it's a true English town. It's enough to make you feel melancholic. Yet, it's the town where we live for five and a half months of the year. In the summer, we reside in Lannoy […]".