The Village That Lost Its Own Name

Then, in 1993, a man from the suburbs of Paris registered the word "Laguiole" as his trademark — and the village spent the next twenty-six years trying to get it back.

The Aubrac plateau sits at over a thousand metres above sea level, in the kind of landscape that has never quite decided whether it belongs to the mountains or the plains and has resolved the question by being neither — just a high, wind-bitten expanse of basalt and pasture that the French describe as austere and mean something closer to beautiful-in-a-way-that-doesn’t-care-what-you-think. The winters are long. The summers are brief and intensely green. The stone villages that punctuate the plateau look like they grew out of the ground rather than being built on it.

Laguiole is one of these villages. Around 1,200 people. A church, a cheese, a famous restaurant with three Michelin stars that seems slightly anomalous against the agricultural backdrop but has been there long enough that nobody questions it anymore. And a knife — the knife, to anyone who knows about such things — that has been made here, in various forms, since 1829.

The name itself comes from the Occitan La Gleisola: the little church. And you pronounce it “Layole,” not the way it’s written, which is one of the first things you learn and one of the ways you can tell who has actually been there. The village formed around that church, gathered together against the winds of the plateau, and for centuries its rhythm was determined by the seasons: cattle, fairs, transhumance — the twice-yearly migration of herds up to the summer pastures and back down again.

A knife born from two cultures and a long walk to Catalonia

The story of how the Laguiole knife came to exist is the kind of story that feels almost too tidy to be true, but appears to be accurate. The young men of the Aubrac, in the early nineteenth century, had a habit of travelling south to Catalonia during the winters to work as lumberjacks. They were away for months. When they came back, some of them brought a Spanish folding knife in their pockets — the navaja, a long, slender thing with a blade that could be tucked into the handle and carried without danger. The local knife at the time, the capuchadou, was a fixed blade, a point of wood and steel that did the job but had no mechanism, nothing to hold the blade closed. You carried it open, which was fine until it wasn’t.

The meeting of these two objects — the Catalan elegance of the navaja and the utilitarian directness of the capuchadou — produced something new. In 1829, a cutler named Pierre-Jean Calmels made the first version of what we now call the Laguiole knife. It folded. It had what’s called a forced notch, a spring mechanism that holds the blade open with resistance rather than a lock, so that you close it by applying deliberate pressure — you can’t close it by accident, but it doesn’t snap shut of its own accord. It was designed for people who worked with their hands and needed something they could trust.

Over the following decades the knife acquired its defining features. An awl was added in 1840 — a pointed steel spike at the spine of the handle — because farmers needed to puncture the stomachs of cattle suffering from bloat, and doing it quickly and cleanly required a tool you already had in your pocket. A corkscrew appeared around 1880, by which point many Aveyronnais had migrated to Paris and become café owners and wine merchants, and wanted a knife that reflected their new station. The bee, a small ornament on the spring of the blade, became an emblem — its origins are debated, but its association with the knife is now so complete that a Laguiole without a bee feels like something is missing, the way a coat of arms feels wrong without its central figure.

The shepherd's cross. On most Laguiole knives, the handle bears a pattern of small rivets — five or seven or nine of them, arranged to form a cross when the knife is held vertically. This is called the shepherd's cross, and its origins are practical rather than decorative. The shepherds of the Aubrac were away from their villages for weeks at a time during transhumance. Far from any church, they would stick their knife upright into a loaf of bread — blade into the bread, handle upward, cross facing out — and use it as an improvised altar. The village name itself means the little church. The cross on the handle was the church you carried with you.

By the late nineteenth century, the Laguiole knife was famous. Workshops in the village employed dozens of people; the Calmels and Pagès families won awards at national competitions. Then, as the century turned, something went wrong. The industrial revolution arrived in Thiers — a town in the Auvergne, 190 kilometres north, which had been making knives for centuries and had the infrastructure to make them at scale. Power hammers appeared in Thiers; the village of Laguiole, reluctant to mechanise, could not keep up with demand. The production migrated north. By the 1980s, almost no knives were being made in Laguiole at all. Two shops remained in the village, and they were selling knives made in Thiers.

The revival came in the mid-1980s, driven by local politicians and artisans who had decided that losing the knife was losing something irreplaceable. A cooperative was formed, a forge was built, craftsmen were trained. By the end of the decade, production was back in the village. The knives found an audience — a global one, eventually, in Germany and the United States especially — and the Laguiole became one of the more recognisable objects in the international vocabulary of craft. All of which made what happened in 1993 considerably more infuriating.

The man had registered the name in 38 commercial categories — not just knives, but bed linen, clothing, lighters, fertiliser, and barbecues. He then licensed it to French and foreign companies who could legally sell, under the name Laguiole, products that had nothing to do with the village, with the plateau, or with any knife at all.

The man from the suburbs and his thirty-eight categories

In 1993, a businessman named Gilbert Szajner, based in the Val-de-Marne — a department in the suburbs of Paris, about as far culturally from the Aubrac plateau as it is possible to get while remaining in France — registered the word “Laguiole” as a commercial trademark at the French national intellectual property office. He registered it in 38 categories. Not just knives — bed linen, clothing, lighters, fertiliser, barbecues. He then licensed it to companies, French and foreign, who could legally sell products under the Laguiole name that had nothing to do with the village, with the plateau, or with any tradition of craft whatsoever. Chinese-made sets of six table knives for ten euros began appearing in supermarkets across France, stamped with the word that the artisans of the Aubrac had spent decades rehabilitating.

There is a particular kind of audacity to what Szajner did, and it’s worth sitting with for a moment. The word “Laguiole” had no registered trademark when he moved. It was simply the name of a village — a name, crucially, with an enormous amount of accumulated goodwill attached to it, goodwill built by 150 years of craftsmanship and the more recent revival efforts of the 1980s. He registered it, legally, and then used that goodwill as a commercial asset that the village itself was no longer entitled to access. Residents of Laguiole found themselves in the position of being unable to call their own businesses by the name of the town they lived in. A shopkeeper who wanted to open something called “Laguiole Vision” — an optician — received a legal challenge. The mayor could not redesign the village logo without navigating a trademark dispute. A fertiliser company could legally use the name that shepherds had embroidered into their identity for two centuries.

Szajner, when interviewed, said he had tried to create a partnership with the village. The village, understandably, saw things differently. The legal battle that followed was long, expensive, and went through multiple reversals. In 2014, a Paris court initially rejected the village’s case, ruling that “Laguiole knife” had become a generic term in common usage — an argument that, if successful, would have meant the village had effectively lost the right to its own name by dint of its knife being too famous. The logic was circular enough to make your head hurt. A 2016 ruling overturned that decision. In 2019, the Paris Court of Appeal ruled in the village’s favour, annulling twenty of Szajner’s trademarks and condemning his approach as a deliberate strategy to deprive the village and its residents of their own name. He and his family were ordered to pay €50,000 in moral damages — against the €5 million the village had requested, which gives you a sense of the gap between what the law could deliver and what the actual harm had been.

The Thiers question. The legal story has a second chapter that is still running. Thiers, the industrial knife town that took over Laguiole's production during the twentieth century lean years, wants to be included in any geographical indication that protects the Laguiole name. Many established manufacturers there have been making knives to the Laguiole design for decades. The village says this dilutes everything. In 2024, the Aix-en-Provence Court of Appeals invalidated a geographical indication that would have included Thiers, ruling that the whole point of a GI is to anchor a product to a specific origin — and a zone that includes two very different places 190 kilometres apart doesn't do that. The story isn't over.

What it means to make a real one

Set aside the legal saga for a moment and look at the object itself, because it rewards attention. A proper Laguiole knife — made in the village, by a single craftsman from start to finish — goes through somewhere between 150 and 200 individual operations before it is finished. The blade is forged and ground and polished. The bolsters are fitted, the handle material is shaped — horn, olive wood, juniper, warthog tooth, ivory in older examples — and the rivets are placed. The spring is chiselled with a decorative pattern called guilloché, which is unique to each maker, a kind of personal signature pressed into metal, and no two springs from different cutlers look quite the same. The bee is welded or forged onto the spring. The whole thing is then assembled and polished and tested, the spring checked for its resistance, the blade for its edge.

A genuine knife from one of the Laguiole workshops costs somewhere between 80 and several hundred euros, depending on the materials and complexity. A “Laguiole” knife from a supermarket costs ten euros for six. The difference is not primarily about price. It is about whether the thing you are holding is an object that someone made, with accumulated knowledge and specific materials and their own hands, or whether it is a label applied to a pressed piece of steel that happens to have a bee-shaped sticker on the spring.

This is the question at the heart of the whole dispute, and it’s not a trivial one. In 2023, the European Union introduced a new system of Geographical Indications for craft and industrial products — a framework that extends to manufactured objects the kind of protection that has long existed for wine and cheese. More than 800 European items stand to benefit. The Laguiole saga was, by general acknowledgement, one of the events that made the case for this legislation. If a village of 1,200 people could spend twenty-six years in court trying to use their own name, the system clearly needed fixing.

The guilloché on the spring is unique to each maker — a personal signature pressed into metal. No two springs from different cutlers look quite the same. This is what mass production cannot replicate, not because it lacks the machines, but because a signature requires someone to sign.

There is something worth noticing about what Szajner actually sold. His marketing materials described his knives by invoking the village, its history, its shepherds, its plateau. He used the legend to sell the product while being quite clear — to anyone who looked closely at the small print — that the product had no connection to any of it. The court in 2019 noted this with visible displeasure. The beef of Aubrac, the cheese of Laguiole, the knife — all three things draw their meaning from the same landscape, the same history of transhumance and isolation and working with your hands in difficult country. You cannot have the meaning without the place. Szajner understood this perfectly, which is precisely why he was so keen to own the name.

The village got it back, mostly. A few trademarks survived. The counterfeits still exist — you can find them on Amazon in five minutes if you know what not to look for. The Thiers dispute is still generating paperwork somewhere in the French legal system. But the workshops in Laguiole are still producing knives, the cutlers who hold the title of Meilleur Ouvrier de France are still chiselling springs, and if you buy the right thing — maker’s name on the blade, realistic price, handle material that feels like something rather than nothing — you are holding an object with a continuous history going back to a man named Calmels who combined a Spanish navaja with a local knife in 1829 and made something that turned out to be worth fighting for.

The shepherd who stuck his knife in a loaf of bread and prayed to the cross on the handle was not thinking about intellectual property. He was thinking about the fact that he was far from home and needed something to hold on to. That instinct — to attach meaning to a made object, to let it carry more weight than its materials would suggest — is what craftsmanship has always been about. It is also, unfortunately, what makes a name worth stealing.

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