Clergerie: the last shoemaker of Romans is dead

On April 8, 2025, the commercial court of Romans-sur-Isère confirmed the definitive liquidation of Clergerie. Sixty workers out. A ghost Spanish buyer later, the Grenoble court of appeal annulled the sale on February 12, 2026. With that ruling, the last luxury shoe workshop in Romans disappeared. A century-old basin, 200 companies at its peak, thousands of artisans — all reduced to an appellate ruling handed down on a Thursday in February.

Romans, a fallen capital

Picture Romans-sur-Isère in the 1960s. A town in the Drôme that smells of tanned leather and sole glue. Over 200 shoe workshops. 5,000 workers who know what “cousu Goodyear” means with their hands, not with Google. The French — and even international — capital of shoemaking.

It all begins in the 15th century. Tanners set up along the Isère and the Canal des Cordeliers. Sheep and cowhides come down from the Vercors, oak and chestnut bark provides the tanning agent. A complete ecosystem, from beast to boot. Around 1850, a certain François Barthélémy Guillaume had the simple but decisive idea of using locally tanned leather to make nailed shoes. The industry took off. World War I did the rest: Romans became a single-industry town, and it owned it.

The post-war era was a golden age. The names piled up: Fenestrier, Unic, Charles Jourdan, Stéphane Kélian, dozens of others. Romans exported worldwide. Hollywood stars wore Jourdan. Romans craftsmanship was a given, not a marketing argument.

And then it all collapsed. Globalisation, offshoring, cheap leather from Asia. The numbers are brutal: over 200 companies after the war, then decline in waves. From 1964 to 1970, ten mid-size companies closed, a thousand workers lost their jobs. The haemorrhage accelerated: 1,400 employees in shoemaking in 1993, fewer than 200 by 2007. By 2003, only three “big” names remained: Jourdan, Kélian and Clergerie. Kélian filed for bankruptcy in 2005, 143 workers laid off, the brand bought by the Royer group. Jourdan was liquidated on December 17, 2007, 197 employees out of work. Only Clergerie remained.

The last one.

Robert Clergerie, grocer’s son turned shoemaker to the stars

Robert Clergerie was born on July 18, 1934 in Paris. Nothing destined him for shoemaking. He discovered the craft in 1970 at Charles Jourdan, in Romans of all places. Leather, assembly, stitching: he learned everything on the job, in the town that still knew how to do it all.

In 1978, he bought the Société Romanaise de la Chaussure, better known under the Fenestrier and Unic brands — two names woven into the fabric of Romans. Three years later, in the winter of 1981, he launched his first collection under his own name. Three models — Paris, Paco and Palma — flat shoes borrowed from the men’s wardrobe, radically elegant. Success was immediate.

The timing was perfect. Women were adopting the trouser suit. They wanted derbies and oxfords that weren’t men’s shoes repainted pink. Clergerie offered exactly that: masculine-feminine, cousu Goodyear, military-inspired Ridgway soles, all made in Romans by artisans who’d known their trade for generations.

Awards piled up. Best Designer of the Year from American magazine Footwear News in 1987, then 1990. The Fashion Footwear Association of New York honoured him in 1992. At its peak, the Romans factory produced 50,000 pairs per season with about a hundred employees.

But Robert Clergerie was a shoemaker, not a financier. In 2005, three days before filing for bankruptcy, he put two million euros of his own money on the table to buy back his own company. A desperate, magnificent gesture. The brand survived, but it was already wounded.

The descent

What followed is a serial that Clergerie employees know by heart, because they lived it.

Late March 2023: Clergerie was placed in receivership. The Paris commercial court awarded the takeover to Titan Footwear, an American group, in June 2023. Grand promises. Less grand reality.

December 2024: new receivership for the operating entities, publicly revealed in February 2025. “The false promises of the American CEO,” headlined France Bleu. The workshop was running on fumes. Orders drying up. The remaining artisans — around sixty — knew how to build a shoe from A to Z. They knew this skill barely existed anywhere else in France. They also knew it wasn’t enough.

On March 11, 2025, the commercial court pronounced judicial liquidation with continued activity until April 25. On April 8, the final blow. Sixty workers found themselves on the street. “We’re going to try to collect ourselves,” one of them told France 3. Robert Clergerie himself, retired but not indifferent, told France Bleu: “Shoemaking as we knew it is over.”

But the story doesn’t end there. It gets worse.

The ghost of Petrer

On April 17, 2025, Petrel 92 SL filed a takeover bid. On April 22, the commercial court signed the transfer order in favour of this Spanish company based in Petrer, in the province of Alicante.

On paper, a rescue. In practice, the operation turned into a social and legal dead end.

Because Petrel 92 SL had a very personal reading of what it had purchased. The Spanish company claimed to have acquired only the assets: the brand, the stock, the machines. Not the employees. It refused to hire them. Refused to pay them. Twenty-four workers — those remaining after the first layoffs — found themselves in a no man’s land: officially transferred to a buyer who didn’t want them.

Who is Petrel 92 SL? On paper, a company from Petrer, a town historically linked to shoemaking — cruel irony. In the Dun & Bradstreet database, a skeletal profile. No website. No communications. A shell holding that buys a century-old brand and leaves the workers on the roadside.

The twenty-four remaining employees took the case to the Valence labour tribunal. On August 18, 2025, the tribunal dismissed their emergency motion. No wages, no recognition, no status. They existed in no one’s eyes: neither laid off (since transferred), nor employed (since Petrel 92 refused to recognise them). Stuck.

The Grenoble verdict

It took until February 12, 2026 for the Grenoble court of appeal to rule. Its commercial division annulled the transfer orders. Petrel 92 SL was no longer considered the buyer. The companies Tiger Mode and JHJ, Clergerie’s legal entities, fell back into the void of liquidation.

For the twenty-four remaining workers, it was paradoxically a relief. “We’ll finally be able to exist in the eyes of the law,” Valérie Treffé-Chavant, an employee, told France Bleu. Exist — meaning be recognised as laid off. Be entitled to unemployment benefits. Finally receive the sums owed since April 2025. The court-appointed administrator had one month to pay.

A relief that tasted of defeat. Clergerie is dead. Definitively. The brand floats somewhere in the legal limbo of a Spanish holding company. The Romans workshop will not reopen. The machines are idle. The skills of these artisans — stitching, assembly, finishing, gestures learned over decades — will scatter like leather dust.

What dies with Clergerie

The scale of what’s disappearing needs measuring.

Romans-sur-Isère had over 200 shoe companies after the war. None of significant size remain. The Cité de la Chaussure, opened in 2019 as a symbol of “renaissance,” houses brave small creators — Ector and its recycled sneakers, a few independent artisans. But the industrial production of French luxury shoes, the kind that rivalled Italy, that dressed actresses and ministers — that’s done.

With Clergerie, it isn’t just a brand that dies. It’s a complete chain. The pattern maker who designs the last. The cutter who slices leather with a tranchet. The stitcher who assembles the pieces. The laster who fixes the upper to the form. The finisher who polishes, colours, burnishes. These trades require years of apprenticeship. They aren’t transmitted through YouTube tutorials. They’re passed from artisan to artisan, in the workshop, hands in the leather.

France still makes shoes. Sneakers, low-end, a few niche workshops. But luxury handmade shoes, produced in an integrated industrial basin with suppliers of leather, glue, soles and heels within van distance — that’s finished. Romans was the last place where that alchemy still worked. It no longer does.

Industrial indifference

The most striking thing about the Clergerie affair isn’t the liquidation. Romans has seen dozens of those. It’s the indifference.

Nobody moved. No government rescue plan like for Alstom or the shipyards. No sovereign fund stepping in as buyer. No French luxury group (LVMH, Kering, Hermès — the ones who proclaim their attachment to “made in France” at every fashion show) lifting a finger. Sixty artisans who know how to make luxury shoes by hand, in a country that prides itself on being the homeland of luxury, and nobody wants to employ them.

Shoes aren’t leather goods. They don’t carry the margin of a Kelly bag. But they’re the historic foundation of French luxury, the one everything else was built on. When Charles Jourdan was putting shoes on Brigitte Bardot, Hermès wasn’t making sneakers.

The final irony: the Clergerie brand may still exist somewhere in Petrel 92 SL’s assets. A name, a logo, forty years of French design heritage. Stripped of its artisans, detached from its territory, it’s worth only what a file in a trademark register is worth. Nothing.

A Romans epilogue

In Romans-sur-Isère, life goes on. The town has other activities, other projects. Tourism, gastronomy, ravioles. The Cité de la Chaussure serves as a living memory, and a few diehards continue to sew soles in workshops of a handful of people.

But the next time a politician comes to talk about reindustrialisation and French savoir-faire while touring a leather goods workshop, someone should remind them about Romans. Remind them that France had a complete luxury shoemaking basin — 200 companies, 5,000 artisans. That it was all liquidated in forty years. That the last survivor was sold to a Spanish holding that didn’t even want it. And that nobody, absolutely nobody, saw fit to do anything about it.

Robert Clergerie was right. Shoemaking as we knew it is over.