Argonay, Haute-Savoie. Three thousand inhabitants, a view of the Aravis mountains, a lake nearby. And a factory that has been making erasers and compasses since 1947. Not a spectacular factory. Not a listed site. A discreet industrial building, wedged between the mountains and the retail park, where people come every morning to make objects that everyone uses and nobody looks at.
In May 2026, this factory will close. Twenty-eight people will lose their jobs. Production will be transferred to Asia. And France will no longer have a single eraser factory on its soil.
Seventy-eight years
The story begins in 1947. France is rebuilding, schools are reopening, supplies are needed. A workshop sets up in Argonay to manufacture school compasses. The choice of location is no accident: Haute-Savoie has a tradition of décolletage — the precision industry of machining small metal parts. Swiss watchmakers, just across the border, had spread their know-how throughout the Arve valley. Making a compass is décolletage applied to stationery.
The company grows. It adds erasers, pencil sharpeners, school scissors. Simple, functional, inexpensive objects. The kind of things you buy at the start of term without thinking, slip into a pencil case, and lose before Christmas. Except that behind every eraser lies a process of mixing, extrusion, cutting, and packaging that demands real industrial expertise. This isn’t craftsmanship. It’s mastered light industry — which is almost rarer.
For decades, Argonay produces. The factory runs, orders come in, product lines expand. The compasses are exported across Europe. So are the erasers. At its peak, the company employs several hundred people in the valley. It invests, automates, modernises its lines. Ranges diversify: ergonomic, colourful, novelty. The classic white eraser sits alongside models designed for left-handers, for toddlers, for artists. Innovation happens in a domain where no one imagines there’s anything to invent.
Nobody claims the Made in France of school stationery. Nobody celebrates it. It simply exists. Every September, millions of French pencil cases contain erasers and compasses made a few kilometres from Lake Annecy. Nobody knows. Nobody asks.
The curve
Then volumes drop. Forty per cent in eight years. Not sudden — steady. A slow erosion, year after year, term after term. The causes are the same everywhere: Asian competition produces at costs impossible to match. Supermarket buyers compare prices, not origins. A compass made in China costs a fraction of one from Argonay. An eraser too.
There’s also the digital shift. Children draw less, erase less, use fewer compasses. Tablets replace rough notebooks. The market for traditional school supplies is slowly but steadily shrinking. Not fast enough to raise the alarm, fast enough to tip a factory into the red.
The equation is simple. Production costs in France (wages, energy, charges) don’t fall. Selling prices, meanwhile, are driven down by competition. The margin compresses until it disappears. And when the margin disappears, the factory follows.
It’s nobody’s fault in particular. Or it’s everybody’s. The consumer who chooses the four-pack of erasers for one euro rather than the French eraser at two. The retailer who stocks the cheapest option. The buyer who only looks at the unit price on a spreadsheet. The entire system, which has decided that making erasers in France no longer makes economic sense.
You could argue it’s the market, it’s natural, it’s globalisation doing its job. And that’s true. Except the market doesn’t calculate what it destroys. It doesn’t factor in the lost skills, the machines that will never be switched back on, the knowledge accumulated over seventy-eight years of continuous production. The market optimises price. The price of the eraser falls. Everything else vanishes.
The same film
It’s exactly the same scenario as Arc France. A town, a factory, an everyday product. Know-how that interests nobody as long as it’s there, and that everyone misses once it’s gone.
Arc France is glassware. The last major French table glass manufacturer, in Arques, Pas-de-Calais. Two centuries of production, thousands of jobs, Arcoroc glass in every bistro in France. And receivership in January 2026. The furnaces still burn, but for how long?
The parallel is striking. In both cases, a banal, invisible object that everyone uses without thinking. A glass, an eraser. In both cases, international competition has crushed prices. In both cases, energy costs too much in Europe. In both cases, an entire town depends on a factory that the global market considers obsolete.
And in both cases, the closure happens in silence. No massive protest, no national front page, no viral hashtag. Twenty-eight jobs in Argonay isn’t enough for the headlines. It’s enough to empty a car park, switch off machines, close a gate.
The invisible objects
There’s an implicit hierarchy within Made in France. At the top, luxury: leather goods, haute couture, champagne. Everyone wants to defend that. It’s photogenic, exportable, political. A president visiting a leather workshop makes a good photo.
Below that, noble craftsmanship: the knife, the shoe, the cast-iron casserole. Opinel, Paraboot, Staub. Brands with a story, a face, a community of fans. They’re celebrated, cited, written about (including here).
And at the very bottom, everyday objects. Erasers, glasses, coat hangers, clothes pegs, toothbrushes. Things you buy without checking the label, use without thinking, discard without remorse. The Made in France of the invisible.
That’s the one dying. Not with a crash, not with a scandal. With indifference. Factory by factory, product by product. One day, you’ll look for an eraser made in France and won’t find one. Just as you can no longer find a French wooden coat hanger, a French clothes peg, or a French canteen glass (or barely).
The phenomenon isn’t new. France used to make its own pins, its own needles, its own buttons. All of that has vanished, so gradually that nobody noticed the exact moment it happened. There’s no death certificate for an industry. There’s a last order, a last day of production, a last worker turning off the lights. And then nothing.
Nobody will take to the streets for erasers. Nobody will start a crowdfunding campaign. Nobody will make a documentary. It’s too small, too banal, too everyday to stir emotion.
Those that hold
Not all are closing. La Rochère, in Haute-Saône, has been blowing glass since 1475. Five hundred and fifty years of furnaces burning. The company is independent; it produces, it exports. It found its niche between craftsmanship and small-batch production. It will never replace an industrial glassworks, but it proves that endurance is possible when you master your positioning.
In stationery, a few manufacturers resist. Pencil workshops in the Landes, a chalk maker in Auvergne. Niches, small runs, products positioned above the one-euro back-to-school pack. They survive because they’ve accepted they can’t compete on price. Because they’ve found customers willing to pay the true cost of an object made here.
But an eraser is still an eraser. You don’t put it in a display case. You don’t photograph it for social media. You don’t pay five euros for the story behind it. The object is too modest to be granted value. And that is precisely why it disappears.
The silence
In May, the machines at Argonay will stop. Twenty-eight people will look for new jobs in a valley where work isn’t scarce (precision engineering is busy, tourism too). This is not a social catastrophe. It’s not a human disaster. It’s something more diffuse and more final: the end of a body of knowledge that nobody will judge important enough to save.
The next eraser you buy will come from Asia. It might be identical. Perhaps even better. Or perhaps a little less good, a little less supple, a little less precise. You won’t notice the difference. Nobody will.
This is how the Made in France of everyday objects disappears. Not by collapse. By evaporation.