A. & L. Guillouard (ALG), Nantes – Hurricane Lantern History

In 1911, two brothers in Nantes borrowed 40,000 francs from their parents to open a tinsmith's workshop. Adrien and Louis Guillouard were two sons of François Louis “Francis” Guillouard and Anne Marie Victorine Grelet, who ran an ironmongery wholesale business on the rue Saint-Jacques. Their new workshop, near the rue des Olivettes, had nothing to do with lanterns yet. Their other brothers kept the family ironmongery running under the name Guillouard Frères, a separate business that would continue for decades alongside the one Adrien and Louis were about to build.

War reached the family early. Brother Joseph was killed on 18 September 1914 at Bitry, in the Aisne. A letter that winter from another brother, Édouard, to Adrien gives the first direct evidence of what the young workshop was already being called: ALG, simply the initials of Adrien and Louis Guillouard, founded “a few years earlier” by the two of them. By the end of 1914 the workshop was already making pails and similar goods for the army. The army bought in quantity — basins, pails and jugs.

By 1919 the business had moved to the avenue Wattignies, where a trade journal advertisement described it as a manufacturer of household goods in black and galvanised sheet steel — pails, wash-boilers, chimney elbows. The two brothers had divided the work between them, Adrien managing the business and Louis handling the technical side.

The company also sold through agents: first M. Laubis in Paris, later by Raymond Candau in the early 1930s. Around 1930, an alcohol-burning stove joined the range alongside the pails, tubs and lanterns. Price lists were renewed regularly — a sixth edition in 1929 replaced a fifth from 1927 — evidence of a business finding its footing. Correspondence from this period also shows the company advertising itself as sole maker of a corrugated-steel roller shutter for chimneys, alongside a press capacity that had grown to handle sheet steel up to 400 tonnes.

Legally, the business took an important step in this period: around 1930 it converted from a general partnership into a limited-liability company (SARL) with capital of one million francs, Louis and Adrien serving as managers. Business correspondence from 1938 confirms this same legal form and capital figure, along with a company representative, referred to only as “Mr Days,” who called on customers directly. By the end of the decade the range extended beyond household goods and lanterns: a 1939 catalogue also lists a grape-harvesting basket.

Adrien Guillouard remained a visible figure through the war years: in 1942 he was named a member of the Nantes Chamber of Commerce. The following year, on 23 September 1943, an Allied bombing raid damaged both the factory site and, on the same day, the family ironmongery on the rue Saint-Jacques.

The wartime years also show up in surviving correspondence. Late in 1944, the company had to cut a promised delivery sharply, citing shortages of raw material, and warned that production might have to stop altogether. Early in 1946 the shortage had not eased: a customer sent 440 kilograms of raw material along with an order for kitchen implements and stoves, in lieu of ordinary payment. As late as 1947 the company was still operating from the same avenue Wattignies address it had occupied for nearly thirty years.

That address did not last much longer. In 1947, construction of the boulevard des Martyrs Nantais cut through the site, and the company's registered address moved to the new boulevard over the years that followed. Capital grew accordingly. A notarial deed of August 1954 raised the company's capital from 60 to 100 million francs — an increase still visible on its letterhead two years later — and the same deed records something else: Louis and Adrien were named managers of an affiliated company, Lufra, dealing in scientific products, the first clear sign of diversification beyond the core business. In the mid-1950s came one further refinement to the flagship product: a new mechanism for lifting the lantern's glass chimney.

Adrien Guillouard — born Victor, Adrien, Gaston Guillouard, on 16 April 1884 in Nantes — died in his native city on 29 April 1963, aged seventy-nine. His brother, Louis François Marie Guillouard, born in 1880, carried the business on after him — but not for long: Louis himself died in Nantes on 2 October 1964, not quite a year after Adrien. The business then passed to Louis's son, Gilbert Gustave Joseph Guillouard, also listed in official records as an "industriel." Gilbert's own death, on 11 May 1980, fell in the middle of the company's most difficult years: the 1979 insolvency proceedings and strike (described below) came just before it, and the 1981 takeover by an outside buyer came just after — a sequence that suggests Gilbert was the family member at the helm as the business declined.

From the 1970s on, the company's history is best traced through trademark filings. These records show when names were formally protected, not when the models behind them first appeared: both Marine and Luciole were already registered as trademarks by 1966, and had by then been in use for some time. A new "AL GUILLOUARD" trademark followed in 1974, filed while the company was still a limited-liability company (SARL) at 15 boulevard des Martyrs-Nantais; that trademark changed hands in 1976, in an ownership transfer whose new holder has not yet been identified. A further trademark, "AL GUILLOUARD AG," was filed in 1984. By December 1989, when the company filed a trademark for a product called Sterilex, it had become a Société Anonyme, trading as "Société Guillouard à Nantes" — and two more trademarks were filed that same month, from two slightly different addresses and under two slightly different company names, a detail that remains unexplained. The company only took its current legal form, a simplified joint-stock company (SAS), in 1993 or 1994, when it was re-registered under SIREN 393558895. In 2001 the Guillouard and ALG trademarks were registered in the form still used today, under that same SAS; the registration address changed again in 2022.

In the mid-2000s the company still employed 80 people and turned over €5.8 million a year, a quarter of it in exports. Under its director at the time, Alain Barbier, it hired a research and development engineer in 2008, tasked with refreshing the range ahead of the company's centenary in 2011. The advantage the company pointed to was speed: 48-hour delivery, against the weeks needed to bring in a container from China, and manufacturing to order.

Éric Sirvin, who had taken over from his father Jean-François in 2001, remained the company's owner throughout this period. By 2012 the workforce was down to 75, with Alain Barbier serving as operational director. For its hundredth anniversary the company had released a limited run of a thousand orange lanterns — a nod to a model that, according to Sirvin, had been made largely unchanged since the late 1920s, and of which 70,000 were still sold every year across French-speaking Africa. A surviving company catalogue from 1927 shows a hurricane lantern and a wash-boiler still recognisable in the range more than eighty years later. In the Congo, tradition held that a groom offered two Luciole lanterns to his bride's family. For the centenary the lantern also acquired colours it had never worn before — orange, taupe, cherry red, dark blue, bottle green — and turned up on the shelves of a Paris concept store, no longer a working tool but something to set on a table or hang in a garden. Its reputation for burning steadily had earned it stranger outings too: when André Malraux's remains were carried to the Panthéon in 1996, the rue Soufflot was lined with a hundred and fifty hurricane lanterns, and not one of them went out. Every lantern was still checked by hand for watertightness. Ninety percent of the catalogue — pails, jugs, cauldrons, vegetable presses — was still made in-house, using the same two processes as always: hot-dip galvanising in a zinc bath, and tinning in a bath of molten tin.

On 22 January 2016, both the trade press and the regional paper reported that the factory would close that April — by then the last French manufacturer of galvanised household, garden and livestock ware, employing 45 people on a turnover of around €4.7–4.8 million, a quarter of it exported. The Luciole lantern was singled out as one of the company's great successes, especially in Africa: in the 1970s the factory had made 500,000 lanterns for Nigeria alone; by 2016 it exported a tenth of that across the whole continent. Director Éric Sirvin cited losses running since 2013, driven by competition from Eastern Europe and Asia manufacturing "at a tenth of the cost," compounded by the cost of new environmental compliance. The company did not go bankrupt; it closed through an amicable procedure. Sirvin turned his attention to Nogent 3 étoiles, a cutlery company he also ran in Biesles, in the Haute-Marne — and even before the factory gates closed, property developers were already said to have their eye on its two-hectare site.

The companies behind the Nantes lantern business went quiet not long after. Records show that the export arm and the manufacturing subsidiary — the latter formally named, fittingly, the "Société Industrielle de Fabrication de Lanternes" — both ceased trading at the end of 2017. The manufacturing entity was formally dissolved in February 2024. The Guillouard name itself continued, carried by Éric Sirvin's cutlery company in Biesles, in the Haute-Marne, where it sat alongside the Nogent knife brand.

The lantern itself, though, did not disappear. By its own account the company went looking for "a workshop with real expertise" to restart production, and found one in Slovakia — then shipped more than two hundred of its Nantes machines there, followed by months of training, so that the tooling and the methods would carry over intact. By December 2018 the Luciole was back on the shelves, in red, anthracite grey and a new green, sold in plain kraft boxes.

The company has never named its Slovak partner, and no press report, retailer or filing does either — contract manufacturing of this kind leaves little public trace. The most plausible candidate, though not a confirmed one, is Kovotvar, a producers' co-operative in the town of Kúty, near the Czech and Austrian borders. The Slovak commercial register shows it was founded in 1955 and has spent its whole existence making galvanised metal household goods — pots, watering cans, basins, preserving jars, sprinkler roses — with hot-dip galvanising formally registered as an activity since 1993. It is, in other words, exactly the kind of workshop with real expertise the company said it went looking for. There is one further hint: Kovotvar sells a lidded ten-litre bucket with a wooden handle that is, to within a centimetre, the same object Guillouard lists in its own catalogue. Suggestive, but not proof — and short of confirmation from one of the two companies, that is where the trail ends.

The sale itself had been in motion for some time. By Sirvin's own account, he first consulted his notary about a succession plan in September 2023, signed with the advisory firm MBA Capital that December, and saw the process properly get under way in January 2024. On 28 January 2025 the Sirvin family sold up — almost exactly a year, he later said, after his first meeting with the buyer. After some forty years, Éric Sirvin handed both businesses to Aymeric Géant, an entrepreneur from Burgundy backed by the investment fund UI Investissement — together some thirty employees and around five million euros of turnover, the knives still made in Biesles, the Guillouard range now largely subcontracted, mostly to French firms. The Luciole is still made on the machines that once stood on the Île de Nantes — but they stand in Slovakia now, and the lantern that left Nantes by the hundred thousand is no longer made in France.

In April 2026, ten years after the closure, most of the remaining buildings on the old factory site were demolished to make way for housing and offices. Only a handful of sawtooth-roofed sheds and the factory's own façade, with its distinctive pediment, were kept — set to remain standing as the one physical trace of a business that began, in 1911, with two brothers and a loan of 40,000 francs.

This page draws on the following sources:

• Historical research by Odile Halbert — valuable, detailed family history, written by Adrien and Louis's own great-niece
  
• INPI French patent, design, and trademark registers
• BASIAS industrial site inventory (French Ministry for Sustainable Development)
• Patrimonia Nantes (municipal heritage record)
• Gallica/BnF and RetroNews newspaper archives
• Journal Officiel de l'État Français
• Geneanet civil records and family trees
• Original company correspondence, letterhead, and catalogues, including the Album-Tarif n°9 (January 1939)
• Le Figaro Magazine
• L'Usine Nouvelle
• Ouest-France (multiple articles)
• An interview with and a LinkedIn post by Éric Sirvin, via MBA Capital
• French business registry records (including marques.expert and SIREN 393558895)
• A current retail listing confirming the present country of manufacture

If you have a question, comment, or addition regarding the information on this page, please get in touch.