Eyewear district, France
Morez and the Jura
The Jura mountain town that became the capital of French eyewear, home of the Musée de la Lunette.
Morez, a small town in the Jura mountains near the Swiss border, has made spectacles since the 1790s. Local accounts credit a nail maker, Pierre-Hyacinthe Caseaux, with bending wire into frames in 1796. The Jura was the first area to industrialise eyewear, from the 1820s, and the region still accounts for most of France's eyewear industry.
Wire, clocks and frames
The Jura had long made nails, clocks and other metal goods, so the skills and tools for fine wire work were already there. By the early nineteenth century Caseaux employed 13 workers. Production in the region rose from about 3,000 pairs of glasses in 1826 to some 720,000 by 1848. Morez was known as the capital of French eyewear by 1900. Nearby Oyonnax made frames in celluloid and later acetate.
Musée de la Lunette
The eyewear museum in Morez holds a collection of about 2,500 objects, from early spectacles and pince-nez to modern designer frames, and shows how frames were made by hand and machine. The Jura makers today work mostly in high-quality metal and acetate frames, and the area also trains opticians and eyewear technicians.
Guides of Morez and the Jura
Photo credits on this page
The small pictures above come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences. Some are cropped to fit.
- Pince-nez: Łeba, CC BY 3.0, source
- Glasses: Jacek Halicki, CC BY-SA 4.0, source