On the evening of April 25, 1883, after 8 PM, shots were fired at people in Żyrardów. Two days earlier, the factory management had reduced the daily wage of seventy female workers, and one hundred and twenty women walked out of the bobbin shop – a department without which not a single loom could operate. Before the protest died down, the entire eight-thousand-strong workforce of Europe's largest linen factory stopped, and a several-thousand-strong procession passed through the city with three coffins: a fifteen, seventeen, and nineteen-year-old.
Half a century earlier, the village of Ruda Guzowska stood here. On July 24, 1833, a spinning mill built around the machines of French inventor Philippe de Girard started operating there, and the settlement was named after the Polonized surname of the constructor. For the next 166 years, Żyrardów was a city entirely designed around one factory – made of unplastered bricks marked with the letters H&D, with workers' housing, a hospital, a nursery, and a community center. This is a story about how a thread thinner than hair is extracted from a plant stem – and what that thread cost.
I. THE FIBER THAT COULD NOT BE BROKEN
Linen is difficult, and that is the starting point of this whole story. Linen fiber comes from the bast part of the stem of common flax (Linum usitatissimum) and does not occur there singly: elementary fibers are compacted into bundles and glued together by pectins – a plant glue for cell walls. To obtain a thin, even thread, these bundles must be separated without destroying the fibers. Cotton requires no such thing – its hair is ready for spinning after ginning.
That is why for millennia, linen was a domestic rather than a factory raw material: yarn was drawn by hand on a spinning wheel, woven in late autumn and winter, and the journey from sowing to a piece of cloth took a full year. When cotton got machines at the end of the 18th century, linen did not. The problem was thus both chemical and political: whoever solved the pectin issue would move linen from the cottage to the factory. That's how Napoleon put it.
II. GIRARD: A MILLION FRANCS THAT WAS NEVER PAID
Philippe Henri de Girard was born on February 1, 1775, in Lourmarin, Provence. He was a universal inventor – chemistry chair in Nice in 1795, tidal turbine patented in 1799 – and a man who did not profit from his own inventions.
On May 12, 1810, Napoleon, wishing to cut off the continent from English cotton, offered a reward of one million francs for a machine for mechanical flax spinning. Girard applied as early as June 12 of the same year. His solution included both dry spinning and – what turned out to be a breakthrough – wet spinning: the roving passes through a hot water bath, which softens the pectins, allowing the fiber bundles to slide past each other during stretching. In the spinning mill Girard launched in Paris between 1811 and 1812, 150 kilometers of thread were drawn from one kilogram of fiber.
The reward was never paid. Girard fell into debt, and the patent went to England in 1814 – registered under the name Horace Hall. Only in 1839 did a British court annul James Kay's competing patent as too similar to Hall's solution, and in 1841, the ruling was upheld on appeal. The inventor saw none of it. In 1815, the Austrian government invited him: he launched a spinning mill in Hirtenberg near Vienna, where in 1818 he constructed a flax carding machine, and in 1825 a water wheel. The venture went bankrupt. His list also includes improved oil lamps and a steam engine (1806), a steam-powered machine gun (1814), and a steamboat for the Danube (1818).
One hundred and fifty kilometers of thread from one kilogram of fiber – that's what Girard's spinning mill in Paris yielded between 1811 and 1812. The million-franc prize he sought was never paid to him.
III. RUDA GUZOWSKA: THE CONTRACT THAT BECAME A CITY
Girard was attracted to the Kingdom of Poland by the administration of Treasury Minister Franciszek Ksawery Drucki-Lubecki. A ten-year contract was signed on August 1, 1825; the inventor arrived in early 1827 and became chief mechanic of the Mining Department and technical director of the government's linen products factory in Marymont, Warsaw, launched in 1831.
The rest is the company's records. On June 24, 1829, the company "Karol Scholtz and Partners" was formed, aiming to develop mechanical flax spinning on Girard's machines and to establish a "flax and hemp spinning mill, as well as a weaving mill" in Ruda Guzowska. On August 9, 1830, the articles of association for the Linen Products Company were drawn up; the founders were brothers Henryk, Jan, and Tomasz Łubieńscy, Józef Lubowidzki – vice-president of the Bank of Poland – and Karol Scholtz. The spinning and weaving mill was designed between 1832 and 1833 by Warsaw architect Jan Jakub Gay.
The work was interrupted by the November Uprising: Marymont was converted to arms production, and Girard developed a technique for making rifle stocks. Production in Ruda Guzowska began on July 24, 1833, on a dozen machines, and the settlement took its name from the Polonized surname of the constructor. In 1845, Żyrardów got a station on the Warsaw-Vienna Railway. Girard himself returned to Paris in 1844 and died there on August 26, 1845; a pension was only granted to his heirs in 1853. The company went bankrupt: On June 1, 1847, the factory was taken over by the Bank of Poland.
IV. FROM STRAW TO LINEN: THE FULL CHAIN
To understand what this factory was, one must trace the path of the raw material. Flax is harvested not by mowing, but by pulling it out by the roots – a cut stem loses part of its long fiber. After drying, the sheaves are ginned, pressing oil from the seeds.
Retting is the stage where the quality of everything else is determined: it involves dissolving the pectins that bind the fiber to the woody part of the stem, and microorganisms do the work. In dew retting, the straw is spread on the grass and left to the dew – fungi Cladosporium herbarum, Mucor plumbeus, and Rhizopus nigricans work, with an optimum at 15–20 °C. In water retting, bundles are soaked in pools of 1.5–3 tons capacity; at 19–38 °C, this lasts from 62 to 212 hours and proceeds in three phases: physical (6–10 hours), preliminary biological (8–14 hours), and proper biological (40–60 hours), when pectin decomposition is most intense.
The test is still the same: under-retted straw bends instead of breaking, over-retted straw crumbles and yields weak and gray fiber, while correctly retted straw breaks with a quiet snap, yielding bright, strong, and smooth fiber.
Next comes mechanical processing:
- Breaking: crushing the stems to separate the fiber from the woody core – with a hand brake and scutching knife in the household, with rollers in the factory.
- Scutching: cleaning the long fiber from shives, i.e., fragments of the woody stem.
- Combing: drawing through brushes with teeth, first sparse, then dense, two or three times; here, long fiber is separated from short fiber.
- Product separation: long fiber goes in 20 kg bundles, tow in 60 kg bales, shives in 100 kg bales.
Only now does Girard's machine come into play. The combed slivers are blended and leveled – today, no less than 24 tape sections from different batches are combined – and then drawn through successive drafts until a slightly twisted roving is formed, which passes through a water bath at 60–70 °C, which dissolves the remaining pectins and allows the bundles to slide relative to each other. The effect is measurable: wet-spun yarn can be up to 25% thinner than dry-spun and stronger when breaking. Thickness is measured in lea: fine apparel linen is 40–50 lea, batiste – above 100. Dry yarn, from tow and noils, yields coarse goods: tarpaulins, ropes, sacks.
Finally, there is weaving, followed by bleaching – in the pre-chemical era, spreading the linen on the grass, hence the name bielnik (bleachery), which the area by the river in Żyrardów still bears today – and finishing: washing, calendering, sizing. Eight operations, each capable of ruining the work of the previous one.
THREE PROPERTIES THAT BUILT ŻYRARDÓW
Textile literature states that flax fiber is up to three times stronger than cotton. Crucial for work in humidity: its strength increases by about 20% when wet.
Linen absorbs up to 20% moisture before the fabric feels wet. That's why linen fabric performs where synthetics cling to the skin.
The water bath softens the binder between the elementary fibers. Result: from one kilogram of flax, it is possible to draw 150 km of thread instead of coarse sacking yarn.
V. HIELLE AND DITTRICH: 96 THOUSAND RUBLES FOR A MONOPOLY
The breakthrough came on March 13, 1857, when the Linen Goods Factory was acquired for 96,000 rubles by German entrepreneurs Karol Teodor Hielle and Karol August Dittrich. They bought a plant employing about five hundred people and turned it into a monopolist in the industry and an employer of over 9,000 workers; at the beginning of the 20th century, foreigners constituted over 20% of the workforce.
Expansion moved towards a full chain under one management: a mechanical weaving mill, cotton and wool spinning mills, a dyeing plant, a finishing plant, and a hosiery mill were added to the spinning mill, and in 1913, the New Spinning Mill – one of the first reinforced concrete spinning mills in the world. The assortment included bedding, underwear, tablecloths, napkins, clothing, and hosiery products, later also cotton. The brand's scale has solid confirmations:
- Mark and Title: in 1843, the factory obtained the right to place the coat of arms of Imperial Russia on its labels, confirmed in 1870 and 1896; from 1905, it held the title of supplier to His Imperial Majesty's Court.
- Sales Network (1880): own stores and warehouses in Warsaw, Lodz, Lublin, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kiev, Odessa, Kaunas, Grodno, Vilnius, and Riga.
- Awards: Warsaw 1838, St. Petersburg 1839, Moscow 1843, London 1862, Vienna 1873, Philadelphia 1876, Antwerp 1885. The culmination was the Grand Prix at the World's Fair in Paris on August 18, 1900 – where Żyrardów was also presented as a model factory settlement.
- Joint-stock company (1885): on April 19, the Hielle and Dittrich Żyrardów Works Joint-stock Company was established; its statute was approved by Tsar Alexander III, and the initial capital was set at 9 million rubles. Karol Dittrich Jr. became the president.
On June 15, 1875, the factory was visited by Henryk Sienkiewicz, who wrote a report for "Gazeta Polska." Żyrardów was written about in the Warsaw press eight years before the strike.
VI. THE CITY AS A TOOL: THE FACTORY SETTLEMENT
The spatial layout of the settlement was created between 1867 and 1898 and is unmistakably regular: a production zone, a residential zone, and a stately zone were designated, with the former Mszczonów–Wiskitki road serving as the compositional axis. The entire area covers over 70 hectares of today's city center, includes nearly four hundred objects listed as historical monuments, and has preserved about 95% of its original buildings – made of unplastered brick marked with the letters H&D. The list of institutions explains why this was not philanthropy, but a system:
- Housing: rows of single-story and two-story workers' houses from 1867–1910, separate foremen's houses and weavers' houses, and a four-story, seventeen-axis family building – the largest residential building in the settlement.
- Care: a day-care center from 1875, considered the first preschool in Polish lands; a hospital from 1892–1894, modeled after the most modern hospital in Dresden at the time – with central heating, plumbing, and electrical installations; a hospice for the elderly and a laundry with a bathhouse.
- Culture and school: a neo-Gothic school from 1882 for workers' children and a separate one for officials' children, a club with a bowling alley, and the Karol Dittrich People's House from 1913.
- Residences: Karol Dittrich Jr.'s villa from 1889–1896 in a landscape park, General Director Wilhelm Haupt's villa, and the Tyrolean Palace from 1867–1871.
Above all this, the neo-Gothic Church of Our Lady of Consolation, designed by Józef Pius Dziekoński, was built between 1900 and 1903, with two openwork towers reaching 70 meters. However, the calculation was simple: a worker in company housing is a worker tied to the plant – and in April 1883, this dependency would be used as a tool of pressure.
The complex was entered into the register of monuments on January 30, 1979 (reg. no. 520), and on January 4, 2012, by ordinance of the President of the Republic of Poland, it was recognized as a Historical Monument "Żyrardów – 19th-century Factory Settlement." Conservation studies describe it as the best-preserved industrial settlement of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries in Europe.
VII. APRIL 23–28, 1883: THE BOBBIN WINDERS' STRIKE, DAY BY DAY
This strike is usually told with grand narratives and fictional details. There's no need: the facts suffice.
April 23. Management cut the daily wages of seventy female workers. 120 women from the winding department – the section responsible for preparing production, whose shutdown would paralyze the entire plant – went on strike. Dittrich himself was ready to withdraw the cuts; the management refused, fearing a precedent. The well-liked factory doctor, Aleksander Jawurek, was sent to the strikers – to no avail. The threat of dismissal and eviction from company housing was then employed. Resistance weakened, but young weavers sustained it.
April 24. Three hundred people already refused to work. Demands expanded: wage increases, shorter working hours, lower rents in company housing, abolition of the factory penalty system, and the expulsion of Germans from the factory. The police commissioner of Błonie county had five men at his disposal; a delegation of three bobbin winders and three weavers was chosen, and the commissioner sent a telegram to Warsaw Governor Carl von Medem requesting military assistance.
April 25. A battalion arrived from nearby Mszczonów, and the police made their first, random arrests – ten workers were detained. The crowd surrounded the detention center, demanding their release, and pelted the guards with stones. A non-commissioned officer ordered two shots fired into the air, which enraged the crowd. After 8 PM, shots were fired at the people.
Two workers died on the spot – a seventeen-year-old and a nineteen-year-old. A third, fifteen-year-old, died the next day. Many more were wounded, but they were treated at home, as immediate arrest awaited them at the hospital.
April 26. The strike became widespread – about eight thousand people took to the streets. Machines were being destroyed. The army and police did not intervene: Governor Medem decided not to escalate the situation until after the funeral.
April 27 and 28. The funeral took place early in the morning, without incident; Dittrich's family also marched in the procession of several thousand people. Immediately afterward, pacification began: the city was divided into districts guarded by patrols of six policemen and four Cossacks, a state of emergency was declared, and a total of thirty-nine people were arrested. Simultaneously, the management declared its readiness to meet most of the demands, and on April 28, the protest began to subside.
Until the workers' uprisings in Łódź in 1892, this was the largest workers' protest in the Kingdom of Poland. Żyrardów was left with the nickname "Red" for decades and subsequent strikes: 1884, 1885, 1887, 1889, 1891, 1895, and 1905.
VIII. WAR, BOUSSAC, PRL, AND WHAT REMAINS
On July 16–17, 1915, retreating Russian troops blew up the main factory buildings and transported machinery and materials deep into Russia; losses were estimated at 5 million gold rubles. On May 16, 1919, the factories were placed under forced state administration; in July 1920, about 3,000 people worked here, and in June 1923 – about 6,000, with 85% of pre-war production.
On November 3, 1923, the Polish government sold the Żyrardów Works to the French consortium of Marcel Boussac. The new owner's predatory management stripped it of its leading position in the industry. The matter came to light dramatically: on April 26, 1932, employee Julian Blachowski shot General Director Gaston Koehler. The peak of the Żyrardów affair occurred in 1934 – mass layoffs, arrests of directors, and forced state administration. On November 30, 1936, the plants were taken over by the State Agricultural Bank.
On September 12, 1939, German troops entered Żyrardów; under occupation management, the factory produced almost exclusively for military needs. On November 18, 1943, twenty-four arrested individuals were executed against the wall of the weaving mill. The city was liberated on January 16, 1945 – the occupation lasted 1952 days. Żyrardów Linen Industry Plants started on July 31, 1945, and on January 3, 1946, the enterprise was nationalized.
Then came half a century of the People's Republic of Poland: from June 1947, State Textile Plants No. 1, in 1950 a division into three enterprises, in 1961 the Central Laboratory of the Linen Industry. The plants employed over half of the city's professionally active population. On October 12, 1981, a strike broke out, Lech Wałęsa arrived on October 27, and the protest ended on November 4.
The end stretched over eight years: June 29, 1991, liquidation, August 31, 1993, the joint-stock company Żyrardów Linen Works, April 21, 1997, bankruptcy, and April 30, 1999, final closure – after 166 years of continuous production. Two private companies wove here until 2019.
Today, the Old Spinning Mill houses a shopping arcade, apartments, lofts, a hotel, and gastronomy; the New Spinning Mill from 1913 is a residential complex known as Lofts de Girard. On the site of the former bleaching plant, at Dittricha 18 street, operates the Filip de Girard Linen Museum: several dozen machines forming a complete technological sequence, Poland's longest flat screen printing machine, Europe's only collection of woven screens, and sixteen looms taken over in 2020 from the Linen Jacquard Fabrics plant. The permanent exhibition is called "Żyrardów, a city woven with linen."
LESSON FROM ŻYRARDÓW: FABRIC IS MADE BY PEOPLE
Grand Prix in Paris, title of court supplier, warehouses from Riga to Odessa – and at the same time one hundred and twenty women whose daily wages were cut, and three coffins in April. This is the same factory and this is the same story. Every meter of good fabric has two prices: the one on the label and the one on the payroll.
That's why we don't talk about Żyrardów as the folklore of brick workers' housing. We take two things from it at once: standard – because the factory's position was determined by the repeatability of the weave and grammage, not a marketing slogan – and the memory that behind every grammage there is someone who makes it. We make heavy, honestly made things from natural fibers and we say directly where and from what they are made.
KNOWLEDGE BASE // OPERATIONAL FAQ
Where does the name of the city Żyrardów come from?
From the Polonized surname of the French engineer Philippe de Girard (1775–1845), creator of machines for mechanical flax spinning. A contract with the government of the Kingdom of Poland was signed on August 1, 1825, and Girard became the technical director of the factory, which began operations in the village of Ruda Guzowska on July 24, 1833. The name of the settlement "Żyrardów" already appeared in the act of the Linen Products Society written on August 9, 1830.
What is wet flax spinning?
The roving passes through a water bath at a temperature of 60–70 °C, which dissolves the pectins that bind the elementary fibers into bundles. This allows the bundles to slide relative to each other when stretched, resulting in a thinner and stronger thread – wet-spun yarn can be up to 25% thinner than dry-spun yarn. In Girard's spinning mill in Paris (1811–1812), 150 kilometers of thread were drawn from one kilogram of fiber. Dry yarn, from tow and noils, is used for coarse products: tarpaulins, ropes, and sacks.
What was the spoolers' strike in Żyrardów in 1883?
A general strike that lasted from April 23 to April 28, 1883. The direct cause was the reduction of daily wages for seventy female workers; on April 23, 120 women from the spooling department stopped working, followed by the entire workforce of over eight thousand. Troops were brought in by Warsaw governor Carl von Medem; on April 25, after the arrest of ten workers, shots were fired into the crowd – three people aged 15, 17, and 19 died, and a total of 39 people were arrested. The management met most of the demands. Until the Łódź uprisings in 1892, this was the largest workers' protest in the Kingdom of Poland.
Why is the factory settlement in Żyrardów unique?
Because it has been preserved almost in its entirety. The spatial layout was created between 1867 and 1898, covers over 70 hectares, includes nearly four hundred listed buildings, and approximately 95% of the original development: workers' tenements, a hospital from 1892–1894, an orphanage from 1875, a community center with a bowling alley, the People's House, villas for management, and Dziekoński's church from 1900–1903. The complex was entered into the register of monuments on January 30, 1979, and on January 4, 2012, by decree of the President of the Republic of Poland, it was recognized as a Historic Monument.
What was the Żyrardów affair and when did the factory cease to exist?
On November 3, 1923, the Polish government sold Zakłady Żyrardowskie to the French consortium of Marcel Boussac. The new owner's predatory management led to the loss of its leading position in the industry; on April 26, 1932, an employee shot and killed General Director Gaston Koehler, and the affair's peak occurred in 1934 – mass layoffs, arrests of directors, and forced state administration. On November 30, 1936, the plants were taken over by the State Agricultural Bank; on January 3, 1946, they were nationalized; on April 21, 1997, bankruptcy was declared; and the final closure took place on April 30, 1999.
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