In 2016, Alain Sauter was a lecturer and researcher in geography. He was preparing a course at the Sorbonne on the history of cartography when he made a strange discovery: the traditional craft of making globes had all but disappeared in France. The last French maker had ceased trading several decades earlier.
For many, this information would have been nothing more than an interesting anecdote to share with students. For Alain Sauter, however, it became an obsession.
He set out to discover how people in the past made these objects. He scoured the literature, going as far back as Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, and began to experiment. His first laboratory was not a prestigious workshop but a cellar in Besançon. A beach ball, plaster, trial and error. His first globe, as he would later recount, was ‘as round as a potato’. It took him over a year of research and experimentation to achieve a satisfactory result.
Then he did something even more unlikely: he left university.
He abandoned the security of the academic world to pursue a profession that, in fact, had all but disappeared.
Today, in Besançon, Globe Sauter & Cie has become a small workshop with a team of six. There, terrestrial and celestial globes are crafted by hand, combining cartography, plasterwork, cabinetmaking and watercolour painting. Hundreds of globes now leave the workshop every year to find their way to owners across the globe.
The story could end with the spectacular revival of a craft. But there is something deeper about Alain Sauter that interests us.
We live in the age of Google Maps. With just a few swipes of the finger, we can fly over Tokyo, walk down a street in Buenos Aires or look at the Earth from space. Never before has humanity had such an accurate and accessible representation of its planet. And it is precisely at this moment that a man decides to spend hours crafting a plaster model of the Earth and painting it by hand.
The object, now technologically obsolete, takes on a new purpose: to inspire dreams.
As Alain Sauter himself puts it: in the age of Google Earth, the globe has lost some of its function as an atlas but gained the ability to become a beautiful object, a source of imagination.
His creations have since found their way into prestigious institutions. The Château d’Amboise, in particular, commissioned him to create a globe inspired by those that explorers might have known five centuries ago. The workshop has also received several awards in the field of arts and crafts.
So why begin ‘Les 100 Inconnus’ with him?
Because Alain Sauter embodies exactly what we are seeking to discover on this adventure: people who, somewhere in France, devote a considerable part of their lives to something most of us know nothing about.
Whilst the world speeds along, some people work slowly.
Whilst we throw things away, some people craft objects meant to last for generations.
Whilst we view the planet on a screen, Alain Sauter continues to shape it with his own hands.
Welcome to *Les 100 Inconnus du Mague*.
And now we’re looking for the other 99.
Do you know a woman or a man whose story deserves to be told? A forgotten inventor, an invisible artist, a mad collector, a scientist working behind the scenes, a craftsman practising a lost trade, someone who has been building a work of art in their garden for thirty years, or simply a person about whom you’ve ever wondered: ‘Why doesn’t anyone know their story?’
Write to Le Mague.
Because the most interesting people aren’t necessarily the ones everyone knows.
