The Little Saints of Aubagne: Provence's Santon Makers Prepare for Summer

Aubagne smells, at the end of May, of thyme and wet clay. The workshop of the Escoffier family sits on the edge of the old town, and by nine in the morning Céline Escoffier already has thirty raw santons drying on a plank by the window — a knife-grinder, a lavender-cutter, a boules player mid-swing.

Santons — from the Provençal santoun, "little saint" — began as a response to the French Revolution's closure of churches. Families who could no longer attend a public nativity built one at home, and the santonniers of Marseille and Aubagne began populating those tabletop worlds not just with the Holy Family but with the entire Provençal village: the miller, the drunkard, the mayor, the fishwife.

Two centuries later the tradition is stubbornly alive. Céline is the fourth generation in her family to work the local red clay. Each figure is sculpted from a single pinch, air-dried for a week, kiln-fired at 980°C, and hand-painted in gouache — the colours of Provence, always: ochre, olive, lavender, madder red.

The summer months are the santonniers' quiet season for sales but their busiest for making. Every figure that will sell in a December market is being sculpted now. A traditional 7cm santon takes about ninety minutes from clay to varnish. A 15cm santon habillé — dressed in real fabric — can take a full day.

I ask Céline whether the trade has a future. She points at her daughter Léa, 19, who is at the next bench painting the tiny apron of a fishwife with a brush the width of an eyelash. "She could have gone anywhere," Céline says. "She chose the clay. That answers your question."