A Swiss historian revives the forgotten industrialist who outbuilt Henry Ford

The Swiss historian Marie-Angèle Lovis has just published "Un Emigré devenu millionnaire. Florian Grosjean, un Suisse à New York au XIXe siècle," according to Le Temps. The book traces the life of Grosjean, born a peasant's son in Saules, who emigrated to the United States and built a fortune manufacturing kitchen utensils in New York. By 1900, his factory employed 2,100 workers, four times the workforce of Henry Ford's plant in 1904, Le Temps reports.

Lovis, who lives in Porrentruy, had already explored the same wave of emigration in her 2020 book "Un Village suisse émigré" (Editions Alphil), about roughly 500 residents of Cornol — known locally as the "Courbe-Dos" — who left for the United States in the early twentieth century in search of a country seen as wealthy and open.

To get closer to that experience, she and her husband crossed the Atlantic in 2016 aboard the Queen Mary 2, the last ocean liner still making the Europe–America crossing, departing from England for a week-long voyage. "In second class, but it was comfortable all the same. There were those endless dinners and the parlour games in the afternoon to kill time, which I avoided as much as possible — even though I read English perfectly, I missed part of the conversations because of the accent," she recalls.

In New York, she walked the streets of Astoria, finding period brick houses where many of the Cornol emigrants had lived, and gathered extensive documentation for her research. She now says she regrets not knowing, during that same trip, that her hotel in Brooklyn stood only half an hour from the site of Grosjean's former factory, where some sections of wall still remained. "I could have gone to see that vestige," she told Le Temps.