The answer would largely depend on the specific time and place and the job of the particular worker within the soap-making industry. While those performing the manual labor required to create the raw materials for soap-making—for instance, harvesting and burning barilla to create soda ash—would have had a lower status, some of those promoting themselves as purveyors of fine soaps did achieve prominent positions in society, as was the case with Jean-Louis Fargeon, perfumer and soap-maker to Marie Antoinette.

Until major scientific discoveries involving methods to create alkali from sodium chloride and to isolate glycerin allowed for the industrialization of the soap-making process in the 19th century, hard and soft soaps were made in northern Europe by combining wood lye with tallow rendered from animal fats. These caustic soaps were primarily used to launder clothing and to clean surfaces in homes and elsewhere. After Castile soaps made from olive oil began to be imported from Spain in the 15th century, soap became a more common tool for cleaning the body but still remained a relative luxury.

In France, the city of Marseille became an early center of the soap-making industry because of its strategic port and its proximity to olive-growing regions. In 1688, Louis XIV issued the Edict of Colbert, which established rules for the production of Marseille soap. As in England, a soap-makers guild was also established that protected its member’ reputations through the creation of a strict system of apprenticeship and regulations on trade. The creation and sale of soaps was limited to a handful of trades: the apothicaires, who provided topical treatments with a medical benefit; the gantiers-parfumeurs, who sold alcohol-based perfumes as well as floral waters, powders, pomades, and scented soaps; and the barbiers-perruquiers-baigneurs-étuvistes, who styled hair, created wigs and provided all the necessities for bathing.

The most famous of the master gantiers-parfumeurs in the 18th century was Jean-Louis Fargeon. Raised in a family of Montpellier apothecaries, Fargeon undertook training in leather-tanning and perfumery in Grasse in Provence. After achieving the rank of maître in 1774, he set up shop near the Louvre in Paris. Before long, his innovative creations received the attentions of members of the French court, including Marie Antoinette. Such was the Queen’s love of Fargeon’s scented soaps and other products that she spent 110,000 livres on them in 1781. Her extravagance permitted the perfumer to purchase and furnish a 21-bedroom house in a Paris suburb.

But the good times were not to last for Fargeon, who remains perhaps history’s grandest soap-maker. The bouleversements of the French Revolution, including social and economic upheaval and the formal abolition of the guilds in 1791, combined with technological advances in production to bring an end to soap-making as an art form and inaugurate the era of mass production. Though industrialists like Andrew Pears and the Lever brothers would earn vast fortunes from soap-making in the Victorian period, soap-makers would never again achieve the same exalted status.

SOURCES:

Duhamel du Monceau, M. L’art du savonnier. Paris: L.F. Delatour, 1774.

Feydeau, Elisabeth de. A Scented Palace: The Secret History of Marie Antoinette's Perfumer. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2006.

Muchembled, Robert. Smells: A Cultural History of Odours in Early Modern Times. London: Polity Press, 2020.

Reinarz, Jonathan. Past Scents: Historical Perspectives on Smell. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2014.