Marseille’s Little Soap Museum

Some museums have lofty collections of art and cultural heritage, some focus on history and some on science and invention. And then there is this one, focused on the humble history of a local product, made in almost the same way for centuries… soap.

It’s a small museum, but still quite a bargain: €3 admission, including a bar of scented soap normally sold in the shop for €2.10. For €6, you get twice as much soap and a chance to stamp it with your own decoration or slogan.

The museum, and the Licorne soap factory and shop that operate it, are located on Marseille’s Old Port, in Louis XIV buildings that were originally the city’s wholesale market. But while the Licorne business is only in its third generation, commercial soap-making in Marseille goes back to at least the 12th century.

The process starts with the cauldron, where the basic ingredients of soap—fat and caustic soda, or lye—first meet. They’re cooked together for hours, producing raw soap and glycerin. The chemical reaction is called saponification. When soapmaking in Marseille began, the caustic soda came from the ashes of plants such as samphire.

Savon de Marseille, literally ‘Marseille soap’ has the distinction of being one of the earliest location-specific products, similar to what we would call an AOP. Louis XIV issued an edict in 1688 limiting the name to soaps made in Marseille, and only with vegetable oils, usually olive. Animal fats, commonly used at the time, were banned from Savon de Marseille.

Granite rollers in the rolling mill press out any lumps in the raw soap and break it down to thin flakes.

Once that’s done, it’s time for the add-ins that provide an aroma, a texture or feel. That would include essential oils from fruit or flowers, perfumes, shea butter, steel-cut oats or honey.

The next step along the line is the wonderfully-named ‘soap plodder.’ This machine uses an spiral screw mechanism not unlike a food grinder, to compact the flakes into a shape. Depending on the attachments, it might come out in long tube shapes to be cut in circles or a long rectangle shape to be cut in right-angled bars of soap.

Once cut, the stamper gives the pieces their final form…

This 19th-century oil mill was used to extract oil for the soapmaking process; the device below, which looks like a cross between a locomotive and a barbecue, uses steam to extract oil from the lavender harvest.

Now that we’ve made the soap, we can move on to a few other exhibits at the small museum, including this model of a traditional ‘lavandiere’ who scrubbed by hand as late as the 1950s and a rather formidable copper bath tub which looks as if it would be very difficult to climb into or out of.

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There’s a display of various brands and forms of soap, some of them internationally-known…

And, quite puzzling and seemingly random, a display of wax statues in a scene from the 1952 film Manon of the Spring, based on a story by Marcel Pagnol and starring, among others, a quite young Yves Montand.

In the rear section of the museum, where the workshop activities take place, some ‘tools of the trade,’ or at least the textbooks for it, and worktables.

There’s even a guessing game—you’re asked to close your eyes, open the boxes, and guess the fragrance used for the soap within. Some are immediately obvious—vanilla, for example, and cinnamon. Others, including the citrus and flower scents were much harder to tell apart without visual clues from color.

Next door, in the shop, the aromas blend in the air and hang there, making shopping definitely a multi-sensory and time-limited adventure.