It is one of the most appreciated corporations in France, we love their courage, their bravery, their abnegation, and this from an early age. When you ask children, especially boys, what they want to be when they grow up, they rarely say notary clerk, undertaker or screwdriver maker, they say firefighter, footballer, veterinarian, astronaut, actress , actor or morning worker at France Bleu Lorraine. For footballer, it should be noted that there is now a triple training, you have to know how to score goals, manage a fortune and film videos, possibly sextapes. For firefighters, more seriously, their jobs have changed because the risks have multiplied. And then the firefighters, beyond the risky profession, in our collective imagination, drain a lot of positive values, popular and joyful meetings… including the famous firefighters’ ball, initiated in the 1930s in Montmartre. Since we are in the pleasures of life, a stop in our slang jargon which retains the fireman to designate a pipe… the French language is sometimes very surprising.
We can also remember that the word sapeur is etymologically close to the verb saper. We say “you’re handsome like a sapper”, but also “you’re handsome like a truck”, so kill two birds with one stone, say “you’re handsome like a fire truck”. When we talk about the history of firefighters, we also talk about Lorraine and particularly Nancy thanks to a certain Louis Gugumus. Because the history of firefighters is also our technical and technological history: everything has changed a lot. It is enough to observe in certain communes where old materials are exposed, for example hand pumps, which were towed by horses or men; by comparing with the huge fire trucks of our time, we measure the talent of the engineers. But they are not always engineers. The inventor of the large scale was a watchmaker, Louis Gugumus. In fact, he was inspired by the mechanisms of watchmaking to invent these scales which intertwine and form the famous large scale and all that was imagined at the Nancy barracks in the 1880s.