Who Still Makes Savon de Marseille, and Why the Name Is Not Protected

There is no protected "Savon de Marseille" label, and the famous 1688 rulebook could not have been signed by Jean-Baptiste Colbert. INPI, the French industrial property office, lists both geographical-indication applications as rejected, and the Palace of Versailles records that Colbert died in 1683, five years before the edict that carries his name.

That leaves shoppers with makers' own promises, one collective trademark and a set of criteria that the soap works wrote for themselves. This guide sets out what the historical record says, which companies official registers name as makers, what happened to the geographical-indication bids, and what to look for on a bar. It draws on INPI's register and published documents, the Palace of Versailles, the UPSM and the Marius Fabre soap works.

Where the 1688 rule comes from

The 1688 text is the founding story of the product, and the soap makers tell it themselves. On the UPSM site, Fer à Cheval says it makes its soap in five steps following "la recette certifiée par l'Édit de Colbert en 1688 et confortée par le décret de Napoléon Bonaparte de 1812".

The UPSM tells the same story in the specification it filed with INPI. "En 1688, par l'édit de Colbert, Louis XIV fixe les règles de fabrication du savon de Marseille," it says: cooking in large cauldrons, vegetable oil only, olive oil, and animal fat forbidden. Its dossier adds that the edict ordered cauldrons stopped in summer, when olive oil works less well.

The name on the edict is the problem. The Palace of Versailles' biography of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV's minister, says: "He died in 1683 and was buried in the Eglise Saint-Eustache." A 1688 decree cannot have been his own act, and one of the historical passages quoted inside the UPSM's own dossier names it differently: "le décret de Colbert marquis de Seignelay".

This guide does not settle who drafted the 1688 text, because the edict itself was not found in any official source read for it. What the record supports is narrower: a rule of 1688 is cited by the soap makers and their association as the first definition of the process, and calling it "Colbert's" is shorthand that does not match the minister's dates.

The next protection came in 1812. The UPSM dossier quotes a Napoleonic decree of 22 December 1812 giving Marseille "une marque particulière pour ses savons à l'huile d'olive": a pentagon with the words "huile d'olive", followed by the maker's name and the city's name.

The UPSM dossier also quotes figures for the 18th-century industry from a 1999 history by Patrick Boulanger: 35 soap works with 159 boilers in 1774, 48 manufactures with 192 boilers in 1786, and 65 works with 280 boilers in 1789, which the quoted passage says shows that Marseille's production had doubled in 60 years.

Who still makes it

The shortest official answer comes from INPI's register. Its record for application IG 15-003 names the Union des professionnels du Savon de Marseille (UPSM) as the applicant and lists four operators with addresses: La savonnerie Fer à Cheval, 66 chemin de Sainte-Marthe, 13014 Marseille; La savonnerie Marius Fabre, 148 avenue Paul-Bourret, 13300 Salon-de-Provence; La savonnerie du Midi, 72 rue Augustin Roux, 13015 Marseille; and La savonnerie Le Sérail, 50 boulevard Anatole de la Forge, 13014 Marseille.

The UPSM describes itself as those four "Compagnons du Savon". Marius Fabre's site says the association was created in September 2011 as a non-profit, and the UPSM says its four members are all labelled "Entreprise du Patrimoine Vivant", a state distinction for craft and industrial know-how; that label status is the association's statement and was not checked in the official register.

Each member tells its own history on the UPSM site. Fer à Cheval says a candle works opened on its site in 1850 and part of it became a soap works around 1856, that it won a gold medal at the 1900 Paris Universal Exhibition, that the Salvador group bought it in 1974 and made Le Chat soap there for years, and that the Seghin family took it over about ten years after a 2003 relaunch.

Marius Fabre says the business began in 1900, when the young Marius Fabre started making soap in a shed at the end of his garden in Salon-de-Provence. It is now run by his great-granddaughters, Julie and Marie Bousquet-Fabre, employs 40 people, has held the Entreprise du Patrimoine Vivant label since 2009, and says it removed palm oil from all its soaps in 2020.

The Savonnerie du Midi says it was founded in Marseille in 1894 in the vallon des Carmes in the 15th arrondissement, makes the La Corvette brand, was bought in 2013 by the family group PRODEF, employs 44 people and produces more than 8 million soaps a year. Le Sérail says it was founded in 1949 by Vincent Boetto, in an old isolated farm that now sits in the middle of a neighbourhood, that he made the small family business viable with his wife's help, and that it is now run by his son Daniel.

The UPSM is not the only group of makers. INPI's record for the rival application IG 15-002 names the Association des fabricants de savon de Marseille (AFSM), at 24 quai Rive Neuve in Marseille, and lists six operators: Savonnerie marseillaise de la Licorne (Marseille), ENSA (La Seyne-sur-Mer), Proredis (Corbières), SA Laboratoires BEA (Forcalquier), La Savonnerie des Alpilles (Cabannes) and Savonnerie Foufour (Aubagne).

Those two lists are the only official, named inventory of makers found for this guide, and neither is a certification.

For the rest of a first visit, the Marseille first-time guide covers the city's districts and the safety question.

The geographical indication that failed

A geographical indication for manufactured and craft products is granted by INPI after a public inquiry. INPI's own slides describe the steps: filing, examination, a two-month public inquiry, consultation of local authorities and professional bodies, a synthesis, and then approval or rejection. They give the filing fee as €350 and the average time from filing to approval as ten months.

Savon de Marseille went through that process twice, and both bids now show as refused. INPI's register, whose database was last updated on 28 July 2026, lists IG 15-002, filed by the AFSM on 16 June 2015, and IG 15-003, filed by the UPSM on 22 December 2015, each with the legal status "Demande rejetée".

The UPSM's revised bid drew wide public support and pointed objections. INPI's synthesis of the second public inquiry, dated 23 January 2023, counts 1,687 observations, 86% from private individuals, and 98% favourable, with 28 observations, or 1.6%, unfavourable. The objections it records include that the name had become generic, that the raw materials are not local, that the specification would allow fatty acids in place of vegetable oils, and that the four members could not meet national demand.

One objection gives a sense of what the zone would have excluded. According to INPI's synthesis, one observation stated that 85% of the savon de Marseille made in France is produced outside the Bouches-du-Rhône; that is a figure from a respondent to the inquiry, not an INPI finding.

A third application failed in the courts. INPI's case-law bulletin reports that on 16 March 2022 the Cour de cassation's commercial chamber, in case 19-25.123, upheld the rejection of a bid by the Association Savon de Marseille France, whose specification defined the zone as the whole of France. The court found the specification incomplete because it did not delimit a geographical area linked to the product.

INPI's own figures confirm how contested the name has been. Slides by the office's geographical-indication staff say rejection decisions, "dont 5 portant sur des demandes Savon de Marseille", have almost all been appealed, six out of seven, and that the five appeals decided so far all confirmed INPI's decisions.

The UPSM's own specification shows what a successful bid would have covered. It would have applied only to soaps made from vegetable fats, sold as bars in classic geometric shapes such as cubes, blocks and ovals, or as chips and flakes, and it would have allowed the collective trademark to sit beside the official geographical-indication logo.

The UPSM's website has not caught up. Its geographical-indication page still says the application was filed in December 2015 and that the association is "en attendant une décision de l'INPI", while INPI's register shows the application as rejected.

How to tell a traditional bar

With no protected name, the practical test is the makers' own criteria. The UPSM's charter sets three: a limited list of ingredients, a cauldron process, and a place of manufacture. Its website states them plainly: vegetable oils, water, salt and soda only, with "aucun parfum, aucun colorant, aucun conservateur, aucune graisse animale et aucun additif"; hot saponification in a cauldron following the five-step "procédé marseillais"; and manufacture in the Bouches-du-Rhône.

The five steps have names you will see on packaging and in shop displays: "l'empâtage, le relargage, la cuisson, le lavage et la liquidation", as the UPSM lists them. The UPSM's specification describes the soap as saponified in a cauldron from vegetable oils only, without colouring or perfume.

The specification also explains each step. Oils are mixed with soda lye in the cauldron and brought to the boil, at 100 to 120 °C, for at least six hours; sea salt is then added so that the glycerine-laden, salty lye sinks; cooking completes the saponification; washing with a fresh lye removes glycerol, impurities and unsaponified fatty acids; and in the final "liquidation" water is added so the soap turns smooth. Cooking and washing together take at least 20 hours, and the whole sequence several days, according to the same document.

The oil figure causes the most confusion. The UPSM website says an authentic bar must contain "au moins 72% d'huile végétale", and Marius Fabre's FAQ explains the familiar "72%" stamp as 72% vegetable oils and 28% moisture, adding that the oil share rises as the bar dries. The UPSM's formal specification uses a different measure: total fatty acids of at least 63% of the finished product's weight, with chlorides at or below 0.8% and free caustic soda at or below 0.2%.

Colour is a quick check. The UPSM specification allows only two: green soap, based on olive and copra oils, with or without palm, and white-beige soap, based on copra and palm. "Toute autre couleur est interdite," it says, because the oils colour the soap naturally. Marius Fabre's FAQ describes its own white soap as copra and high-oleic sunflower oil, and the UPSM's page on Marius Fabre says it removed palm oil from all its soaps in 2020.

Olive oil is not what most people picture. Marius Fabre says the oil used is olive-pomace oil, "huile de grignons d'olive", made from the residue of pulp and stones left after the first cold pressing, and that copra oil is needed because without it the soap would hardly lather.

The logo is the last check. The UPSM says its members registered a collective trademark, which its specification dates to 2012 at INPI and 2014 at the EU trademark office, to certify that a product meets the charter's three criteria. The UPSM describes the logo's design as a cube, the symbol of the soap, with a round form recalling the stamps once used to mark it.

The table reflects the UPSM's charter, not a legal standard. A bar made by another company can follow a similar method without the logo, and no official source read for this guide makes any of these criteria a legal requirement for a "savon de Marseille".

If you are buying soap in quantity as gifts and live outside the EU, keep the receipt; the guide to claiming your VAT refund explains when a shop purchase qualifies.

Buying and visiting in practice

The four UPSM members are the soap works an official register ties to Marseille and Salon-de-Provence, so their own shops and museums are a direct way to see the process. The UPSM's page on Marius Fabre says guided tours of the soap works in Salon-de-Provence are completed by the Musée du Savon de Marseille, set up in 2001 in a former drying room at the factory, followed by the factory shop. Marius Fabre also says it opened a shop in the Marais in Paris in 2017 and another in central Salon-de-Provence in 2018.

The Savonnerie du Midi says it created a Musée du Savon de Marseille in its cauldron room in the 15th arrondissement of Marseille, with an educational and tourist purpose. The Fer à Cheval and Le Sérail pages on the UPSM site give their addresses in the 14th arrondissement but say nothing about visits.

Opening hours and prices for these visits are not given here. The Savonnerie du Midi's own site did not respond when checked, and no official source read for this guide published current visiting times, so check each company's site before you travel.

Silk in Lyon has a comparable heritage-trade story with its own museum, told in the guide to Lyon's silk, traboules and canuts.

What this guide does not cover

Prices for savon de Marseille are not given here, because no official source publishes them. Nor does this guide give the dates of INPI's rejection decisions for applications IG 15-002 and IG 15-003, or their grounds, because the register pages show only the status "Demande rejetée", and a 2025 INPI case-law document that may cover an appeal could not be downloaded because of a certificate error.

It does not quote the 1688 edict itself, because the text was not found in an official archive; the account here comes from the UPSM's specification and a member's page on the UPSM site, set against the Palace of Versailles' dates for Colbert. It does not confirm the Entreprise du Patrimoine Vivant status of the four UPSM members in the official label register, which was not consulted.

It does not list every soap maker in Provence, only those named in INPI's register, and it does not assess any maker's claims about being the oldest or most traditional. Visiting hours and ticket prices for the factory museums were not verified, and the INPI slides cited for appeal figures are undated; the file was hosted by the University of Perpignan.