Located in Déville-les-Rouen, the Girard factory was founded in 1818. It employed up to 400 workers for the production of printed fabrics. In the 1930s, the Indienne manufacturer was incorporated into the Alsace group Gillet-Thaon. The company was the last textile printing factory in the metropolitan area and closed its doors in 1970.

Nineteenth-century industrialists often called on professional photographers to create a photo album in order to immortalise the staff from each workshop.

This album would start with some exterior shots of the factory and some of the interiors of the workshops; then, each group of workers would be photographed in their work uniforms, sometimes with their tools.

These images are valuable as iconographic representations of workers in the nineteenth century are rare. They provide us with information about working conditions (in some pictures you can see little girls working in the workshops), the hierarchy established within the company between the different workshops, and work clothes.