The most serious episode of collective protest among textile laborers in the first months of the July Monarchy occurred among cotton spinners in the Rouen area. The evidence shows that Rouen was likely to have had the greatest difficulty in adapting itself to the new conditions of the slump after 1827. The style of Rouen mill operators was at the opposite extreme from that of the Alsatians, who viewed their firms as patrimonial possessions and spared no expense in keeping equipment and methods up to date. Charles Noiret, a literate and outspoken handloom weaver of Rouen, gave in 1836 a stinging description of the quite different outlook that prevailed in the town. In the early years of the Restoration, he said: “ The profits of the producers were such that they did not bother to count them: they bought, they produced, and sold according to habit and their capital quintupled in a single year … They got rich without knowing why. ”

As for their treatment of labor, judging from Noiret's comments, it resembled what one today associates with secondhand car dealers rather than with managers. They bought cheap cotton, he said, mixed in waste fibers, set their machines to spin No. 30 but told the spinner it was No. 26 (justifying a lower rate of pay per kilogram), and sold the yarn to their customers as No. 34 (arithmetic reminiscent of the report of Fouquet-Lemaître et Crepel in 1834). Once their fortunes were made (and the industry ruined), said Noiret, they bought land and retired.