What Cire Trudon is known for
Wax merchants since 1643 — candles for Versailles and Napoleon’s coronation; the green-and-gold busts still cast in Normandy.
Cire Trudon traces its origins to 1643, when Claude Trudon opened a shop on Paris's rue Saint-Honoré selling wax and candles for domestic and ecclesiastical use. His son Jacques joined the royal court at Versailles in 1687 as apothecary and distiller to Queen Marie-Thérèse, and the family's wax business grew alongside its court connections; Louis XIV later elevated Charles Trudon to the French nobility. In 1737 Jérôme Trudon purchased a large wax factory in Antony, in what is now Hauts-de-Seine, where more than a hundred workers once labored — the building survives today, listed on France's inventory of historical monuments. The house supplied candles for the royal chapel at Versailles and continued serving the court through the Ancien Régime and the Revolution; even during his imprisonment, Louis XVI is recorded as having used Trudon candles. The engineer Duhamel du Monceau praised the family's craftsmanship in his 1762 encyclopedia. Cire Trudon still supplies the Paris church of Saint-Roch, lit by its candles continuously since 1643. Its headquarters and flagship boutique now sit at 78 rue de Seine in Paris's sixth arrondissement, a few streets from the house's original rue Saint-Honoré premises, and the maison markets itself today as the oldest surviving candlemaker in France.
How ORBIS reads this city
Best for — The world’s oldest candles
France
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