A blacksmith-mayor’s first bell, for his own church.

Paccard was founded in 1796, in the years after the French Revolution, by Antoine Paccard, a blacksmith who was also mayor of Quintal, a village in the Haute-Savoie. His first bell, fittingly, was for Quintal’s own church, according to the French Wikipedia and the company. The firm has moved twice since — to Annecy-le-Vieux in the 1850s, and in 1989 to Sévrier, on the shore of Lake Annecy — and it has stayed in the family throughout.

It is now in its seventh generation of the family, run by Philippe Paccard with his brother Cyril. The French business register shows how the family holds it: the foundry, Paccard Fonderie, trading as Paccard Cloches et Carillons, is a simplified joint-stock company at 40 route des Saintiers in Sévrier, whose president is a family holding company, Paccard Frères, chaired by Philippe Paccard. A third company in the group sells miniature bells online under the name Campanuna.

Its own English-language line is about reach: “Since 1796, the rich musical quality of PACCARD cast bronze bells has resonated all over the world.” It says it has made “more than 125,000 bells and carillons”; the French Wikipedia gives about 120,000, 80 per cent of them exported. We attribute the figure.

La Savoyarde, a peace bell and three hundred Liberty Bells.

Paccard’s single most famous bell is in Paris, and its most famous project in America. La Savoyarde, cast in 1891 for the basilica of Sacré-Cœur, weighs 18,835 kg, and the French Wikipedia calls it the largest bell in France. In 1914 the foundry cast the 16-tonne bourdon Jeanne-d’Arc for Rouen Cathedral. Its carillons include those at Chambéry, with 70 bells, and Douai, with 62.

Its American work is just as notable. On 11 December 1998 it cast the World Peace Bell for Newport, Kentucky, a project, Paccard says, “executed under the auspices of organizations in the United States and France” and led on the American side by Cincinnati’s Verdin. Paccard gives its weight as 33,285 kg; other sources differ. Since August 2024 the bell has been in temporary storage while its Newport site is redeveloped. And in 1950–51 it cast about 300 replicas of the Liberty Bell — not the original, which was cast at Whitechapel in London in 1752 and recast in Philadelphia in 1753 — one of which the United States gave to the city of Annecy. The bell those replicas copy is itself a recast: the original cracked, and Philadelphia’s John Pass and John Stow recast it in 1753.

The firm has also turned its history into a visitor attraction, on the lakeside where it now works. A bell museum opened in Annecy-le-Vieux in 1984, moved to Sévrier with the foundry in 1989, was renamed the Musée Paccard in 2004 and was renovated in 2020. Since 1999 the company has offered architectural bell design under the name Ars Sonora.

Copper, tin and the music of bells.

Bell metal is a bronze of roughly four parts copper to one of tin — “approximately 78% copper and 22% tin,” according to the Guild of Carillonneurs in North America, “heated in a furnace to above 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit.” Heritage Crafts gives the furnace temperature as 1,200 degrees Celsius. In Britain, Heritage Crafts lists bell founding as “critically endangered,” saying it now “takes place almost solely in Loughborough” at John Taylor & Co.

UNESCO has recognised the music bells make, if not their casting. In 2014 it selected Belgium’s programme for “Safeguarding the carillon culture” for its Register of Good Safeguarding Practices, noting that the programme “exists in seventy-six cities and villages of Belgium and in thirty countries worldwide.” The Guild of Carillonneurs in North America counts “more than 180 carillons in North America and more than 450 elsewhere in the world.” A carillon, by the guild’s definition, has “at least 23 carillon bells,” played from a keyboard.

Tin is the scarce ingredient. The US Geological Survey estimates world tin mine output at about 290,000 tonnes in 2025, led by China, Indonesia, Peru, Brazil and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and says “The estimated annual average New York dealer price for refined tin in 2025 was 1,600 cents per pound, a 13% increase compared with that in 2024.” The same survey notes that “Tin has not been mined or smelted in the United States since 1993 or 1989, respectively,” and that the US relied on imports for about 77 per cent of its refined tin in 2025.

Bells are also rung by hand, and that tradition has its own recognition. In 2022 UNESCO inscribed manual bell ringing in Spain on its Representative List, and in 2024 extended it to Italy, describing it as “a form of communication that is tied to the classification, acoustics and shapes of bells, bell towers and belfries.” We found no UNESCO listing for bell casting itself.

A family name since 1796.

Paccard writes its name in capitals in its own copy — “PACCARD cast bronze bells” — and its website compares the firm to Steinway and Stradivarius, names that stand for the best instrument of their kind. The comparison is the company’s; the ambition is plain. Its family structure is equally clear: a holding company named Paccard Frères — Paccard Brothers — sits over the foundry, so the brand and the family share one name at every level. Its museum, its online shop of miniature bells and its architectural design service all carry the same surname.

For a design guide, Paccard shows how a foundry can sell an experience as well as an object: a museum, a lakeside location, miniature bells online, and a seventh-generation family name. Its American reach — three hundred Liberty Bell replicas and a peace bell in Kentucky — is a large part of its story, and so is its French one, from Sacré-Cœur to Rouen. Compare Eijsbouts, which began with clocks, and Verdin, whose home city of Cincinnati sits across the river from Paccard’s World Peace Bell.

For this guide we use a lake blue and a mist with a serif, an unofficial interpretation. No bell, carillon or logo is reproduced.

Keep Paccard’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.