Obut, La Boule Bleue, and MS Pétanque: The History of the Big Three

When competition players talk about boules, three French names come up again and again: Obut, La Boule Bleue, and MS Pétanque. They are very different companies. One is a Marseille family workshop that predates pétanque itself, one is the industrial market leader from a small town in the Loire, and one is a small forging specialist in Haute-Marne. Each brand exists because a few people solved a practical problem in front of them, and the boules they built went on to shape how the modern game is played.

This is the story of how each of the three came to be. For a side-by-side look at what each brand's boules actually play like today, see our Obut vs MS Pétanque vs La Boule Bleue comparison.

La Boule Bleue: The Oldest Name in the Game (1904)

La Boule Bleue dates its history to 1904 and a shop on rue des Fabres in central Marseille run by Félix Rofritsch. The family came from Alsace. According to current director Hervé Rofritsch, his great-great-grandfather, a merchant navy captain, left his native Alsace after its annexation by Germany in 1871 and settled in Marseille (some retellings make Félix himself the captain). Félix sold "articles de Paris" (fancy goods) and made "boules cloutées": wooden boules covered in metal nails that he set one by one, for the older jeu provençal. Pétanque itself was only invented in 1907, in nearby La Ciotat.

The company's defining steps came over the following decades:

• Bronze and brass boules replaced the nail-studded wooden style. The date usually given is 1925, though some accounts say 1910.
• 1937: Félix's two sons, Fortuné and Marcel, joined and then took over the business.
• 1947: Fortuné and Marcel made the first boule in hardened carbon steel. The heat treatment and quenching left the finished surface with a bluish sheen, and the company took its name, La Boule Bleue, from those blue reflections. (See our carbon steel vs stainless steel guide for how hardened carbon steel compares with today's stainless alternative.)

La Boule Bleue is now led by Hervé Rofritsch, the fourth generation of the family, and holds the French Entreprise du Patrimoine Vivant (Living Heritage Company) label. It is a small business: in an interview with La Gazette de la Pétanque, Hervé Rofritsch described it as a company of about ten people with annual revenue of around 1.3 million euros, with a team of craftsmen in Marseille making custom boules to order.

Obut: From a Lock Maker's Idea to the Market Leader (1955)

Obut grew up in Saint-Bonnet-le-Château, a small town in the Forez area of the Loire department that already had a link to steel boules. According to Obut's own history, a local man named Jean Blanc patented a steel boule made from two pressed half-spheres welded together there in 1929.

Two other strands of local industry came together to create Obut:

• In 1937 Jean Souvignet set up a business in Saint-Bonnet-le-Château making steel tubes for bicycles and cars. His sons Georges and Robert joined him in 1950 and developed all kinds of metalworking equipment, from rolling mills to telescopic forks and garden furniture.
• In 1955 a lock maker, Frédéric Bayet, and a mechanic, Antoine Dupuy, started manufacturing boules and registered the OBUT trademark. Pétanque was then less than fifty years old and growing fast across France.

In 1958 Jean Souvignet and his sons bought the small factory, then trading as the "Société Nouvelle de boules à jouer". They stayed in partnership with Dupuy, who had invented the manufacturing machines. The company became a société anonyme under the name La Boule Obut in 1981. Robert Souvignet ran it from 1981 to 1994, with Antoine Dupuy as technical director; Robert's son Pierre took over as chief executive in 1995, and in 2003 he bought out the Dupuy family, making the Souvignets sole owners. Pierre's son Romain Souvignet became managing director in 2010 and president in 2022.

Obut is by far the largest of the three. The French intellectual property office (INPI) puts its production at about 2 million boules a year from the Saint-Bonnet-le-Château plant, with around 100 employees in 2015, and French Wikipedia cites an estimated share of about 80% of the French market in 2008. The company celebrated its 70th anniversary in 2025, still in the town where Bayet and Dupuy started.

MS Pétanque: A Forging Specialist in Haute-Marne (1990s)

The youngest of the three comes from Nogent, in the Haute-Marne department of north-eastern France, far from pétanque's southern heartland. The brand grew out of VMS-Plot, a company founded in 1993 or 1994 (sources differ). The initials VMS are usually explained by three names:

• Vartan Berberian, a Franco-Armenian engineer
• Marle, founder of the Marle group, a forging business
• Henri Salvador, the French singer, who is described as the brand's godfather (parrain) rather than as one of its engineers

France 3 gives a slightly different account: the company initially belonged to the Marle group, and "MS" stood for Marle Sport. The first boules were rounder and resembled the old nail-studded wooden boules, hence the "Plot" (French for stud) in the name; the brand later moved to smooth and grooved models.

What defines MS Pétanque is forging. The company says it is the only manufacturer on the market to make its boules by forging, which it says gives the metal an integral fibre structure and the internal ribbing behind its "anti-rebound" feel, the quality shooters most associate with the brand.

MS Pétanque is not a founding-family business. José Sanchez bought into the company in 2008 and later took over all the shares. When France 3 visited in 2022 it had about ten employees and was aiming to produce 90,000 boules that year, a small fraction of Obut's output. See our full head-to-head comparison for how the three brands differ in practice.

Three Companies, Three Different Bets

Laid side by side, the founding stories explain a lot about how each brand still positions itself today:

None of these companies set out to become one of "the Big Three". A Marseille shop selling nail-studded boules, two tradesmen in the Loire, and an engineer with an industrial partner in Haute-Marne each built boules for the game in front of them, and pétanque's growth did the rest. See our full history of pétanque itself for how the sport they all build boules for came to exist in the first place.

You can browse each manufacturer's current lineup directly: Obut, La Boule Bleue, and MS Pétanque.