Education for the Industrial World: The Écoles d’Arts et Métiers and the Rise of French Industrial Engineering by Charles R. Day

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 159 scientist on the other, as well as the incorporation of the engineer into industrial and governmental entities which subordinate technical ex­ pertise to their own agendas, are pretty much the same. If correct, what dynamic is effecting this convergence and how does it bear on the autonomy of technology vis-à-vis its local institutionalization? Steven L. Goldman Dr. Goldman is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and director of the Science, Technology and Society Program at Lehigh University. He teaches and does research in the history, philosophy, and social relations of science and technology. Educationfor the Industrial World: The Écoles d’Arts et Metiers and the Rise ofFrench Industrial Engineering. By Charles R. Day. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987. Pp. ix + 293; tables, notes, bibliography, index. $30.00. The misleading reference to “industrial engineering” in the subtitle can be forgiven, since Education for the Industrial World is a valuable book, both for the subject it treats and the issues it raises. Current wisdom on French industry and engineering in the 19th century as­ serts that France had a relatively immobile society and its engineers were impractical people saturated with theoretical learning and higher mathematics more useful as a social cachet than applicable to the problems of modern industry. Charles Day implies that historians have been both fixated by the prestige of the elite institutions of technical education like the Ecole Polytechnique and trapped by bureaucratic pigeonholes into ignoring or misjudging a host of humbler intermediate institutions of technical education run by the Ministry of Industry and Commerce rather than the classically inclined mandarins of the Ministry of Public Instruction. Dominant among these schools, and the main focus of Day’s atten­ tion, were the écoles d’arts et métiers, created by Napoleon but with roots stretching back to 1780 when the Duc de la RochefoucauldLiancourt founded a trade school for the sons of soldiers and military orphans. Conceived by Napoleon partly as orphanages and partly as training schools for “petty officers for industry” (p. 71), the image of the schools producing skilled craftsmen and foremen has obscured the fact that graduates soon occupied key positions in production and management in the burgeoning mechanical engineering industries and railways. Long before 1907, when graduates finally received an official engineering diploma, most of them were fulfilling the func­ tions of engineers and executing the responsibilities of technical man­ agers. Much valued for their experience on the shop floor, their ability to work hard, and their education in science and mechanical drawing inculcated in the penal-monastic environment of their dreary board­ ing schools, they played a major role in private industry, small in­ 160 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE dustrial establishments, and even to some extent (like the technical services of the navy) in the public and military spheres dominated by the state engineers from the elite grandes écoles. According to Day, not only were they good practical engineers, workhorses of the French Industrial Revolution, responsible for early French successes in the automobile and aeronautical industries as well as the splendid effort of industrial mobilization during World War I, they also did well for themselves, rising relatively rapidly on the social and economic ladder from their lower-class origins. Indeed, their growing professional prestige and social mobility, as much as the in­ creasing complexity of the curriculum to keep pace with an ever more scientific technology, powered the inevitable evolution of the schools toward their apotheosis in 1974 as a bona fide grande école just a notch below polytechnique. In discussing 19th-century France, it will henceforth be more dif­ ficult to speak of industrial backwardness, of social immobility (at least for that small part of the labor aristocracy that went to the écoles d’arts et métiers), and shortage of practical talent, or to restrict one’s definition of engineer to graduates of the Ecole Polytechnique. Janis Langins 1)r. Langins is currently at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto. He is the author of l.a République avail besoin de savants, a history of the first vear of operation of the...