L’Ecole d’application de l’artillerie et du génie de Metz, 1802–1870: Enseignement et recherches. Actes de la journée, d’étude du 2 novembre 1995 ed. by Bruno Belhoste and Antoine Picon

Abstract

148 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE tool as they once were. Even so, not only undergraduates but more advanced scholars will find this work useful as long as it is not the sole resource at their disposal. Terrence R. Fehner and F. G. Gosling Drs. Fehner and Gosling are historians at the U.S. Department of Energy. They are currently working on a history ofwaste management policies and programs from 1942 to the present. L’Ecole d’application de l’artillerie et du génie de Metz, 1802-1870: Enseig­ nement et recherches. Actes de la journée, d’étude du 2 novembre 1995. Edited by Bruno Belhoste and Antoine Picon. Paris: Musée des Plans-Reliefs, 1996. Pp. 76; notes, index. Price not available. The École d’application (best translated perhaps as “school of instruction”) of artillery and military engineering at Metz has suf­ fered from a double neglect. First, it has been overshadowed by the École polytechnique, the mother school from which all the écoles d’application were for many years required by law to recruit their stu­ dents. Even among these, it never attracted the attention accorded to the École des ponts et chaussées and the École des mines, older and more eminent Parisian institutions. Secondly, with the loss of Lorraine to Germany after the Franco-Prussian War, the école was transferred from Metz to Fontainebleau and received (with other military institutions) a significant share of the blame for France’s defeat. It was accused ofbeing too theoretical and out-of-touch with the practical needs of warfare at a time when rifled artillery had a decisive effect on the battlefield. The conference papers collected in this slim book on the school contain abundant and useful notes as well as a list offaculty, but the book has no pretensions to being a definitive work. Rather, its aim is to give an overview of present research and to encourage further attention to some interesting problems in the history of the peda­ gogy of engineering, its relations with science, and engineering re­ search. The organizers of the conference, Bruno Belhoste and Antoine Picon, historians ofthe École polytechnique and the École des ponts et chaussées, respectively, point out that Metz was in fact the direct descendant of the old royal military engineering school at Mézières and for some years carried on that school’s emphasis on graphics and practice before polytechniciens gradually took over its teaching positions and gave it a decidedly analytical and theoretical bent. In their article on the general character of the school’s teaching, Bel­ hoste and Picon show that this process was neither smooth nor ever entirely complete because of the nature of engineering itself. There is inherent in the pedagogy ofengineering a tension between begin­ TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 149 ning with the application of a science to technology and beginning with the intellectually messier and analytically recalcitrant domain of practice itself. There were other tensions that conditioned teach­ ing at Metz: internal tensions between artillerists and military engi­ neers, each with proud traditions and rivals during the 18th century, and external tensions with the Ecole polytechnique and the military corps that recruited their officers from the school. These are dis­ cussed in a paper by Fabrice Hamelin, who looks at the complex administrative and bureaucratic history of the school. The majority ofpolytechnicienswent on to Metz, and the eminence of its faculty often matched that of Polytechnique. Perhaps the most famous was Jean-Victor Poncelet, pioneer of projective geometry and theoretician of hydraulics, whose course on the “science of ma­ chines” is analyzed in detail here by Konstantinos Chatzis. Philippe Prost and Jean-Francois Belhoste deal with the courses in fortifica­ tion and chemistry, respectively. These were considerably more con­ servative in their approach than Poncelet’s. But Metz was more than a school; it was also a focus and stimulant for research in ballistics and explosives. Patrice Bret describes the work at the Ecole de pyrotechnie, also located in the town of Metz, which conducted the most advanced research on black powder tech­ nology in the world. He shows that Metz was in fact the most active site...