What the French Have to Say about the History of Technology

Abstract

Review Essay WHAT THE FRENCH HAVE TO SAF ABOUT THE HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGY MIRIAM R. LEVIN Several years ago the New York Times Book Review published an essay entitled “Miniskirts of the Mind” in which the author pondered the reasons that Americans followed the latest intellectual fashions from Paris: structuralism, poststructuralism, the work of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Jean Baudrillard.1 In my work, I have been led to do some of the same kind of ques­ tioning, with the twist that, rather than exploring why Englishspeaking historians of technology anxiously try to keep up with the French, I have to ask why—relatively speaking—non-French prac­ titioners of our discipline seem to pay so little attention to France and French historians of technology in our research and teaching.2 Since the first Ph.D. program in the history of technology was established in France in 1985, the held has grown enormously, and there is now ample reason to take the French seriously.3 In this article, I first want to touch on the sources of this oversight and then to argue why the French are well worth our attention, ad­ dressing the Middle Ages to the present. While my observations stem from my own experience as a historian of Europe working in the United States, they may have some relevance for other scholars in a held that tends to circumscribe itself within national boundaries. Traditionally, the emphasis in history of technology has been on Dr. Levin is a member of the History Department at Case Western Reserve Univer­ sity. An earlier version of this essay was presented at the 1992 annual meeting of the Society for the History of Technology in Uppsala. For their suggestions, the author wishes to thank colleagues who attended that session. 1 Richard A. Shweder, “Miniskirts of the Mind,” New York Times Book Review, January 8, 1989, pp. 1, 73. 2See, e.g., the bibliographies and syllabi in The Machine in the University, comp, and ed. Terry S. Reynolds, 2d ed. (Bethlehem, Pa.: Lehigh University Press, 1987). 3See Alexandre Herlea, “History of Technology in France,” SHOT Newsletter no. 55 (March 1992): 4-5.© 1996 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/96/3701-0004$01.00 158 What the French Have to Say about the History of Technology 159 national histories, each historian concentrating on his or her own country’s process of industrialization; moreover, those histories have been written in light of the experience of the “winners” in the “race” to industrialize—Great Britain, Germany, and the United States in the 20th century being the models of modernization against which other countries have been measured. In this schema, France is viewed as a poor second in the race for industrialization won by others. The French themselves suffered from this inferiority complex to the ex­ tent that they paid only sporadic attention to their own technological history or to the held in general until after World War II and not really until the advent of the Fifth Republic, when they began to develop a modern technological capacity. Rebuilding the nation and new interest in the technological past were related. As historian Lu­ cien Febvre was quoted in a 1949 article by David Landes, “We shall buy machines, fine machines, when we have acquired from top to bottom a mechanical mentality.”4 Doing history at once expressed that attachment and promoted it among contemporaries. Belief in the machine—as well as under­ standing the relationship between long-standing industrial weak­ nesses and strengths and present dilemmas—had to precede and fuel new technological development. Febvre had already called for the writing of the history of technology in a 1934 Anuales article still considered a manifesto for a history of French technology.5 Criticiz­ ing the history of French science for neglecting the material side of scientific activity in which the development of the telescope and microscope figured large, Febvre suggested that a “histoire des tech­ niques” should consider the intellectual, cultural, social, and political, as well as economic dimensions of the subject—a prescription fully in accordance with the interests of the Annales school itself. Like all people...