Reviewed by: Artisanal Enlightenment: Science and the Mechanical Arts in Old Regime France by Paola Bertucci Sven Dupré (bio) Artisanal Enlightenment: Science and the Mechanical Arts in Old Regime France By Paola Bertucci. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017. Pp. 312. Artisanal Enlightenment: Science and the Mechanical Arts in Old Regime France By Paola Bertucci. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017. Pp. 312. This book explores the relationship between science, the mechanical arts, and the French state, from the founding of the Académie Royale des Sciences in 1666 until the first volumes of the Encyclopédie published in 1751. In her study, Paola Bertucci focuses on a largely forgotten society, the Societé des Arts, whose members advocated the notion that the improvement of the mechanical arts was essential for the economic prosperity and colonial expansion of the French state. Bertucci's Artisanal Enlightenment reveals the hidden relationship between the Encyclopédie and the projects of the Societé des Arts. Diderot (of the Encyclopédie) was inspired and indebted to numerous writings on the arts by Societé members. However, as Bertucci convincingly shows in the epilogue of her book, Diderot was also responsible for making this relationship invisible. By promoting the authors of the Encyclopédie to savants, he erased the political epistemology that the Societé members had articulated. This book therefore recovers what the Enlightenment looked like from the perspective of Societé des Arts members instead of the philosophes—the perspective which became dominant due to Diderot. Despite the book's title, the Societé des Arts's members did not consider themselves artisans; nor were they philosophes. The members' reaction to the increased interest in the mechanical arts from the side of the savants and the Académie Royale des Sciences was not to elevate the status of [End Page 956] artisanal labor or the perception of the artisan. Instead, they developed in their writings a strategy to differentiate themselves from mere artisans, proclaiming themselves to be artistes. The artiste, the central character of Bertucci's book, is the artisan with esprit. The theory of knowing that the artiste developed emphasized the role of the body and manual dexterity. Yet, it differed from the "artisanal epistemology" discussed by Pamela Smith in The Body of the Artisan (2004). The artistes did not argue for a way of knowing that was typical for all artisans, but on the contrary claimed that their epistemology differed from other practitioners of the arts. Bertucci touches upon the meaning of esprit and the distinctiveness of the artistes' epistemology, contrasting it with "artisans' subservience to rules… derived from the classical definition of art, and in particular of the mechanical arts, as techne" (p. 9). It would be interesting to survey artistes' writings on the language of ingenuity as recently scrutinized in Alexander Marr's and his colleagues' Logodaedalus (2019). Bertucci emphasizes the political dimension of this epistemology. Bertucci builds upon the substantial number of studies in the history of art, science, and technology devoted to writings on the arts that argue that writing is a political act. Her book is particularly good at articulating the various portrayals of artisans and their epistemologies throughout the diverse publication projects on the arts in old regime France. According to Gilles des Billettes (of a noble family and inventor of a hydraulic machine) and René de Réaumur (a physicist and elected member of the Académie des Sciences), artisans were not peers, and because of their secretive nature, they were even obstacles to writing a natural history of the arts. In Réaumur's view, Bertucci argues, there was no ingenuity either in their hands or in their minds. The Societé des Arts's concept of artisanal knowledge was radically different. It considered, unlike Réaumur, that the perfection of the arts would emerge in the artisans' very creation process, rather than through experimental knowledge gained in Réaumur's laboratory. Moreover, despite the artisans' secrecy, the Societé discovered and encouraged collaboration among artistes, and followed the model of the Republic of Letters. The artiste's useful knowledge, openly shared for the public good, consisted of "manual dexterity, knowledge of materials, as well as the ability to organize, maintain...