Conserving the Enlightenment: French Military Engineering from Vauban to the Revolution (review)

Janis Langins revisits the art of fortification to remind us that a technology cannot be reduced to the social and political contexts within which it is developed and used. Wary of the "jargon of social constructionists of technology," Langins acknowledges a "strong and intimate interaction between technology and society" but wishes to emphasize the many "solid and concrete" material (and social) imperatives central to engineering (pp. 405, 426). Such a reminder may seem at first paradoxical. Those who have, over the past decades, explored the social dimensions of technology were themselves responding to reductionist tendencies of opposite nature. However, we now know that focusing on the permeability of the frontier between a technology and the surrounding social forces without ignoring its principles is a challenge, and not only because it undermines a helpful analytical distinction between essence and context. Langins strives to explain how the French royal corps of military engineers could at the same time be fundamentally conservative and fully attuned to the progressive ideals of the Enlightenment or, more precisely, wedded to a century-old design system and—as Terry Reynolds puts it on the dust jacket—one of the "seeds from which the modern engineering profession . . . sprouted."

Recent works have shown the importance of early modern engineers to the evolution of the state, science, a range of professions, and, in the broadest sense of the term, the landscape of France and other nations. Not surprisingly, the relation of those who claimed this still equivocal title to the Enlightenment and the revolutionary ages has called for particular attention. This book fits with this scholarship in several ways, in a progression that likely reflects the evolution of Langins's longstanding interest in the field and his interpellation by recent analyses. The first part of the book reaches to the roots of early modern fortifications before exposing the massive influence of Vauban (and his political masters) in the creation and entrenchment of a military engineering body pivotal to the transformation of space into a national territory and a peculiarly French interest in its aménagement. The second part takes us to the last Bourbon reign, when recurrent disputes shook the corps. Here we meet the Marquis de Montalembert, who doggedly tried to break through its attachment to the principles laid down by Vauban and refined and institutionalized by his followers. These battles, grounded in the tensions between theory and practice, reflect many of the ambiguities characteristic of the last decades of the Old Regime: the respective worth of social origins and personal merit, respect for new ideas and rejection of "systems," and the primacy of social connections or organizational momentum, as well as a sobering contrast between ambitions and realizations.

As he comes to the final and chaotic decade of the eighteenth century, Langins appropriately adopts a more combative stance to argue that engineering is not, in essence, revolutionary—as so forcefully asserted by Ken Alder. Like the Enlightenment, the French royal corps of military engineers was committed to progress—but it was not revolutionary in the sense that this generation was to give to the word. Innovations, and most obviously the advances of artillery, were assessed in the light of its greater goal, the preservation of a state, a social order, and a culture deemed worth preserving. Similar tensions between traditionalism and modernity are evident at other levels of the functioning of this institution as well. Military engineers received a first-rate scientific education, but the requirements of keeping a vast range of fortresses in fighting order required daily attention to matters of operation, accounting, and reporting (a realism forcefully linked to "the pessimistic moral vision that is at the core of the professional military ethic," p. 404). However, they also turned this potentially stifling agenda into a key dimension of engineering and developed an organizational sophistication that prefigured large modern organizations. Yet again, if military engineers grasped the systemic nature of the...