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Technology and Culture 43.2 (2002) 254-290



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School for Industry
L'Ecole d'Arts et Métiers of Châlons-sur-Marne under Napoléon and the Restoration

John R. Pannabecker

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On 1 April 1826, students at the Ecole d'Arts et Métiers (school of arts and crafts) de Châlons-sur-Marne revolted violently against the repressive management of the ultraroyalist school administration appointed by King Charles X. In December, the student leaders were acquitted, defended by an attorney hired by the liberal Duke de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, benefactor and former inspector of the school and opponent of the ultras. A few months later, the eighty-year-old Liancourt died. As students from Châlons bore his coffin toward his grave in Paris, an anonymous official of the ultras gave a secret order for troops to intervene. In the scuffle, the coffin fell into the mire, triggering a flurry of publicity that helped expose the ultras' vindictiveness and ineptitude in trying to impose a return to the Old Regime. 1 [End Page 254]

Since taking power early in the 1820s, the ultras had suspected the school of Châlons of being a hotbed of political resistance because of Liancourt's long association with the school, its emphasis on shop practice, and Napoléon Bonaparte's role in its founding. Student unrest, which from time to time tarnished the school's reputation, exacerbated the political problems that resulted in the ultras' demise in the Revolution of 1830. The progressive leaders of the July Monarchy (1830-48) looked more favorably on the school's training of leaders for industry. Today a network of eight Ecoles Nationales Supérieures d'Arts et Métiers, all descended from the school at Châlons, is the largest source of engineers in France, producing a thousand graduates each year. How and why did the school of Châlons, with such modest and presumably lower-class beginnings, survive the disinterest or opposition of powerful bureaucrats and politicians under Napoléon and then during the Restoration? 2 [End Page 255]

Before the Revolution of 1789-94, the French had tried to accelerate industrial growth by importing English machines and workers, with only limited success. As part of their reaction against state control of the economy, moderate leaders of the Revolution eliminated the trade guilds and the apprentice system in hopes of increasing social and economic mobility and technological innovation. But the constant warfare of the 1790s depleted the supply of skilled workers and widened the industrial gap between France and England. In 1803, Bonaparte created the schools of arts and crafts in hopes of jump-starting French industry and competing more effectively with England. He viewed technical schools as a means not only of training military leaders but also of injecting into industry a new type of educated worker who could modernize industry. 3

Bonaparte's minister of the interior, the industrial chemist Jean-Antoine Chaptal, assembled a committee of scientists to design industrial schools, the first of which was established in 1803 at Compiègne. Their regulations for the schools of arts and crafts reflected a technocratic approach to military production not unlike that which some of them had promoted during the Revolution. Liancourt had longstanding interests in technological innovation, including technical schools. He had created a trade school for military orphans in the 1780s on his property near Compiègne and Paris. After his return in 1799 from seven years of exile, during which he had traveled extensively in the United States, he promoted the creation of industrial schools. In 1806 Napoléon appointed Liancourt as school inspector and moved the school from Compiègne to Châlons-sur-Marne (now Châlons-en-Champagne). Even today the schools and their huge engineering alumni association consider Liancourt the major force behind the creation of the schools and his trade school of the 1780s the first school of arts and crafts. 4 [End Page 256]

The school of Châlons faced special challenges...

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