Artisanal Knowledge, Expertise, and Patronage in Early Eighteenth-Century Paris: The Société Des Arts (1728–36)

The paper focuses on the Société des Arts, an assembly of artisans and savants that gathered in Paris in the early eighteenth century. Contrary to previous studies that have considered the Société an unsuccessful precedent to the Encyclopédie, it discusses the Société des Arts as a cultural experiment by which a number of artisans presented themselves as a new kind of experts whose knowledge was essential to the economic advancement of the French state. The paper reassesses also the relationship between the Société des Arts and the Académie Royale des Sciences in light of a body of hitherto unknown documents that have recently surfaced.