La France en réseaux. Tome I: La rencontre des tlécommunications et de l'informatique (1960-1980) [The Networked France, Volume I: The Meeting of Telecommunications and Computing] by Valérie Schafer (review)

"While it implied an encounter between telecommunications and computing, the birth of data networks in France did not lead to an intellectual convergence between engineers in both fields," Valérie Schafer writes in the beginning of her PhD-dissertation-based book La France en réseaux (p. 9). She warns the reader at the same time, however, that the final outcome of this controversy, or lack of convergence, should not be read with a "presentist" look, likely to result in its framing as France's "great delay" or missed opportunity. A precise, complete, hands-on historical work enriched by firsthand (and first-rate) contributions from Internet pioneers, La France en réseaux is an important exploration of the complex socio-technical nexus underlying the choices that shaped the French Internet between 1960 and 1980, as well as an occasion to read about France's role in the history of computing.

For indeed, the French Internet case was and is peculiar. When the birth and swift diffusion of the Web made the development of the Internet a matter of general public and mass consumption—a matter of convergence between telecommunications, computing, and mass media—France was already equipped with an effective, widespread networking system: the Minitel. However, only a few years after the inception of the Web, France, to some extent the pioneer of telematics, was considered by many to be "playing second best" to several countries that were more direct and adamant in adopting the TCP/IP, packet-switching based "network of networks" that we know today. How did France's "great delay" come about?

In the preface to this book, Pascal Griset points out that Schafer's main interest is not to answer this question. Rather, she explores the numerous reasons why it is not appropriate to ask that question and that the concept of "delay" is not well suited to understanding the dynamics and sequences of events that led to the decisions taken in the 1970s.

Schafer acknowledges that is it tempting to read the conflict that revolved around packet-switched networks in the 1970s as a missed opportunity for France. The choice of Transpac and the Minitel was made to the detriment of data grams, initially developed by Louis Pouzin within the Cyclades project—the first network to make hosts, rather than the network, responsible for the reliable delivery of data by means of end-to-end protocol mechanisms. The data-gram concept would, later and elsewhere, be adopted in the TCP/IP protocol and the creation of internetworking as we know it today.

However, the French adventure—a technical, social, political, and industrial one, at once—should not be reduced to a mere strategic error, Schafer argues. The purpose of La France en réseaux is, to put it in the words of the great historian Reinhart Koselleck, to restore all the relevant actors' "horizons of expectation and fields of experience," their hesitations and motivations. The goal is to show that, if it is true that not all roads were necessarily leading to the Internet in its current shape, they were nonetheless far from being blind alleys. The book successfully—although somewhat densely at times for readers who have not fully mastered a knowledge of the French political institutions, academic projects, and industrial districts' intricate ensemble—follows and disentangles the articulate nexus that led to Transpac rather than Cyclades, "without trying to find out if these choices were good or bad—they were" (p. 11).

This work retraces the people, organizations, and business logic behind this choice by showing the reader how strategies and opposing actors with fundamentally different logics were at play in the France of the 1970s, strategies in which the decision-making processes that took place are deeply...