De l'espionnage industriel à la veille technologique (review)

The title of Michel Cotte's interesting and informative monograph is a touch unclear. He is concerned not with industrial spying per se, the importance of which he considers to be exaggerated if not quasi-mythical, but with the circulation of technological ideas that in his view preceded the process of industrialization in modern history. "La veille technologique" (not quite translatable as "technological eve") is the term he coins for this anterior intellectual stage, which he considers to be a precondition of technological innovation itself. With respect to the latter, Cotte diminishes without quite dismissing the role of the legendary inventive genius—a James Watt, a Thomas Edison. He also finds inadequate, though less so, the revisionist view that seats the vector of technological progress in the role of the entrepreneur—a Henry Ford, an André Citroën—who builds industries by putting new ideas and devices profitably to work. The precondition to all that is the climate of technical opportunity, opinion, and communication.

Cotte takes British industry largely as a given and inventories the channels through which technological information was disseminated in the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century, mainly in France, though with passing attention to the United States and Japan at later junctures. After the close of the Napoleonic Wars, officialdom abetted by the scientific and technical elite emergent from the E´cole Polytechnique, as well as by such private entrepreneurs as the Frères Seguin, made a concerted effort to close the gap with Britain. The Ministry of Commerce encouraged the granting of patents for importing foreign inventions, sometimes with their inventors. It relaxed protectionist measures in critical areas. Experts were sent on missions to investigate and report on British procedures. Charles Dupin's six-volume Voyages dans la Grande-Bretagne (1821–22) is the most impressive. Certain self-educated industrialists, most notably Marc Seguin, undertook such visits on their own.

That technology was in some sense being institutionalized appears in the foundation and flourishing of societies loosely modeled on scientific academies. The Société pour l'Encouragement de l'Industrie Nationale (1802) consisted of scientists, engineers, financiers, industrialists, and businessmen. Its monthly bulletin reported on procedures, inventions, machines, and whole industries. It set, publicized, and awarded prizes, and established a reference library. More influential probably, because closer to actual producers in an industrial stronghold, was the Société Industrielle de Mulhouse (1825–26), which corresponded with other, though lesser societies in major cities. Beginning with the E´cole Centrale des Arts et Métiers in Paris (1829), technical schooling (again Mulhouse was pivotal) progressively displaced apprenticeship in the training of mid-level technicians, foremen, and engineers. Emigrant British experts leavened though they did not lead industrial development in France. A spate of new journals, a proliferation of new books, and a multiplication of libraries augmented the availability of technical information to an ever-growing public.

Cotte devotes one chapter to the educational and professional institutionalization of technology in Britain itself, which from mid-century onward benefited from a certain feedback from foreign procedures. He makes no question of the preeminence of British industry, which was indeed the principal, though far from the unique, fount of information on processes and procedures. His purpose is simply to treat technology as more than the sum of the set of advanced techniques prevailing at any time and to situate it, not perhaps in the marketplace, but in the international forum where ideas, innovations, information, and knowledge are communicated and shared.