The Myth of the Ecole Polytechnique

The École Polytechnique, according to Bruno Belhoste, is a "veritable national myth," but Belhoste's La formation d'une technocratie: L'École Polytechnique et ses élèves de la Révolution au Second Empire (Paris: Belin, 2003, pp. 507, i27) is neither an idealized nor simplistic representation of the first seventy-five years of the École. Instead, this book analyzes the formation of an institution that was at first dynamic and modernizing but over time became increasingly rigid. Now, argues Belhoste, the École Polytechnique is an endangered species—"too small, too French, too military" (p. 5). In his view, at least three of its distinguishing features will likely disappear: the concours (entrance exam), the ranking system for students, and career opportunities in the public service corps. Citing an 1847 book on public instruction in China by polytechnicien and sinologist Edward Biot, Belhoste draws parallels between the demise of Chinese elitist education and the rigid elitism that has come to dominate today's École Polytechnique.

Critical of simplistic approaches to institutional history, Belhoste argues that since 1960 historians have too often reduced institutions to systems of practice and overemphasized their role as representations of power, at the expense of analyses of their structures and operation. Belhoste is interested in the multidimensional, regulatory functions of the École Polytechnique: organizing a social world, producing and transferring knowledge, and forming specific dispositions and practices. In his view, the École was initially not an instrument for reproducing the existing social order but for forming savants and artisans in the same school. However, "it was the control of the École by the power of the State, its progressive isolation, and finally its submission to the sole logic of technocratic reproduction, especially after 1850, which precipitated its decline, perhaps irremediably, as a modernizing institution" (p. 426).

Belhoste is a professor at the University of Paris X—Nanterre, and has published extensively on the history of science, technology, education, and mathematics, including three books on the École Polytechnique that he coedited at the time of its bicentennial in 1994–95.¹ La formation polytechnicienne, 1794–1994, with contributions by scholars such as Roger Hahn, Charles Gillispie, Joel Sakarovitch, Antoine Picon, and Janis Langins, examines such internal aspects as curriculum and instruction, leading professors, and educational change. Le Paris des polytechniciens: Des ingénieurs dans la ville, 1794–1994, a large-format volume with more than two hundred black-and-white illustrations, documents polytechniciens' contributions to Parisian society, science, culture, and infrastructure. This celebratory book seems to augment the very legend that Belhoste is now attempting to demythologize. La France des X: Deux siècles d'histoire analyzes polytechniciens as a group and focuses on their involvement in service to the state, science, and industry.

Not surprisingly, Belhoste anticipates readers' skepticism toward yet another book on the École Polytechnique. The "missing piece" in the history of the École, he argues, is a "study of this vast machinery of schooling considered as the generator of a specific social space" (p. 8). La formation d'une technocratie goes a long way toward filling in this missing piece. Since its scope is limited to the period from 1794 to 1870, instead of the two hundred years covered by the other books, this volume, with its seventy pages of references and notes, provides much greater detail on the early years. Indeed, if you have ever wondered how this internationally known school functioned and changed in the context of elitist engineering education, La formation d'une technocratie is the book to read. Only over time did the secondary-level baccalauréat become a requirement for admission. Students typically spent at least one year in specialized, intensive, privately run classes in mathematics in preparation for the concours of the École Polytechnique, which was administered orally, individually, and usually publicly in cities throughout France by traveling École examiners, the most notable of whom was Pierre-Simon Laplace.

The concours filtered out of the national male population a tiny group of one to two hundred young men, referred to as a promotion, the size of which...