L'Invention technique au siecle des Lumieres (review)

L'Invention technique au siècle des Lumières. By Liliane Hilaire-Pérez. Paris: Albin Michel, 2000. Pp. 443.

This book is less about invention than about contexts of invention (social, political, and juridical) in England and France in the eighteenth century. Liliane Hilaire-Pérez presents a richly detailed and nuanced account of the changing relation between inventors and the central French administration during the Enlightenment. Her thorough description of the English patent system not only provides a useful comparison between the approaches to invention in what were probably at the time the two most technologically productive nations of the world, it is also integral to an understanding of the changes in French practices made toward the end of the century in conscious emulation of English models.

Hilaire-Pérez shows that although the English and the French both took their inspiration for rewarding inventors from Venetian precedents, they developed distinct approaches reflecting their sharply differing political cultures. In England, the relation between the inventor and administrative government was largely monetary, patent monopolies generally being awarded upon payment of a fee, sworn assurances of novelty, and the deposition of "specifications," that is, detailed descriptions of the inventive techniques. Unlike the French, the British did not normally subject patent applications to prior examination by technical experts. If expertise was required to assess utility or suggest improvement, it was often provided by private individuals or organizations such as the public-spirited Society of Arts, which played a key role in the development of British agricultural and industrial technology during this period. The English inventor was otherwise on his own to fend off encroachments before judges in courts of law.

In France, the legacy of Colbertist absolutism conjoined with Enlightenment ideals of state benevolence produced a considerably more dirigiste model, especially at midcentury under the administration of the academician and economist Daniel Charles Trudaine. Inventions submitted to the Bureau du commerce for privilèges were assessed by teams of experts and academicians who rarely (in this period) approved exclusive monopolies. Both the academic and the enlightened concept of useful knowledge was that it constituted common property, not so much invented as discovered, not to be individually possessed but to be openly disseminated. Innovation was considered the product of an era, of a society, and of the traditional practices of an industrial collective. If the enlightened state awarded privilèges in the form of prizes, grants, or subsidies, then their holders owed a reciprocal duty to propagate the new techniques, to teach them to apprentices and even to rivals, and to serve the state as technical advisors. A privilège was a reward for public benefaction, not private intellectual property deserving of protection by the state.

Paradoxically, Hilaire-Pérez believes, it was precisely because of this image of the inventor as public benefactor that inventors in collectivist France rather than in individualist England first came to be glorified ("heroized" or "valorized," to use her terms). Like artists and writers, they were often accorded attributes of "genius," and like many creative intellects they often looked to posterity for appreciation when they felt they had received it in insufficient quantity from their own contemporaries.

Beginning around 1777, more liberal French administrations attempted to deregulate innovative practices and to "autonomize" the inventor much after the English fashion. The government granted privilèges exclusifs more freely upon deposition of detailed descriptions and without the prior assessment of government experts, whose abilities as predictors of inventive success were called into question. Ideally, a market of informed consumers and investors would decide the fate of new techniques. Jean François de Tolozan, a free-market advocate who ran the Bureau from 1787 to 1791, wrote: "It is not for the Government to direct the Merchant's pen, the Artist's hand or the Weaver's shuttle" (p. 263). Inventors in large, capital-intensive industries--in fields such as soda manufacture and cotton spinning--petitioned for...