Analyzing Infrastructure

In Confluence: The Nature of Technology and the Remaking of the Rhône (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011. Pp. xiv+371. $49.95), Sara Pritchard attempts to bridge environmental history, science and technology studies, and the history of technology to analyze the Rhône River as an envirotechnical system. In connecting technology to the environment and politics, she joins a small group of scholars, most famously James Scott, but also Patrick Joyce, Patrick Carroll, and myself, who approach infrastructures as built environments designed to exercise political power through material arrangements.¹ The Rhône, according to Pritchard, is a partly natural and partly technical assemblage of hydroelectric plants, irrigation systems, and nuclear generating facilities that was developed after World War II to restart the French economy and restore French pride after the German occupation. It was made part of a new system of logistical power, transforming natural attributes and forces of the French landscape through technology into political assets.

If you want to know about the design or construction of the power plants on the Rhône or about the environmental degradation of the river valley before the 1970s, you will not learn much from this book. Pritchard is not really interested in the technical work and natural knowledge used to make the Rhône an envirotechnical system. Neither does she paint a clear picture of the environment of the Rhône with its valleys, gorges, farms, vineyards, irrigation systems, power plants, and canals. What Pritchard does nicely is trace the technical rhetoric, political imagery, and physical assumptions that were used to align "the Rhône" as an envirotechnical system with the French political landscape as France changed over the course of the late twentieth century.

The development of the Rhône after World War II—mainly as a source of electrical power—was formally under the control of the CNR, the Compagnie Nationale du Rhône. CNR technocrats and policy makers experimented with ways to make the river more valuable to France. What this meant was neither clear nor constant. In the 1940s-50s, the CNR concentrated on taming the "furious bull" to augment the nation's capacity to rebuild its economy and pride. In contrast, by the 1980s environmentalists were questioning intervening in nature at all, advocating the protection of the upper Rhône as "wild." Between the 1940s and 1980s, the Rhône was a project-in-the-making clearly tied to the goals of the central government even as the political currents there shifted. Pritchard lovingly follows the political twists and turns of this history, providing a detailed and compelling picture of the micro-politics of twentieth-century technocratic governance, and the birth of the environmental movement that questioned its value.

Pritchard argues that the Rhône was a managed environment before World War II. Flood-control measures and irrigation systems had already blurred the distinction between nature and culture. In fact, France had an even longer tradition of engineering for political ends, exercising logistical power through public administration outside of normal politics. By the twentieth century, public administrators like those in the CNR were developing a technocratic language with which to consider and design these silent practices of power. They focused not on whether to change the environment, but how to do it.

France needed to rebuild its infrastructure after the devastation of World War II, and its esteem after a humiliating occupation. Using the Rhône's waters for grand hydroelectric projects seemed appropriate for addressing both issues. So the CNR was founded to spur economic growth and repair France's national pride through engineering. Taming the furious bull was meant to be an act of "grandeur," not only vitalizing industry but also vividly demonstrating that France could govern its own land.

Pritchard follows the decision-making behind creating power plants on the Rhône, staying close to the technocratic language and reasoning by which the furious bull and French grandeur were aligned. She discusses, for example, how the "old" Rhône was made a "dead Rhône," part of a dead past abandoned to build a modern France. The diminished...