L'Etat, l'armee, la science: L'Invention de la recherche publique en France (1763-1830) (review)

In L'E´tat, l'armée, la science, Patrice Bret mines a wide range of primary and secondary sources and synthesizes years of his own historical research. Rather than emphasizing institutions, corporate groups, or systems, Bret focuses on experimental and applied public research programs—a phenomenon formed in the crucible of arms development and "a sector that offers essential materials for a reflection on invention and innovation, science and power, politics and technology, the organization of research and the genesis of a politics of research" (p. 17). The book is organized into three parts: (1) the state as organizer of innovation; (2) the administration of production; and (3) programs for testing weapons.

Bret first examines Colbert's rationalist approach to state public service and its influence on eighteenth-century engineering. During the Revolution, the scientists who worked for the Comité de salut public drew heavily upon that rationalist tradition. But Bret argues that historians have not sufficiently recognized the decisively political nature of the Comité's decisions and the extent to which the scientists designed and acquired power through politics, science, and technology. Bret thus contests the conventional view of the scientists' involvement as "purely technical" and apolitical, referring to it as the "direction occulte des savants" (p. 76). Here, one should compare Ken Alder's "technocratic pose" in Engineering the Revolution (1997).

Bret's explanation of the scientists' consolidation of power eschews traditional institutional analysis in favor of studying the informal though effective network of personal and professional connections in the chemical revolution (among, for example, Fourcroy, Monge, Berthollet, Chaptal, Guyton, and Lavoisier). Bret details how chemists combined those networks with their science, techniques, and styles to develop research programs for arms production and testing, powder and saltpeter, ballooning, accelerated production of hydrogen, tanning of leather, production of soda, materials for pencils, and rocketry. The provisional or extraordinary methods of the Revolution later became normalized through technocratic administrations from the Directory to the Restoration, which then displayed their own inertia.

The second part of the book begins with a chapter on the rationalization of industrial production of artillery and small arms—the primary focus of Alder's book, but only a subtheme here. Bret's main interest is the production of chemical-related inventions and innovations, first organized by the Old Regime's Régie system, and then by revolutionaries who sought to accelerate production and develop alternative materials and techniques. The role of education as a formative and political tool of scientific and technological culture is an important theme that reflects the work of others, such as Bruno Belhoste, Janis Langins, and Antoine Picon.

Part three of the book focuses on programs for developing new forms of firepower and methods of testing devices such as incendiary and explosive projectiles. The central feature here is the renewal of French artillery rocket research in 1810, triggered by William Congreve's work in England, which Bret interprets as part of an international arms race underway from the Old Regime to the Restoration. This complex story of English, French, and Danish rocket designs and testing systems, shifting goals, and conflicting reports of success and failure illustrates Bret's original intent to "stay away from all anachronism and teleological vision" (p. 13). Bret also contrasts the characteristics of French applied research with its counterparts in England and Austria, and notes how the French model later influenced the United States, Russia, and Sweden. He concludes that the military research programs of the French Revolution indeed marked a major rupture in terms of scientific, technical, political, and administrative practice.

This book will be of considerable value to scholars, both as a research tool and as a sobering account of how the politics of science and technology in the West accelerated an embryonic international arms...