Disziplin, Profession und Nation: Die Ideologie der Chemie in Frankreich vom Zweiten Kaiserreich bis in die Zwischenkriegszeit (review)

French science and technology between the mid-nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries were once analyzed with tiresome predictability in terms of decline and a failure to match the pace set by Germany. In the case of the chemical industry, weaknesses were seen to lie in the indifference of academic scientists to applications and in the reluctance of both manufacturers and universities to invest in laboratories and research. The effect of a quarter century of revisionism has not been to deny the relevance of such factors but to integrate them in a more complex interpretative fabric. The emphasis has shifted from France's patchy performance in laboratory-based innovation in the German style (notably in the arguably peculiar case of artificial dyestuffs) to its strength in such areas as electrochemistry and superphosphate fertilizers and its capacity for the creative assimilation and unspectacular improvement of imported technologies.

Ulrike Fell's book takes this change of focus as the starting point for a richly documented analysis of the ideology of French chemistry between the 1850s and World War II. The ideology, for Fell, rested on a sense of disciplinary identity, professional self-interest, and patriotism that transcended, or sought to transcend, the boundaries between the academic and industrial sectors of the chemical community. Its fashioning was, of course, a social process, and Disziplin, Profession und Nation gives due weight to the institutions in which it was fostered. Two such institutions stand out: the Société Chimique de Paris (founded in 1857) and the Société de Chimie Industrielle (founded in 1917), chapters on which occupy almost half the book and inform most of the rest.

The start, as Fell describes it, was brisk. The Société Chimique de Paris quickly became a setting in which scientists and industrialists worked together to advance what they saw as their shared discipline and to counter the effects of advancing specialization. Then came World War I, which brought chemistry to the heart of national life. Fired by a gathering sense of their importance, even indispensability, in the modern world, chemists prepared confidently for the celebrations that, in 1927, marked the centenary of the birth of Marcellin Berthelot. Berthelot's eminence as a professor at the Collège de France and unflinching support for the secular ideals of the Third Republic had earned him the rare accolade of burial in the Pantheon twenty years earlier, and he was a natural focus for the festivities, which did him ample (some would say more than ample) justice.

Donations from home and abroad poured in: by 26 October 1927, when the minister of culture, Edouard Herriot, laid the foundation stone for a Maison de la Chimie, which would act as a setting for conferences and fashion the public face of chemistry and the chemical industry, they were well on their way to the astonishing figure of eighteen million francs that they reached a few weeks later. To the Maison's promoters, the ceremony (attended by representatives of sixty-three nations) marked the triumphant culmination of a struggle with roots in the Second Empire. But there are twists aplenty in Fell's book. No sooner was the foundation stone in place than governmental support began to wither, and although a Maison de la Chimie was eventually inaugurated in 1934, it was not in the modernist showpiece of the Place d'Iéna, where the foundation stone of 1927 lay abandoned.

A further straw in a chill wind was the founding of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique in 1939. As a national research organization, the CNRS offered a more powerful focus for the cause of science than the Société Chimique de France (as the Société Chimique de Paris had become in 1906) or the Société de Chimie Industrielle...