FROM MECANICIEN TO INGENIEUR: TECHNICAL EDUCATION AND THE MACHINE BUILDING INDUSTRY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE

This study investigates the changing character and sources of technical skills and knowledge that were essential to the industrial development of France in the nineteenth century. It does so by first describing the rise of technical education in France. The focus of this study then shifts to the strategically important capital goods sector of French industry to determine when and how graduates of engineering and trade schools became industrial managers and workers. By examining firms that built steam engines, textile machines, and marine engines it reveals that before 1850 the techniques of the machine builder were firmly rooted in a craft tradition brought from Britain by emigrant engineers and mechanics. Technical personnel in early French machine building enterprises were trained on the job by apprenticeship and by travel throughout an expanding network of machine shops.;This study continues with the examination of a machine builders' trade association, the Union des Constructeurs (1840-1852), and finds that industrialists belonging to this organization began, for the most part, as skilled workmen and were preoccupied by business concerns. Education at engineering or trade school counted little in their minds since it did not furnish skills and knowledge of immediate value in an industrial setting. This attitude began to change in the 1840s, however, as machine building companies became large, complex industrial enterprises that faced growing problems of managerial control and coordination. Engineers in locomotive building firms used mechanical drawing, a skill acquired at technical school, to plan and direct the production of machines. In addition, railway engineers resolved technical problems that plagued the operation of early locomotives by using analytical and experimental methods learned at engineering school.;By the 1880s most machine builders acknowledged the value of advanced technical education. This change is illustrated in this study by an examination of the Chambre syndicale des mecaniciens, chaudronniers et fondeurs, a trade association that succeeded the Union des Constructeurs. In that organization engineering school graduates now represented machine building companies. Closer scrutiny of firms belonging to the Chambre syndicale indicates, however, that many technical innovations were still the result of machine shop training, particularly in firms that designed and constructed machinery used in the emerging mass production industries of France. In addition, family ties were a key factor in the rise of many prominent machine builders through the end of the nineteenth century. This study also examines the training of skilled workers and finds that machine builders generally preferred traditional apprenticeship over trade schools until the 1880s and 1890s. They reluctantly endorsed trade schools by the close of the century but only after those schools had been restructured to provide practical training suited to the changing skill requirements of industry. This study concludes that in the case of the French machine building industry technical education was neither the exclusive source of technical innovation, nor was it the only criterion by which owners, managers, and workers were selected and promoted to positions of responsibility.