Engineering the revolution: arms and enlightenment in France, 1763-1815

Abstract

Recent historical revisionists have divorced 18th-century material conditions from concurrent struggles. This book's anti-teleological approach repudiates technological determinism to document the forging of a new relationship between technology and politics in Revolutionary France. It does so through the history of a particular artefact - the gun. Expanding the political to include conflict over material objects, the author rethinks the nature of engineering rationality, the origins of mass production and our interpretation of the French Revolution. Towards the end of the Enlightenment, a cadre of artillery engineers transformed the design, production and deployment of military guns. The first part of the book shows how the gun, the first artefact amenable to scientific analysis, was redesigned by engineers committed to new meritocratic forms of technological knowledge and how the Revolutionaries and artillery officer Napoleon exploited their techno-social designs. The second part of the book shows how the gun became the first artefact to be mass produced with interchangeable parts, as French engineers deployed objective drawings and automatic machinery to enforce production standards in the face of artisanal resistance. Finally, the third part places the gun at the centre of a technocratic revolution led by engineers on the Committee of Public Safety, a revolution whose failure inaugurated modern capitalist techno-politics.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 132 citations exist upstream.