The Making of Mechanical Engineers in France: The Ecoles d'Arts et Metiers, 1803-1914

The recent interest of historians of French education in technical instruction has been confined mainly to the elite engineering schools of Paris: the Ecole polytechnique and its affiliates, Mines and Ponts et Chaussees, the Conservatoire des arts et metiers, and the Ecole centrale des arts et manufactures.' Little original research has been done on middle-level technical schools despite the importance of such schools as the Ecoles d'arts et metiers, established early in the nineteenth century. Thus, the view commonly held by historians that French technical schools produced too many theoretically trained engineers and too few practitioners and therefore provided few opportunities to young men of modest origin has rarely been questioned. I will attempt to do so in this paper through a study of the graduates of the Ecoles d'arts et metiers during the nineteenth century. By means of a collective biography of the social origins, recruitment, placement and careers of 800 graduates of the first three schools at Chalons-sur-Marne (1806), Angers (1811), and Aix-en-Provence (1843), I will examine the schools' contribution to the formation of intermediate cadres in response to industrial