The eighteenth century was an age of expanding and diversifying state bureaucracies. In France and the German states new administrative departments were founded in order to promote trade and manufacture, as were public institutions to provide technical and scientific education. Leading state officials turned to academies of science and savants for support of their reforms. They hired savants as permanent officials or temporary consultants and inspectors for key economic sectors such as mining and metal production, textile dyeing, and transportation infrastructure, and they further sought the help of savants in order to educate knowledgeable officials and workmen. Implementing savants’ technical expertise, natural knowledge, epistemic values and discipline in the state bureaucracy, these leading officials aspired to build a modern state that guaranteed technological innovation and social progress.
These practical movements in the French and German state bureaucracies joined with a multifaceted discourse on technical knowledge, the useful sciences and public service, embedded in scientific academies, mining schools, engineering colleges, and learned and economic societies, as well as in the cameralist (or mercantilist) and Enlightenment literature of the time. Despite numerous local differences, the Enlightenment and cameralist discourse and practical reform movements in the state bureaucracies ranged from France to Prussia, Saxony, the Habsburg monarchy and well beyond the boundaries of France and German-speaking countries to other mercantilist states on the European continent.
In this milieu a distinct social figure – or a whole range of slightly nuanced figures – was flourishing, which is the subject of this special volume: the artisanal-scientific expert. The eighteenth-century artisanal-scientific experts supported by the mercantilist state were truly hybrid figures. Among them were mathematicians, chemists, mineralogists, botanists, and explorers of the Earth, who were members of scientific academies and other learned societies, authors of scientific books and papers, public lecturers and teachers, mostly in the newly founded engineering colleges and technical schools. These men were thus socially recognized as savants or Naturforscher. At the same time they were also technical experts who possessed technical knowledge about mining, military engineering, civil architecture, forestry, gardening and agriculture, dyeing and calico-printing, the manufacture of glass and porcelain and so on. Living in both an academic and an industrial world, and further participating in the world of state bureaucracy, they personally spurred the circulation of knowledge and objects between these worlds.
Persons who intimately combined natural and technological inquiry with certain occupations in industry and commerce were by no means a novelty of the eighteenth century.Footnote1 From the fifteenth through the mid-eighteenth centuries, courts were among the most important sites where these persons could make a living. Like the Renaissance engineers and mathematicians, or the itinerant seventeenth-century projectors and scholarly alchemists, for example, the eighteenth-century artisanal-scientific experts had loose or no bonds with the guild system. But their life in the milieu of scientific academies and mercantilist state bureaucracies was more settled and their inquiry more sustained than that of their predecessors. Their distinct social milieu also implied specific possibilities and constraints of activities, which we hope to illuminate in this special issue.Footnote2 From the perspective of the modern, differentiated system of natural and engineering sciences, state and industry, the eighteenth-century artisanal-scientific experts certainly appear as transitional figures, as they personally united goals and activities that were later divided and distributed among different specialists. Thus they share features with the modern scientist cooperating with industry, including occasional shifts away from technological inquiry and towards scientific research done for its own sake. But they also resemble the modern engineer and technician with a formal degree from an engineering college; until the end of the eighteenth century the education and training of these hybrid experts was not yet formally regulated, however, so that individual ways of learning were more important.
The following essays present individual examples of artisanal-scientific experts in eighteenth-century France and the German-speaking states. As this collection of cases shows, there was not just one (ideal) personification of the artisanal-scientific expert, but rather a whole spectrum of hybrid figures with differences in degree. At a time when state positions for such persons and formal ways of educating and training them were just in the making, this should come as no surprise. The French chemist and state commissioner Pierre-Joseph Macquer (see Lehman), the Habsburg chemist and mining official Anton von Ruprecht (see Konečný), and the Prussian mineralogist and mining official Carl Abraham Gerhard (see Klein) might be located at the centre of this spectrum of figures. They were ‘experts’ (or Sachverständige) in the narrower meaning of the term in eighteenth-century France and Germany, namely men who (1) possessed specialized but nonetheless generalized and systematic technical knowledge, and who (2) performed direct service for the state. In their technical occupations these three experts cooperated with craftsmen and artisans without being themselves members of guilds or entrepreneurs. At the same time they were well-known citizens of the Republic of Letters. The French glassmaker, physician and chemist Paul Bosc d'Antic (see Beretta) is a slightly different case. He was commissioned by the state to run the state glass manufactory of Saint-Gobain and then became an entrepreneur himself. But he, too, was recognized as a chemist and involved in the world of the Paris Academy of Sciences. Situated even further toward the edge of craftsmanship is the French woodworker and author of the Art du Menuisier André-Jacob Roubo (see Belhoste). Roubo was a craftsman who also played a role among the Parisian savants as a contributor to the academic project of Descriptions des arts et métiers. As he had only indirect links with the state bureaucracy via the academic project of the Descriptions des arts et métiers, which received support from state officials, he was not an ‘expert’ in the narrow French sense of the term. Yet his career clearly benefited from a milieu of technological innovation and science instigated by the Academy of Sciences in tandem with the French state. The work of the Southern German naturalists, agricultural improvers and directors of economic societies Friedrich Casimir Medicus and Franz von Paula Schrank thrived in a similar cultural and political environment (see Popplow). Medicus and Schrank were deeply involved in projects of agricultural innovation and the distribution of advanced agricultural and botanical knowledge, and they systematically mixed technical expertise about agriculture with natural knowledge, again with support from the state.
Hence, despite their differences the essays collected here have much in common. First, they help to establish the historical fact that hybrid artisanal-scientific experts did exist in eighteenth-century France and Germany. Familiar distinctions between artisans and craftsmen on the one hand, and savants and natural philosophers on the other, do not work for these historical persons, who were hardly marginal figures in their day. Studies of artisanal-scientific experts thus contribute to a better historical understanding of the relationship between the arts and crafts (technology), systematic natural inquiry (science) and state institutions on the eve of industrialization and the creation of the modern system of natural and technological sciences. Second, historical studies of artisanal-scientific experts question the orthodoxy of historians of science that the predecessor of the modern scientist was, as a rule, the natural philosopher. Artisanal-scientific experts participated in the discourse of natural philosophers, but they did not identify themselves with natural philosophers, nor must they be grouped together with natural philosophers from the historians’ analytical point of view. Third, our studies of artisanal-scientific experts may also present a counter-argument to those historians of technology and of science who highlight differences between the modern natural and technological sciences and equate ‘science’ with scientific theory and university-based ‘pure’ natural science. Like recent studies of experiments, instruments and materials involved in the early modern and modern sciences, our studies of artisanal-scientific experts provide a more complex picture of eighteenth-century science in action. In addition to natural philosophy and natural history pursued for their own sake, there was also a field of mixed natural and technological inquiries in the pre-industrial world that resembles the modern engineering sciences and the late modern technosciences.
The essays are based on a workshop held at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin in October 2010, organized by Bruno Belhoste and myself. I thank Bruno Belhoste for his help and intellectual support in preparing the workshop and his stimulating contributions to the workshop discussions. Bruno Belhoste's work about eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century French networks of science, technology and public service has laid the foundation for most of the themes discussed on the workshop. Thanks go also to other participants in the workshop, especially Jean-François Belhoste, Gunhild Berg, John Christie, Seymour Mauskopf, Sacha Tomic, and Jakob Vogel. Furthermore I thank Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (director at the MPI) for his financial support of the workshop.
Ursula Klein
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Notes
1There is a growing historiographical literature on these hybrid figures. To the most recent publications belong Ursula Klein and E. C. Spary (eds.), Materials and Expertise in Early Modern Europe: Between Market and Laboratory (Chicago, 2010); Pamela Long, Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, 1400–1600 (Corvallis, 2011); Lissa Roberts, Simon Schaffer, and Peter Dear (eds.), The Mindful Hand: Inquiry and Invention from the late Renaissance to Early Industrialization (Amsterdam, 2007); Matteo Valleriani, Galileo Engineer (Dordrecht, 2010).
2We focus here on a milieu around the nexus of scientific academies and mercantilist state bureaucracies in France and Germany. For the slightly different British figure of savant fabricant see, for example, Larry Stewart, The Rise of Public Science: Rhetoric, Technology, and Natural Philosophy in Newtonian Britain, 1660–1750 (Cambridge, 1992); Peter M. Jones, Industrial Enlightenment: Science, Technology and Culture in Birmingham and the West Midlands, 1760–1829 (Manchester, 2008).