Engineering modernity: Civil engineers between national state and provincial society in France, 1840-1914

This dissertation studies the civil engineers of the Corps des Ponts et Chaussees as a social and professional cadre in French society. Focused on the long nineteenth century, it explores three interrelated themes: the social integration of state engineers and their families in provincial society, the social context within which French society made decisions about new technologies, and the changing role of engineers as agents of a centralizing state. This work informs the larger question of France's distinctive pattern of state involvement in nineteenth and twentieth-century civil projects, local society, and industrial development.; A principal focus of this research is the surprising extent to which members of a highly centralized Corps were multiply connected to local communities and families. Comparative study in three departments reveals how the state's agents reached into regional society to endow France with modern infrastructure at the same time as they drew diverse regions closer to the national state. Materials from local archives in the Cote-d'Or, Nord, and Dordogne departments are compared to demonstrate that state engineers used associational, personal, and familial ties to become deeply integrated into local communities. In turn, these connections enabled members of an elite, state-run Corps to tailor a program of national development to accommodate diverse regional needs, rather than imposing homogeneous technical solutions across France.; At the national level, this thesis combines official correspondence, circular letters and centralized personnel records from the Archives Nationales with a database of career patterns to show how the national agenda, activities, professional structure, and ideology of a Corps with deep eighteenth-century traditions evolved during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This research is positioned at the intersection of the study of state formation, the dissemination of technological innovation, and social decision making. It examines the internal culture and ideology of the Corps, the social and professional presence of civil engineers in French society, and the national influence of engineering activity on economy and society in modern France.