Forging the new order: French mass production and the Language of the Machine Age, 1763-1815.

摘要

Interchangeable parts manufacturing--the cornerstone of modern mass production--was conceived in Enlightenment France, not in Eli Whitney's America or industrializing Britain. This dissertation charts the rise and (temporary) decline of this seminal technique in France: the conjunction of the French and Industrial Revolutions. The republican scientists and military engineers who created our modern mentality of rational scale also spawned the material abundance and social discipline that accompany the mass production of identical goods.;The artillerist-engineers under Jean-Baptiste Gribeauval proselytized a "Low Enlightenment." After the debacle of 1763, these "instrumental rationalists" forged men, weapons, and tactics into a purposeful machine for redeeming French power. The conscious application of system-thinking led them to introduce interchangeable production for artillery carriages, and less successfully, for muskets (using processes developed by Honore Blanc). As the managers of the world's largest proto-military-industrial complex, they disciplined workers like soldiers. This radical restructuring enraged reactionary officers, and gunsmiths and arms merchants in the Saint-Etienne armory. One might say the Revolution came to Saint-Etienne early.;And there the experiment with interchangeability might have ended, if the Revolution had not catapulted the military engineers into control of the French state. To supply the army with muskets, they created ex nihilo the Manufacture of Paris, Europe's largest industrial project. But when even the Terror failed to discipline the armorers, the engineers again resorted to interchangeable production, revealing the technocratic imperative behind the Committee of Public Safety.;Afterwards, a new generation of "economic rationalists" forswore strict interchangeability in return for social peace. Blanc's attempt to sell interchangeable gunlocks to the army succumbed to bureaucratic in-fighting. By 1815, France had succumbed to a self-induced technological "amnesia." Precisely because of its political revolution, France embraced industrial gradualism.;Interchangeability developed in intimate relation with the metric system, a "Language of the Machine Age." Only a system of uniform measures could ensure that guns manufactured at remote sites were interchangeable. The system also reinforced the emergent national market and disciplined ordinary citizens. Authoritatively imposed, it encountered fierce resistance. Napoleon (temporarily) abandoned the metric system. French modernization was a protracted struggle.