From Knowledge to Power: The Rise of the Science Empire in France, 1860–1939

by Harry W. Paul

• ISBN13: 9780521265041
• ISBN10: 0521265045
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1985-11-29
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

France has played a pivotal role in the development of modern science. Especially striking and controversial has been the way in which the state has organized scientific endeavor. After the 1880s reinvigorated university faculties played a key role in the growth of science in France, and many faculty scientists enjoyed close relations with industry, agriculture, the military, and politics. During the Third Republic the idea of governmental responsibility to support research became a dogma, due to the stimulus that science was perceived to give to the French economy. By 1939 a working mechanism of state funding for science, buttressed by a complex scientific ideology, had come into existence and provided the foundations for the development of a new structure of scientific research and education in the postwar era. From Knowledge to Power is the first full-scale treatment of this dramatic expansion of French science between 1860 and 1939.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. From second empire to third republic: the great scentific mutation

2. Fata morgana: positivism in nineteenth-century French biology

3. Biology in the University: the success of marine biology leads but to paradigm lost

4. The industrial connection of University science

5. Science in agriculture: an increasing role in the new land of plenty

6. Science in the catholic universities

7. Scientific publication: the flood of monographs, books, and journals unleashed by the new research imperative in schools and societies

8. Science funding in the twentieth century: laying the foundations of the science empire

9. The denouement of the 1930s: a new scientific function for the state

Notes

Bibliography

Index.