Introduction to the Special Issue Free

Abstract

This special issue demonstrates how investigating topics related to the histories of science and technology illuminates themes of enduring importance in French and Francophone historical study—from policing female bodies to expressing patriotic anxieties. By documenting the circulation of people, ideas, information, artifacts, and technology within and beyond the Hexagon, these six articles help rethink French science and technology since the 1700s by problematizing the often-assumed links among science, technology, mobility, and modernity. Instead of seeing moments of change in science or technology as self-evident moments of modernity, the authors show how such moments unleash crosscurrents that pit modernizing projects against moves that resist modernization. Rather than any linear relationship between science and technology, on the one hand, and modernity, on the other, these articles stress the consistent, contingent, and contested entanglement of these terms. Reflecting the history of science's shift away from great men and often state-sponsored sciences, they emphasize applied, “minor,” and popular sciences practiced by individuals beyond the academically trained. Here, users and consumers of science and technology are often as important as its producers, and observers outside the magic circle of professionals debate the stakes in and value of innovations—from decrying moral perils to legitimating imperial projects.

A French female painter disturbed by the human viscera in a waxwork Venus on display in an Italian museum . . . a master taxidermist packing up his natural history collection for shipment to Scotland . . . the skeptical greeting of British gaslight technology in Restoration Paris . . . an exiled Communard enclosing a vocabulary list of an Indigenous people in a letter home . . . well-heeled tourists motoring through French North Africa . . . a female pedestrian experiencing an urgent call of nature in Paris . . .

What do these vignettes, evoked by the articles in this issue, have in common? Quite a lot, it turns out. First, they demonstrate how investigating topics related to the histories of science and technology illuminates themes of enduring importance in French and Francophone historical study, from policing female bodies to expressing patriotic anxieties. Documenting the ceaseless circulation of people, ideas, information, artifacts, and technology within and beyond the Hexagon, they do more than help us rethink French science and technology since the 1700s: they problematize the often-assumed links among science, technology, mobility, and modernity. Instead of seeing moments of change in science or technology as self-evident moments of modernity, they show how such change unleashes crosscurrents that pit modernizing projects against moves to contest and resist modernization. Therefore, rather than any linear relationship between science and technology, on the one hand, and modernity, on the other, this issue stresses the consistent, contingent, and contested entanglement of these terms. Reflecting the history of science's shift away from great men and major, often state-sponsored sciences, these articles emphasize applied, “minor,” and popular sciences practiced by individuals beyond the academically trained. As such, they disrupt easy distinctions between mental and manual labor, the head and the hand. In these articles, users and consumers of science and technology are often as important as its producers, and observers outside the magic circle of professionals and experts debate the stakes in and value of innovations, from decrying moral perils, often centered on gender, to legitimating imperial projects.

In short, these six articles demonstrate how science and technology have been woven into the fabric of French society and culture. The remainder of this introduction highlights some of the main themes that thread through the issue, intertwining with one another and with other scholarly concerns. Suggestive rather than exhaustive, this introduction is also an appreciation of the conceptual richness of the whole created by these six articles and an invitation to scholars of French and Francophone histories to pursue such concepts in their own work.

Mobilities: National and Imperial Trajectories

Several articles here test the connections that scholars have often assumed exist among science, technology, modernity, and mobility by exploring whether those connections persist when entangled with national identity and empire. Historians and social scientists have often claimed that mobility is both a defining feature and a generator of modernity. Whether we call it globalization, David Harvey's “compression” of time and space, Wolfgang Schivelbusch's “industrialization” of time and space, or the nineteenth-century term annihilation of time and space, mobility signals an accelerating, shrinking, and interconnected world.¹ At the same time, science and technology have also been proposed as defining aspects of modernity. What happens when we put these two arguments together? On the one hand, mobility appears as a necessary support for developing science and technology. The practices that make modern science and technology presume a highly mobile world, fit for a wide-ranging transit of people, specimens, data, and ideas. On the other hand, mobility can be seen as a consequence of science and technology, an outcome of powerful ideas, practices, and instruments that accelerate and disenchant the modern world.

Taking different forms, mobility literally generated the author's subject in each of these articles. Yotam A. Tsal shows in “Exporting French Nature” how Louis Dufresne's extensive natural history collection would not even have existed without the long-standing, continuously ramifying networks that brought specimens and scientific information into Paris from around the globe.² In Elizabeth Della Zazzera's article “The Illumination of Restoration Paris,” a German inventor, Frederick Albert Winsor, brought the gas lamps he had pioneered in London to Paris, where they would enhance the mobility, safety, and surveillance of inhabitants at night. Years later in “Louise Michel et les savoirs de l'exil,” a Communard exiled to New Caledonia paradoxically found in constraint “the rest required to think, to feel alive, to read, to write, and ‘to exist a bit as a free being.’” Volny Fages, Jérôme Lamy, and Florian Mathieu show how she used intellectual and revolutionary epistolary networks to send news of her botanical, ethnographic, and pedagogical endeavors home. In the Haussmannized Paris of Louise Thiroux's “Les toilettes pour dames s'emparent du macadam,” women traverse new boulevards that promoted pedestrian and other forms of mobility while still lacking in 1870 public facilities for relieving themselves that men had enjoyed since the July Monarchy. In “Automobiles, Entrepreneurs, and Empire,” Zohar Sapir Dvir writes that “where France expanded its colonial presence, French tourists followed”—and they preferred to do so in automobiles, which required the creation of physical and mental infrastructure, such as roads and travel guides.

As “modernity” exists in relation to a “past” from which it has allegedly progressed or decisively broken, it inevitably acquires meanings and prompts value judgments that at first blush appear quite foreign to the brute facts, say, of a preserved bird or a carburetor. Thus the sale of Dufresne's collection to the University of Edinburgh was both material as embodied in seashells, bugs, and other natural specimens, and conceptual in Dufresne's proposed layout for its new home and his long-definitive manual on taxidermy. While the collection asserted the global empire of French science, it also became a source of national pride for the Scottish institution that purchased it. A revolutionary feminist on her way to anarchism, Michel obviously found much to reject in the modern republican empire that consigned her quite literally to its margins. Nevertheless, although she empathized with the situation of the Kanaks among whom she lived and sought to change European perceptions of them as cannibals, she remained captive of a stadial view of human history that dovetailed with, even facilitated, the oppression of non-Europeans. Let us imagine, too, the car packed with French tourists evoked by Sapir Dvir's research, speeding past Roman ruins in North Africa. Such a scene was potentially edifying to the tourists on two counts: first, the French resumption of an ancient imperial project; second, their surpassing of it.

Yet Della Zazzera's article on street lighting in Paris shows how claims to modernity can be challenged. A period dubbed “Restoration” by people living through it was bound to have a complex relationship with any technology identified as “modern.” Thus, people on the political Right and Left expressed ambivalence toward or simply rejected gas lights, which were already suspect because of their British origins. Romantic critics, who were also suspect because of their foreign inspiration, could condemn gas lights as merely “new,” thus unnecessary and unworthy of a truly modern, “restored” French monarchy. And while gaslight would make navigating the city at night easier, it would also facilitate the surveillance of its increasingly mobile population. The gaslight debates thus reproduce a familiar ambivalence about technological change that gripped the industrial age as contemporaries juggled enthusiasm for and fear of modernizing technologies.³

Thiroux shows how ambivalence toward modernity was literally built into the architecture of the first “chalets” that served as public lavatories for women.⁴ On the one hand, gas lights had now become synonymous with modernity, and they illuminated comfort stations whose gleaming interiors of marble and porcelain implemented the dictates of modern hygienic ideas. Yet the design of the first such structures was an urbanophobic “engineering fiction,” evoking “the alleged healthful virtues of the mountains,” according to Thiroux; in our view, these “Swiss” chalets also brought the nineteenth-century altitude cure to Paris, albeit with a surprising and somewhat scatological twist.⁵

In short, these articles confirm that modernity and technology form a “compelling tangle”⁶ while demonstrating how that entanglement eschews tidy, predictable relationships. They confirm, too, that modern France was a high-stakes battleground for modernity because of the ideological diversity of French political culture, as Della Zazzera shows.⁷ In such contests, science and technology made modernity not more secure but more embattled.

Gender and Bodies: Moral Panics and Pedagogies

Thiroux's article and Margaret Carlyle's “Women and Anatomy Education in Enlightenment France” also encourage us to think about how technological innovations centering on the female body—its “nature” and its alleged capacity to provoke disorder—made the museum and the public lavatory places of moral peril despite their explicitly stated purposes of edification and education, on the one hand, and relief in safety and privacy, on the other.

Scholarship exploring the nexus of gender, women, and medicine in the early modern period is well established and very rich.⁸ During the eighteenth century some individuals had more generous views of female capacities than Thiroux's medical writers in the nineteenth. Nevertheless, erroneous beliefs about the “nature” of the female body—hence the “nature” of women—persisted even as the Galenic synthesis gave way to new medical views. “Progressive” pedagogues such as Mme. de Genlis believed that girls should have knowledge of their own bodies as they transitioned into their social roles of marriage and child rearing—and some philosophers, such as Denis Diderot, agreed. An especially powerful way to communicate that knowledge was through closely monitored and carefully scaffolded encounters with detailed anatomical waxwork models of the female body, such as those constructed by Marie-Marguerite Biheron. Displays featuring these waxworks figured in other efforts to engage a wider public in science, such as lecture-demonstrations, though sometimes the perceived sensationalism of these events undercut their serious objectives. According to Carlyle, the finely crafted models meant to “bring women and otherwise genteel audiences into the fold of human anatomy without offending their polite sensibilities” could be confused with more “pedestrian” versions, that is, “the late-century fairground knock-offs or the models displayed in the ‘salons de cire’ found in the entertainment districts of cosmopolitan cities like Paris.”⁹ This fact, combined with the abundant production of libertine literature, aroused the suspicions of more conservatively minded individuals. They “viewed [such displays] as a cover for immorality and an easy outlet for debauchery”—suspicions that, of course, the notorious marquis de Sade was happy to confirm. In other words, if we posed the question “Can women be educated into the ‘facts’ of sexuality without being corrupted?” to Biheron's contemporaries, many would have responded with a resounding “No!”

Public lavatories for women were meant to serve the needs of the female corps pissant, but they also figured in the Haussmannization of Paris and the implementation of new imperatives of public hygiene. The latter could be perceived as particularly urgent given widespread belief in the “degeneration” of the nation; it also resulted in the oppression of social groups considered undesirable, such as prostitutes, to contain the spread of venereal disease.¹⁰ Yet there could be more benign effects—if for the wrong reasons. Thiroux documents how medical theorists who maintained that the female body was “le lieu des excès, des hystéries, des maladies,” and other problems also worried about “la bonne santé des vessies et plus généralement des organes reproducteurs.” In other words, for the sake of their health, women should simply not have to hold it in. The creation of pissoirs for men had similar medical justifications, as Andrew Israel Ross shows.¹¹ His work also suggests that the city fathers, when initiating the female comfort stations, could hardly have been surprised that containing bacterial contagion was easier than containing social contagion—especially its challenges to bourgeois values. As pissoirs had become a site for homosexual encounters, so it was feared that women's facilities would become a theater of homosexuality, prostitution, theft, murder, and suicide. Enter the gardienne of a new style of chalet, who was charged with surveilling the clientele and reinforcing the moral standards, which the structures were intended to instill in their users.¹²

In short, these artifacts—anatomical models and toilets—prompted social concerns and agendas, often expressed in moralizing terms. In the world Carlyle describes, the young woman tutored properly in her own anatomy would be better equipped for her socially appropriate, morally upright role as a wife, ready to assume her conjugal and child-bearing duties—or, corrupted, she would become licentious, an enemy of her own happiness (correctly understood) and a source of social disorder. In Thiroux's Paris, the impetus for women's public facilities stemmed from a larger program to manage waste, thus making it a healthier place. Yet because personal cleanliness was considered a measure of bourgeois respectability, comfort stations equipped with an increasing number of conveniences beyond the toilet mimicked the interior of bourgeois homes and architecturally tutored lower-class (hence socially deficient) females in the actions of a proper woman. But this “improving” social agenda was undermined when the public lavatory became a potential site for salacious, rather than clean, edifying behaviors. In sum, artifacts designed to educate about the “nature” and needs of the female body were believed to have the power to cue or modify certain behaviors in morally desirable or undesirable ways.

Applied and Popular Sciences

As history of science has moved away from the history of great men, it has simultaneously moved away from the assumption that professional scientists are the only (important) actors in the scientific past. Thus this special issue tells us almost nothing about famous scientists like Louis Pasteur and Marie Curie. While present here, doctors and engineers are sometimes antagonists rather than protagonists. Following currents in the social history of science and technology, these articles blur distinctions between mental and manual labor. They also hold that the users or consumers of science and technology are as worthy of scholarly consideration as its producers. If we accept that knowledge is made by diverse groups rather than by privileged individuals, then we raise significant questions about the boundaries of science. The articles in this issue explore these boundaries by examining applied and popular sciences, with the article on Louise Michel providing a nice review of historical literature on popular science.¹³

As we make these methodological moves, scholars must take care in translating the word science from French to English. In everyday terms, English science means the natural or physical sciences, while in French science means professional scholarship or knowledge making, a broader notion closer to the German Wissenschaft. Meanwhile, in scholarly terms, Anglophone science studies examine a range of natural and social sciences, while French science studies have traditionally focused on historicizing the natural or physical sciences. These varied and layered definitions of science/science help explain why recent historical research on the sciences has closely watched how historical actors defined and contested “science” while documenting how such definitions shift over time.¹⁴ Historical actors and scholars alike have devoted close attention to the questions of which fields of inquiry are part of “science,” who gets to participate in these fields, and with what authority. The articles by Carlyle, Tsal, Thiroux, and Fages et al. make important contributions to this conversation.¹⁵

Tsal and Fages et al. illustrate the recent scholarly trend of studying the applied sciences, deemphasizing “pure” science, such as the production of theories. These articles examine both descriptive and experimental methods in fields from botany, zoology, and taxidermy to ethnography and pedagogy as they relate them to social-historical questions about networking and gatekeeping. Who gets to participate in science: Taxidermists? Globetrotting specimen collectors? Exiled revolutionaries? Carlyle joins Fages et al. in tracing both the limits of women's and girls’ participation in science and their efforts to access science in careful and creative ways. A related question for us is: Where and when do social networks, especially those that reach overseas, go from being legitimate and powerful, such as Dufresne's, to being illegitimate and marginalized, such as Michel's? Our contributors also show how professional science and popular science overlap consistently, but not always comfortably. The practice and practitioners of science, therefore, circulate not only among labs, fields, and scientific institutions but also in and out of museums, penal colonies, and people's homes. Michel was exiled for her participation in the Paris Commune, a punishment that was supposed to cut her off from French imperial social networks. But as the article demonstrates, her exile resulted not in disconnection but in different connections to France and to the world. We might also ask: Did she desire to maintain connections to the social networks behind mainstream science, or was she turning instead toward an alternative science, a revolutionary science, a subversive science? Finally, her case raises the question of how the social sciences change broader definitions of science.

Thiroux deals with hygiene as a stimulus to architectural and technical choices, as well as to social and moral ones. Hygiene was a prominent applied science in nineteenth-century France, as relevant in public toilets as it was in scientific academies or publications. Bruno Latour described hygiene as “a social movement of gigantic proportions that declared itself ready to take charge of everything.”¹⁶ But despite hygiene's towering ambitions to transform bodies, morals, society, and environments, it failed to establish itself through institutionalization and professionalization as a fully fledged scientific discipline. Rather, it became what Lion Murad and Patrick Zylberman called a “thwarted utopia,” which retreated into quotidian problems of cleaning bodies, behaviors, and bidets.¹⁷ Because hygiene could not wrest its objects and methods of study away from competing fields of biology and medicine, by 1900 it was less a discipline of its own than an applied version of other sciences, a constellation of practices in bathing, grooming, housekeeping, medicine, and public health.¹⁸

Artifacts and Networks

In contrast to a special issue on mobility of French Historical Studies published in 2006, this issue shifts from state-directed mobility to freer-flowing movement, and it includes moving things alongside moving people.¹⁹ It demonstrates how much mobility studies has evolved since its early days two decades ago, and how it has intersected with the scholarly interest in artifacts and networks and applied and popular sciences described above. The articles gathered here illustrate scholarship's increasing focus on concrete artifacts (material culture)—not only in histories of medicine and technology, where it might be expected, but also in the history of science, where artifacts are increasingly integrated into understandings of how knowledge is created. Teaching tools, visual aids, models, specimens, and instruments are strikingly mobile; they circulate through different contexts and different hands, in which they assume different meanings and consequences.²⁰

The authors in this issue tell stories that connect the concrete artifacts of science and technology with the mobility of people and things: taxidermists and tourists, specimens, guidebooks, wax models, water, and gas. Carlyle shows how wax anatomical models changed symbolically and morally as they moved from boudoir to parlor, museum, university, or hospital. Tsal details a global transit in specimens brought from around the world to France before being sold to Scotland. Sapir Dvir shows how cars, maps, and guidebooks circulated between France and North Africa while enabling the movement of people, whether colonizers or tourists. In Della Zazzera's and Thiroux's articles, the gaslights and toilets obviously did not move, but they functioned because of the circulation of water and gas, and they shaped how people circulated through Paris streets. Della Zazzera's illumination burned gas delivered through a network of pipes unlike their predecessors, the oil lamps (reverbères) with their individual reservoirs of oil. Thiroux's toilets, objects of intense concern, illustrate how French hygienists obsessed over the circulation of air, water, and waste as fundamental facets of their discipline, guaranteed by the careful design of drainage and ventilation.

Because artifacts traveled across networks of various kinds, the theme of networks threads through this issue in multiple ways. First were the overseas shipping networks that tied together France's empire and reached beyond it, for example, in the global search for scientific specimens. Steering flows of people, commodities, resources, and information in and out of France, ships, waters, and ports were the sinews of globalization both before and after steam power. Second, on a smaller infrastructural scale, networks of pipes routed water, gas, and other resources through Paris. Third were the social networks of scientific collaboration and communication, the ties that bound the republics of letters and of science. Finally, there were the revolutionary networks, both transimperial and radical, with important roots in Paris, that connected Louise Michel with the global community of the far left.²¹ These varied types of networks overlapped but also played distinct roles. Shipping networks served entrepreneurs, colonists, specimen collectors, and tourists (not to mention bureaucrats and imperialists). The social networks of science, whether amateur or expert, facilitated exchanges of people, texts, specimens, and ideas beyond France. These networks linked France with peer institutions in Edinburgh and Vienna, endeared the Swiss chalet to French engineers and hygienists, and solicited data and specimens from practitioners operating worldwide. Among radical intellectuals like Michel, networks helped sustain a revolutionary community of scholars who believed that another science was possible.

The multiple mobilities illuminated in this issue comprise moving people and moving things, largely outside the domain of state-directed mobility of colonial expeditions, trade agreements, troop movements, and diplomatic exchanges. The ramifying global networks of France's expanding empire were crosscut by transnational and transimperial networks that suggest what French historians can learn by looking beyond France and its empire.

Decentering the State

Statism used to be state-of-the-art in French history and in French history of science. The contrast between Britain's independent Royal Society (1660) and France's state Academy of Sciences (1666) is a familiar one.²² While centralization remains an important dynamic across early modern and modern French history, this issue indicates a relative decentering of the state in histories of science and technology. Although these articles still show state involvement, the state neither drove nor determined the changes in science and technology explored in these articles. Not surprisingly, then, the authors also pursue science and technology outside of scientific institutions. Even though France's national museum of natural history remains prominent in “Exporting French Nature,” Tsal makes clear that this institution could not have functioned without the help of a diverse global network of collaborators, both nonstate and non-French actors. In addition to formal public-private partnerships (such as state contracts or concessions), these articles also document informal collaboration of state and nonstate actors. In Sapir Dvir's article, tourists and sellers of cars, tires, guidebooks, and vacations contributed to France's colonization of north Africa without any formal partnership with the state; rather, they were inspired by patriotism, profit, the civilizing mission, a sense of adventure, and combinations thereof. While science and technology are important objects of humanistic study because they serve as tools of state power, some of that power is soft power. A related consequence of decentering the state is revising our sense of which institutions matter in histories of science and technology—both those outside the public sector (the state institutionally speaking) and those outside the nation and its empire (the state territorially speaking). Decentering the state works against narrow institutionalism and encourages transnational perspectives; both approaches are featured in this issue.

Another consequence of decentering the state is deemphasizing revolution and regime change. Although four of our six articles are nineteenth-century studies, the recurring revolutions of that century do not appear prominently in these articles. The violence of the Revolution, the Napoleonic years, and the Commune is always in the historical background, because significant moments in scientific and technological change do not line up with important moments of regime change. For example, what John Tresch called “Romantic” science and technology continued apace before and after the revolution of 1830, pre-Pasteurian hygiene extended before and after the cholera epidemics of 1832 and 1849, and Latour's Pasteurian hygiene continued across the breach of 1870.²³ The decentering of the state therefore indicates how finely grained histories of science and technology can revise our sense of chronology and periodization. This pattern is quite striking in the nineteenth century in which ostensible moments of historical rupture have tended to overdetermine how we divide the past and whether we see continuity or discontinuity in historical narratives. Not all breaks in history correspond with crisis moments in state power.

Conclusion

These articles document conflicts and disagreements that haunted science and technology in France, in its empire, and beyond from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Inevitably, they resonate with our ongoing culture wars, heirs to the “science wars” of the 1990s. Here we are not encouraging facile analogies, much less proposing naive lessons of the past. That said, if we agree that the study of history opens a space for reflection on concerns agitating us now, and if we cautiously pursue historical analogies, these articles provide fascinating fodder for thinking about current-day themes.

First, they urge us to think about how scientific and technological innovations, coming hard and fast, get wrapped up in and are often explicitly marketed for ideological ends. Technological hype characterized 1820s gaslight boosters, 1880s sewerage reformers, and 1920s automobile promoters. Yet why don't more of us ask, as the 1820s Romantics did, whether an innovation is merely new, rather than necessary—and perhaps even inimical to our society's well-being? These stories reveal familiar rhetorics of technological optimism and optimization often applied to artificial intelligence (AI) today. What does it say about us that our contemporary debate about AI is dominated by corporations that will profit the most from it and whose views are amplified by their control of digital communication and the social prestige accorded capitalist leadership?

Fraught questions of water and public hygiene link the Third Republic's public toilets for ladies with last summer's debate over cleaning up the Seine for Olympic swimming. Both sets of questions were inspired by the environmental impact of sewers from Paris and other cities upstream. In the summer of 2024, as Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo plunged into the river and emerged unscathed, cheeky Parisians were conspiring to defecate in it while news stories flickered that swimmers from Belgium, Germany, Ireland, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, and Switzerland got stomach bugs after swimming there. Mobilities abounded. As bacteria, athletes, and the mayor circulated in the river, rumors circulated in the media, animating contests over water quality, swimmer safety, local politics, and international relations. Amid all this conspicuous circulation, and as the world watched Paris, who was to decide which waters were clean or safe enough?²⁴

The fact that the nation of Pasteur, once so proud of its role in developing modern vaccines, confronts a growing antivaccine movement in the age of COVID-19 urges us to historicize the faith, hope, and trust invested in science and technology and the social power of expertise. As noted above, these articles frequently show individuals outside the charmed circle of professional experts who challenged them and even made science on their own. We now live in a world of citizen science movements, for such causes as environmental justice or health care reform, alongside antiscience movements for undermining vaccines or action against climate change. How do we balance skepticism, a democratic openness to views beyond the professionally sanctioned, and the intellectual authority of professionals, on whom we depend for the next vaccine and energy-saving innovations? More important, how do we encourage our students to do so?

Carlyle's article demonstrates particularly well how pedagogical programs intended to communicate scientific knowledge through new technologies in new venues generate conflicts as well as hopes, which inevitably connect with debates over values that, in their most acute form, spark moral panics. Finding contemporary examples is like shooting fish in a barrel, but these examples are complicated by the increasing flexibility and complexity of both bodies and behaviors, both sex and gender. In other words, we can expect conflicts over the nature of the body and the roles it allegedly suits us to become, if anything, more ubiquitous and intractable, pitting ideals of individual happiness or health on the one hand against fears of moral collapse on the other.

Our toggling between past and present here is no more exhaustive than our pursuit of this issue's themes, which resemble so many threads in a richly colored and textured fabric. Like the articles in this issue, it potentially suggests additional research questions about science, technology, modernity, and mobility in French and Francophone history. What other artifacts produced through scientific and technological innovation can scholars similarly leverage to excavate the moral stakes people in the past perceived in them? Innovators more often than not have swathed their innovations in promises of improvement, so it is the business of historians to ask “What improvement? Defined by whom, for whom, and to what end?” We have mentioned the decentering of the state and the role of marginality, allegedly justified on the basis of gender, race, and civilizational backwardness, in knowledge production. If Sapir Dvir's article decenters the state in French pursuit of imperial goals, what does it mean when transnational capitalistic entities begin to matter more in technological and scientific research? What is the impact on the promise of a more democratic production of knowledge? Can we be sanguine about such developments, as science and technology are arguably important drivers of social change, potentially affecting the lives of everyone on the planet? As these articles show, science and technology have never spoken for themselves in any historical moment. Rather, human beings continuously contested their meanings, assessed them in the contexts of their politics, their societies, their economies, their cultures, from the perspectives of their social situations, aspirations, and fears. All of this makes topics in these areas not just fruitful for French and Francophone historians but crucially important.

Acknowledgments

We offer our warmest thanks to Carol Harrison, the editors and staff of FHS, the referees and contributors to this issue for helping us make the project successful.

Notes

References