A filiation of learning connects the Encyclopédistes of the third quarter of the eighteenth century to Napoleon’s technocrats of the first quarter of the nineteenth century. The two groups and their intermediaries all prized technical knowledge. So, too, did the virtuosos. The common purpose of amassing technical knowledge seemed to be to increase one’s power over one’s world.

The publication of Diderot and d’Alembert’s thirty-five-volume Encyclopédie between 1751 and 1780 constituted an imposing campaign on behalf of practical, specialized learning. The Encyclopédie’s subtitle, Dic-tionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts, et des métiers, might be translated as “systematic enumeration of the sciences, arts, and manual trades.” The word “systematic” implies a system, and to the philosophes the word “raisonné” implied their particular system, the application of human reason to the material world. Historian Robert Darnton contrasts the system opposed by the philosophes with their own: “Diderot and d’Alembert did not seek out the hand of God in the world but rather studied men at work.” ^[18] The Encyclopédie’s twelve volumes of plates depict in great detail the workshops, tools, methods, and products of an extensive range of physical labors. D’Alembert’s “Discours préliminaire” disregards theologians and other purely mental laborers, venturing the revolutionary idea that “it is perhaps among artisans that one must look for the most admirable manifestations of the sagacity, the patience, and the resources of the mind.” ^[19]

The Académie des Sciences put out an even larger compilation of industrial, craft, and occupational techniques and lore, the seventy-three-volume Description des arts et métiers of 1761–88, at least one edition of which appeared under the slogan-title Description et perfection des arts et métiers. The Paris publisher Panckoucke weighed in with a reorganized and expanded version of the work of Diderot and d’Alembert, the 166-volume and half-century long Encyclopédie méthodique of 1782–1832, for which thirty more volumes were projected. But the most massive monument to the new knowledge was a work organized by Berliner Johann Krünitz, the 242-volume Oekonomisch-technologische Encyklopädie whose publication sprawled across eighty-five years, from 1773 to 1858. The Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert also inspired the two encyclopedias that have proven most enduring, because of their broader appeal, the Encyclopædia Britannica, whose three-volume first edition ap-peared in 1769–71, and the Brockhaus Conversations-Lexikon, whose eight-volume first edition appeared in 1809–11; both have been continually revised and republished over the past two centuries and are still in print. Thomas Carlyle complained in 1833 of the “exaggerated laudation of Encyclopedism.” ^[20] In the West, the encyclopedia of technical knowledge, a work of many volumes produced by the collaboration of many experts, was a creation of the second half of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century.

The Encyclopédistes’ belief in the superiority of practical, specialized learning led them to argue for educational reform. Indeed, publications on this subject by them and other reformers constitute a recognized genre of Enlightenment literature. Rousseau’s Émile, ou De l’éducation, published in 1762 but banned in France until 1770, had the greatest popularity and remains the most famous of these works. Also influential were Louis-René de La Chalotais’ Essai d’éducation nationale (1763), Joseph Priestley’s Essay on a Course of Liberal Education (1764), and Diderot’s Plan d’une université pour le gouvernement de Russie (1775). Significantly for their views on education, Rousseau was the son of a watchmaker, Priestley the son of a cloth finisher, and Diderot the son of a cutler. Rousseau’s compatriot and follower Johann Pestalozzi successfully ran a series of schools emphasizing learning through concrete experiences that had a wide influence on primary education in both Europe and the United States.^[21]

It may be a myth that Napoleon’s generalship developed in school snowball fights,^[22] but it is true that technical education in France snowballed out of the army. The opening of the École Royale Militaire (Royal Military Academy) in 1751 opened the second half of the eighteenth century, a period in which, according to historian Frederick Artz, “The interest in all aspects of military science was enormous; in the writings in this field the French outdistanced all other European peoples both in originality and in influence.” The first comprehensive artillery school was established in 1756 with a curriculum that united theory and practical exercises. “From the artillery schools, this method of instruction passed into the advanced technical schools of the later eighteenth century and thence into the École Polytechnique.” ^[23] Here is a key not only to Napoleon’s—and France’s—successes on the battlefield, but also to his administrative and social policies.

The revolutionaries founded the École Polytechnique, a national engineering college, and the École Normale Supérieure, a national teacher-training college. These two colleges composed the nucleus of what came to be a small set of Grandes Écoles.^[24] The Grandes Écoles, all located in Paris, have educated the French elite for the past two centuries. The revolutionaries also founded écoles des arts et métiers, or trade schools. Indeed, Artz concludes:

Inspired by many of the same motives that led to the creation of the écoles des arts et métiers and of the Conservatoire was a whole series of special educational enterprises which were set up in the decade 1793 to 1803. The French faith that anything could be improved by found-ing a school to teach it led to the opening of new schools for soldiers, sailors, midwives, pharmacists, veterinarians, schoolteachers, the blind, deaf-mutes, students of the fine arts, of music, and of living oriental languages, miners, and agriculturalists.^[25]

Or was the French faith that led to the opening of these new schools the faith that anything could be mastered with the help of a trained corps?

France still led the world in science during the reign of Napoleon,^[26] even though the revolutionaries had guillotined the father of modern chemistry, Antoine Lavoisier, and had fatally incarcerated the long-time secretary of the Académie Royale des Sciences, the marquis de Condorcet, both of whom died in 1794 at the age of fifty-one. Napoleon strongly supported scientific and technical education. He opened more trade schools and several schools of mines. He reorganized the university system, adding for the first time a faculty of sciences. He raised the number of medical faculties in France from three to seven. To Napoleon education essentially meant technical training and the inculcation of discipline. He wanted skilled but obedient subjects and favored independent thinking only in confined areas. He neglected primary schools, reorganized public secondary schools along military lines, and tried to limit advanced and specialized schools to professional or occupational training.^[27] Channeled in education, the same will to control produced French superiority in military science, natural science, and an array of technical fields.^[28]

The practice of systematically drawing on technical experts for government administration can be traced back at least to the first government of Louis XVI, the Turgot ministry of 1774–76. A.-R.-J. Turgot was an Encyclopédiste and economist. “To bring forward the expert and give him the authority there where interest and routine misgoverned, that was the thrust of his administrative purpose,” argues historian of science C. C. Gillispie. As an example, Gillispie cites Turgot’s creation of the Régie des Poudres (Gunpowder Administration) and his appointment of Lavoisier as one of the Régisseurs, in 1775. At that time France produced only half of the saltpeter, the principal ingredient in gunpowder, consumed by its military and had to import the other half. By 1788, as a result of the reforms for which Lavoisier was mainly responsible, France had become totally self-sufficient in saltpeter, and its gunpowder had become both the best in Europe and less expensive than in 1775.^[29]

Although the revolutionary governments contained more men of the law, one of the old liberal arts, than members of any other occupational group,^[30] men of science exercised an influence disproportionate to their numbers. Jean-Paul Marat, the Jacobin firebrand, had been a physician and physicist. Jean-Marie Roland de La Platière, minister of the interior in 1792–93, had had a long career as an inspector of manufactories, like Vau-canson, and had written numerous monographs on a variety of French industries with proposals for their modernization. Lazare Carnot, “organisateur de la victoire” of the armies of revolutionary France over those of monarchical Europe, had been an army engineer. The revolutionary governments also delegated to scientists particular projects, for example, the development of a rational system of weights and measures to be used throughout France, where in the eighteenth century almost every region, and in some regions almost every town, had its own system. A committee that included the chemist Lavoisier and the mathematicians Monge, Laplace, and Lagrange devised the metric system, the system used today not only throughout France, but throughout the world. The revolutionaries encouraged science and technology by enacting patent law, by establishing the industrial exposition, by founding technical schools, and by reconstituting the art-favoring academies of the Old Regime as the sciencefavoring Institut National des Sciences et des Arts. In this reorganization, they suppressed the most prestigious of the Old Regime academies, the Académie Française, and incorporated three others, the academy of painting and sculpture, the academy of architecture, and the academy of music, into one “class” of the Institut, the “class for literature and the fine arts.” Moreover, they made this the second class of the Institut, while they made the “class for physical and mathematical sciences,” the new version of the old Académie Royale des Sciences, the first class.^[31] The control of nature had become more important than the imitation of nature.

The artillery officer Napoleon Bonaparte was elected to the first class of the Institut two years before he became first consul, and he always prized that membership, which gave him the status of an elite technician. When he led his famous expedition to Egypt, he took with his army the equivalent of a small polytechnical institute, including two leading mathematician-physicists, Fourier and Monge. As first consul, then emperor, he appointed individuals to high office who lacked administrative experience but who had shown themselves to be brilliant scientists or masters of some technical discipline, such as the mathematician Laplace, the chemist Chaptal, the physician-chemist Fourcroy, and the naturalist Lacépède. These were not always Napoleon’s most successful appointments, but they do say something about his conception of government. He also rewarded technological pioneers, employing Nicolas-Jacques Conté, the first to put graphite in a pencil, and offering a million francs to anyone who could perfect the mechanical spinning of linen and hemp. In the words of one of his private secretaries, “the emperor loved technical men.” Surveying the administrative reforms of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, C. C. Gillispie observes: “The historian has become used to seeing a movement from aristocracy toward liberalism and democracy in all these developments, whereas what needs to be perceived is a movement from bureaucracy toward technocracy.” ^[32]

The publication of voluminous encyclopedias of the sciences, arts, and trades, the reorientation of education toward practical, specialized learning, and the employment and encouragement of experts by government all promoted the desirability of acquiring technical knowledge and the importance of showing what one had acquired. In the ordinary course of their work, experts exhibited their knowledge, but not necessarily comprehensively. Many experts also published repertoires of techniques, and the virtuosos published some of the most extensive of these repertoires.

Philidor’s Analyse du jeu des échecs aimed at comprehensiveness in two dimensions of chess analysis. The original 1749 edition analyzes only a few chess games, but it analyzes them from start to finish, including in each case several branches of possible play in addition to the main line. In his preface, Philidor complains of the incompleteness of the works of his predecessors:

I return now to Don Pietro Carrera, who, to all appearances, served as the model for Greco and for other authors; however, neither he nor any of the others have given us (in spite of their great prolixity) anything but very imperfect instruction, quite insufficient to train a good player. They have only applied themselves to the openings of games, and then abandoned us to study by ourselves the endings, so that the player remains almost as lost as if he had had to open the game with-out instruction.^[33]

Philidor knew well that his discussion of situations at every stage of the game gave his analysis an unprecedented longitudinal comprehensiveness, an achievement that made his treatise both important and popular. The expanded edition of 1777 contains both individual endgame analyses and an innovative section called “Observations sur les fins de parties” (Obser-vations on Endgames), which specifies for fifteen different types of endgames, defined by the material forces confronting each other, whether the more powerful side should win or only draw. Philidor’s systematization of endgame study reduced a large number of possible endgame situations to a small number of types, each of which was susceptible of analysis as a unit. Furthermore, using his method, other types of endgames in addition to his fifteen could be defined and analyzed, and have been. Philidor’s innovation postulated the complete analysis of one stage of the game of chess, an unprecedented latitudinal comprehensiveness. The further-expanded edition of 1790, the last worked on by Philidor, contains more complete game analyses, more endgame analyses, and the records of the games played in three of his blindfold exhibitions, a state-of-the-art treatise.^[34]

Among chess masters whose lives overlapped Philidor’s, neither his mentor Légal, nor his successor Deschapelles, nor any of his strongest contemporaries in Britain published a chess treatise, although four of his strongest contemporaries in France did collaborate on one.^[35] By contrast, in the first half of the nineteenth century Labourdonnais, Alexandre, and Kieseritzky in France and Sarratt, Lewis, and Cochrane in Britain all produced at least one chess treatise apiece. For the leading players to publish had become the norm. Experts displayed their knowledge as well as their skill.

Cookbooks had always been repertoires of techniques, unlike chess treatises. Before Philidor’s, most chess treatises explained good moves in terms of the very particular configuration of the game in which they occurred, when they bothered to explain them at all, or else gave only the most general principles.^[36] Guidance closely tailored to a unique situation tends to be nearly inapplicable, the uselessness of History, while guidance applicable to many situations tends to be nebulous, the uselessness of Philosophy. Philidor’s pioneering endgame studies balanced applicability and specificity, maximizing their usefulness and making his treatise a true repertoire of techniques. Cookbooks have rarely ever taken either a historical approach, describing the preparation of particular dishes as unique events, or a philosophical approach, expounding a system of gustatory thought. Thus, in producing a culinary repertoire of techniques, Carême did not—did not need to—innovate as Philidor did. On the other hand, Carême’s repertoire had an imperial monumentality lacking to Philidor’s.

The master chef’s L’Art de la cuisine française au XIX^e siècle filled five volumes. This ambitious set of recipes for French cooking, on top of Carême’s two-volume set of recipes for French pastry in Le Pâtissier royal parisien, made a towering collection. One of his contemporaries, an epicurean official of Napoleon’s court, called gastronomy “the art of a thousand resources”:

Good soups abound; take your pick from among the recipes of Carême: There are 500 of them, with or without meat. He has described 200 entrées; 50 garnishes and purées; 500 dishes for whole large fish; 1,000 for beef, fowl, ham, and pork; and 1,000 more delicious preparations of vegetables, fruits, and desserts. It’s really innumerable. This fabulous superabundance can have reality only for the wealthy and their guests.^[37]

The 124 designs for pièces montées in Le Pâtissier pittoresque and the two volumes of menus in calendrical order in Le Maître d’hôtel français are also professional repertoires, although repertoires of ideas rather than repertoires of techniques. Taken as a whole, these four works of Carême approximate an encyclopedia of the culinary arts such as he had originally proposed be done collaboratively by the leading French chefs of his time.

Vidocq’s Les Voleurs (Thieves) is a kind of miniature encyclopedia of the French underworld of his era. Like the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert, its overall organization is that of a dictionary: It is composed of articles that define or explain words of underworld argot, in alphabetical order. Many of the articles are short, consisting of a one-sentence, one-phrase, or even one-word definition. For example, in underworld argot “hospital” meant “prison” and “ill” meant “in prison.” As a dictionary of argot, Les Voleurs is significant for containing a large number of entries and for being one of the first published separately rather than as a glossary appended to another book.^[38] Incidentally, Carême included a glossary of culinary terms in L’Art de la cuisine française au XIX^e siècle. Vidocq’s Les Voleurs contains enough longer articles describing thieves’ methods to justify considering the book in part a repertoire of thieves’ techniques. In fact, when a French historian edited the book for republication a century after its original appearance, he grouped those articles together into one section.^[39] Vidocq explains fifty-odd techniques, some with several variations, of burglars, robbers, sharpers, swindlers, etc., not as in most repertoires, so that the reader may use them, but so that the reader may prevent their use. In this respect it is an “anti-repertoire.” Les Voleurs also contains longer articles that relate the stories of celebrated, unusual, or interesting crimes or portray particular criminals. These stories and portrayals in many cases involve disguises, impersonations, or misrepresentations of oneself. Underlying the dictionary organization of Les Voleurs is a repertoire of deceptions: words with hidden meanings, activities that mask thefts, and people who appear other than they really are.

Robert-Houdin’s Les Tricheries des Grecs dévoilées is also an anti-repertoire. As Vidocq’s dictionary informs us, “Grec” (Greek) signified in argot “cardsharper,” so the title of Robert-Houdin’s book translates as “Tricks of Cardsharpers Exposed.” The first half of the book, like one group of longer articles in Vidocq’s Les Voleurs, consists of narrative episodes showing wrongdoers at work. The second half, entitled “Partie Technique” (Technical Part), is a systematic presentation of some thirty different methods of cheating at cards, concluding with chapters on related subjects such as card tricks in prestidigitation, the psychology of card players, and ethical gray areas in card play. Robert-Houdin published three repertoires of techniques, the how-to-avoid-it compilation Les Tricheries des Grecs dévoilées on cheating at cards and two how-to-do-it compilations, Comment on devient sorcier on sleight of hand and Magie et physique amusante on illusions requiring complex apparatus. Robert-Houdin’s milieu was “play,” ranging from cards among friends to gambling at spa casinos, from parlor tricks to professional prestidigitation, from stage magic to legitimate theater—that is, from play as recreation to play as performance. Robert-Houdin found lying under the milieu of play what Vidocq found lying under the milieu of crime: deception.

Play as performance was the milieu of Paganini and Liszt. Paganini’s 24 capricci, published eight years before he ever left Italy, baffled many contemporary violinists until they were able to see him perform and to read others’ explanations of his methods.^[40] Even today, few pianists venture to perform the middle versions of either the Études d’exécution transcendante or the Grandes études de Paganini of Liszt. Other violinists and pianists may have felt that in published form these works presented unplayable techniques, but the deception lay in their inability to figure out how to do the very difficult, not in any claim of Paganini and Liszt to be able to do the impossible. The incomprehension came from the fact that in written form the pieces are more like repertoires of ideas than repertoires of techniques. They record what Paganini and Liszt were able to do but do not explain how. Only their near-perfect execution of the pieces in concert told others how such pieces could be performed. Paganini and Liszt significantly enlarged instrumental technique by composing music that demanded increased speed, reach, strength, agility, and flexibility in players’ hands and then executing it. For difficulty and comprehensiveness the 24 capricci of Paganini and two sets of transcendental études of Liszt set enduring standards. At the end of the twentieth century musicologist Boris Schwarz could still conclude that Paganini’s caprices “incorporated virtually the entire arsenal of violin technique,” and musicologist Alan Walker could still conclude that “the modern pianist may disparage Liszt’s studies, but he should be able to play them. Otherwise he admits to having a less than total command of the keyboard.” ^[41]

The virtuosos not only acquired an armory of techniques but also recorded what they had acquired. Their repertoires of techniques can be seen most simply as a manifestation of the encyclopedism of the Age of Revolution that was epitomized by multiple-volume compilations of technical knowledge. Their repertoires can also be seen as a form of spectacle-making, especially in the case of Paganini and Liszt’s repertoires, which originated as performance pieces. But all the virtuosos had some audience in mind when they wrote their repertoires. The public had to be pleased. From yet another perspective, the virtuosos’ repertoires can be seen as a form of self-promotion, like their advertisements and autobiographies, two other media they exploited, since all these publications ultimately pointed back to them. Through their repertoires of techniques the virtuosos could compensate for having to bow to the public by demonstrating to that public a quasi-Napoleonic mastery of their world.