The Social Composition of Management

Through its early boards of directors the PGC grew under the casual supervision of some of France's most original and innovative entrepreneurs. Among these were the fourteen principle owners, partners, and directors of the gas firms that had fused to form the company. These pioneers of the gas industry in France had not been members of the conservative Orléan-ist business aristocracy that safely dominated the court and banking circles. Some were clearly outsiders who won great wealth despite, or perhaps as a consequence of, breaking rules. Jacques and Vincent Dubochet,

[27] Ibid., no. 766, report of May 4, 1870; no. 1081, ordre de service no. 180.

[28] Ibid., no. 1070, report of September 25, 1861.

owners of the former Parisian Gas Lighting Company, were born in Switzerland (Vevey) and were well known for their republican principles. They had participated in Carbonari conspiracies in their youth and became wealthy patrons of Léon Gambetta during the Government of Moral Order. Gambetta received financial support from the Dubochets for newspapers and campaigns, most notably during the May 16 (1877) crisis. Vincent's death in 1877 was marked by two distinctions: Leading Opportunist republicans were at his funeral, and he died one of the wealthiest men in France, with an estate worth more than thirty-five million francs.^[29]

Louis Margueritte, the principle architect behind the merger forming the PGC and the owner of the largest pre-merger firm, was another outsider. Born into a family of well-off Rouennais merchants in 1790, Mar-gueritte developed a serious interest in both industry and theater. He claimed to have written a tragedy that the Comédie-Française produced in 1824. Though he entered the gas industry the very next year, his ties to the arts did not dissolve. In fact, he married one Mademoiselle Minette, a former actress at the Vaudeville Theater. He eventually came to own huge estates outside Paris and died one of the largest landlords in the Seine-et-Oise. His fortune was rumored to be eighty million francs.^[30]

Thomas Brunton, another board member and a partner to the merger, was born to English parents in 1793. His father had made a fortune by taking British methods of cotton spinning to Normandy. The Revolution ruined the business, and his father went to prison during the Terror. Brunton's status as an alien was reinforced by his habit—inexcusable to some proper-thinking Frenchmen—of calling himself an engineer even though he lacked a diploma from an appropriate French school. The Imperial administration declined to recommend Brunton for the Légion d'honneur because he did not "enjoy much consideration among industrialists."^[31]

The pioneers of the gas industry were joined on the board by some of the men most responsible for the French "industrial revolution" of the Second Empire. The largest investors in the PGC were Emile and Isaac Pereire, the "best representatives of Saint-Simonian dynamism in service

[29] I. P. T. Bury, Gambetta and the Making of the Third Republic (London, 1973), pp. 111, 307-308, 414, 441. On Dubochet's wealth, see AP, D Q⁷ , nos. 12387-12389, 12396. Jean-Marie Mayeur, Les Débuts de la III République (Paris, 1979), p. 50, refers to Dubochet as the "Mécène des républicains."

[30] Archives nationales, F¹² 5201. On hearsay regarding Margueritte's fortune, see Maurice Charanay, "Le Gaz à Paris," La Revue socialiste 36 (1902): 433.

[31] Archives nationales, F¹² 5098.

of the Imperial economy" according to Guy Palmade.^[32] Though the gas company was less pathbreaking and historically significant than the Pe-reires' Crédit mobilier, one of Europe's first industrial banks, it proved more enduring and profitable. The Pereires brought their circle of business associates and fellow investors to the PGC's board.^[33] Hippolyte Biesta, the director of the Comptoir d'escompte and a collaborator of the Pereires in creating the Crédit mobilier, was on the first board. Alexandre Bixio, who served on the board from 1855 to 1865, also sat on the boards of the Credit mobilier, the Railroad of Northern Spain, and the General Transportation Company, all Pereire projects. Emile's son-in-law, Charles Rhoné, was also a board member. These associations emphasized the ties of the PGC to the men who were shaking up the French economy during its most dynamic era and to other pillars of the new corporate capitalism.^[34]

The Pereire circle continued to encompass most of the leading nationally connected entrepreneurs on the PGC's board even after the failure of the Credit mobilier (in 1867) and the humbling of the family.^[35] In spite of its size and profitability the company never succeeded in forging links to other great names of French capitalism, like Paulin Talabot, Henri Ger-main (of the Crédit lyonnais), Paul-Henri Schneider (of Le Creusot) or the Rothschilds. Only one representative of France's financial aristocray, the Haute Banque, sat on its board—André Dassier.^[36] As the significance of the Pereire group faded on the national scene, the PGC's board lost its entrepreneurial luminaries. In 1864 at least thirteen of the twenty board members served on the boards of other large and important corporations.

[32] Guy Palmade, French Capitalism in the Nineteenth Century , trans. Graeme Holmes (London, 1972), p. 130.

[33] On this circle, see Robert Locke, "A Method for Identifying French Corporate Businessmen," French Historical Studies 10 (1977): 261-292, and lean Autin, Les Frères Peteire (Paris, 1984).

[34] Charles-Joseph-Auguste Vitu, Guide financier: Répertoire général des valeurs financières et industrielles (Paris, 1864), lists the boards of directors of large firms. Note that reference works on French entrepreneurs, even important ones, hardly exist.

[35] AP, V 8 O , no. 726, deliberations of April 2, 1868. Emile and Isaac Pereire resigned from the board in April 1868, but members of the younger generation remained.

[36] Pierre Dupont-Ferrier, Le Marché financier de Paris sous le Second Empire (Paris, n.d.), p. 70. David Landes, Bankers and Pashas (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), p. 13, notes that "there was hardly a corporation of any importance [in France]— canal, railroad, or public utility—that did not feature among its founders and on its board the names of one or more of these few firms who formed . . . the Haute Banque." The PGC fit his description, but just barely and not for its entire life.

By 1878 only five of the PGC's administrateurs sat on other boards, and these were largely a legacy of the Pereire connections.^[37]

The businessmen who replaced the Pereire group or sat alongside its remaining members were well-off Parisians, grands bourgeois, but not captains of industry or finance. The banker Charles Mussard had an estate worth 690,000 francs at his death; he was neither a Pereire nor a Du-bochet. Jules Doazan, a stockbroker (agent de change ), possessed just under a million francs. Athanase Loubet was an important merchant and a former president of the Parisian Chamber of Commerce, but his fortune of 1.8 million francs did not give him the stature of a department-store magnate.^[38] Under the Third Republic the PGC increasingly lost its ties to other great corporate enterprises.

Instead, the PGC recruited to its board ever-larger numbers of distinguished scientists, state officials, and administrators to replace business leaders. The representation of scientific expertise became rather formidable. One of France's leading chemists, Henri Sainte-Claire Deville, joined the board in 1874.^[39] Louis Troost, professor of chemistry at the Sorbonne, became president of the corporation and one of the more active hoard members. Eugène Pelouse, an applied chemist, came to the board after developing a widely used condenser for coal-gas production and finding new ways to use by-products.^[40] There were also a member of the In-stitut de France and a vice president of the French Geological Society. Whereas these notables were eminently qualified to examine the firm's technical procedures, several of the men who joined them on the board had occupied important positions in state administration. The general inspector of mines, Meugy, came to the board in 1880. A former director of the postal service, Baron, served with him as did two former councillors of state. The stockholders confirmed the trend toward reduced ties with other corporations by placing on the board the retired director of the PGC and the current director.^[41]

The shifting profile of the board of directors, from economic movers and shakers to administrators, mirrored the declining vigor and aggressiveness of the PGC's entrepreneurial policies (see chapter 4). Yet we

[37] Vitu, Guide financier ; Alphonse Courtois, Manuel des fonds publics et des sociétés par actions (Paris, 1878).

[38] AP, D Q⁷ , nos. 12371, 10710, 10714, 12342.

[39] Harry Paul, The Sorcerer's Apprentice: The French Scientist's Image of German Science, 1840-1919 (Gainesville, Fla., 1972), pp. 77-78 ; L. F. Haber, The Chemical Industry during the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1958), p. 77.

[40] Archives nationales, F¹² 5231.

[41] Appointments to the board were announced in the deliberations of the conseil d'administration. In most cases information available on these people was slender.

should not make too much of the parallel. There were more important reasons for the growing caution of the corporation, not the least of which was the approaching end of its charter (giving heavy, new investments less opportunity to pay off). Moreover, patterns of aggressiveness and caution in business policies were not clearly confined to a distinct phase of the firm's life, and it is far from certain that the board had more than a passive impact on decision making.^[42] The changing composition of the board may well have reflected wider trends in the French economy rather than changes within the corporation. After all, Paris had ceased to be the center of commercial and financial innovation that it had been during the 1850s. Great names in business were fewer and farther between. The depression of the 1880s hit the economy of France harder and longer than those of other countries. When France resumed vigorous economic growth at the beginning of the new century, the innovative leaders were specialists, like Louis Renault, who confined their activities to one firm.^[43] Such figures would not have considered the gas industry as marked for special growth in any case and might have turned to the infant electrical industry. The last boards of the PGC were well suited to the task at hand—finding a technological niche and adapting to new corporate responsibilities as a public service and as a model employer.

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The central figure and animating force in the PGC was the director. After owner-entrepreneur Vincent Dubochet took the post for its first eighteen months, it went to a salaried manager. The PGC was one of the early firms to initiate a practice that was to become a distinctive mark of French capitalism. It sought its chief executive not among the subordinate officers already in the firm, nor among the heads of comparable firms, but rather in the civil service. After Dubochet the directors of the PGC were all engineers of the Corps des Ponts et Chaussées.

The corps was charged with overseeing and improving the nation's infrastructure, and its engineers were indisputably public servants of high rank. They had diplomas from France's most distinguished and exclusive school, the Ecole Polytechnique. Furthermore, the corps accepted only the polytechniciens who had graduated at the top of their classes. The corps in effect comprised a post-Napoleonic aristocracy. Recruited through rig-

[42] Only two board members had enough of an attachment to the PGC to leave substantial legacies to its personnel. Those members were Germain Hervé, an early entrepreneur in the gas industry, and Raoul-Duval, an engineer-entre-preneur and a polytechnicien.

[43] Maurice Lévy-Leboyer and Francois Bourguignon, L'Economie française au XIX? siècle: Analyse macro-économique (Paris, 1985), pp. 78-84; Palmade, French Capitalism, pp. 187-216.

orously competitive examinations, the engineers who were admitted came overwhelmingly from haut-bourgeois families. The purpose of their long years of preparation and demanding careers was service to the state. Moreover, members were bound by powerful codes of collegial loyalty and personal honor. Wearing the distinctive military uniform at all times was obligatory for the engineers of the corps. The dignity of the corps was an ideal around which the members had to organize their lives. Aristocrats of the Old Regime had had to accept an occasional mésalliance; there was nothing they could have done about the waywardness of individual blue bloods. However, the engineers of the Corps des Ponts et Chaussées had to submit their marriage plans for approval to their director general.^[44]

Preparation for the corps marked the engineers for life. Each officer was the product of about fifteen years of cloistering—first nine years at the lycée, then six years at the Ecole Polytechnique and the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées. The latter two were run on a military model, and minute regulations governed the details of the students' lives. Vacations were short and infrequent; students spent little time outside the school. Hazing and deeply rooted customs inculcated a strong corporate identity.^[45] At the same time, the rigors of the selection process and of the training bred a sense of elitism and authority. Contemporaries noted in the officers that emerged from this formative experience a distinctive comportment and even a distinctive way of thinking. No wonder the chief executives of the PGC always identified themselves first as "engineer of bridges and roads" and only then as director of the firm.^[46]

The PGC was one of the earliest private enterprises to take engineers out of state service and place them in corporate management. The path by which these post-Napoleonic aristocrats came to accept—even welcome— the new career opportunities is worth examining. Members of the corps enjoyed great prestige; they were admired for their learning, for their expertise, and for the weighty matters they handled. There was hardly a family in France that would not have taken pride in having a member in the corps. The daily existence of an officer, however, was usually mundane. The pay was modest, barely enough to sustain bourgeois standards

[44] On the corps, see E Fichet-Poitrey, Le Corps des Ponts et Chaussées: Du Génie civil à l'aménagement du territoire (Paris, 1982), and A. Brunot and R. Coquand, Le Corps des Ponts et Chaussées (Paris, 1982).

[45] Fichet-Poitrey, Corps, pp. 33-34; John Weiss, "Bridges and Barriers: Narrowing Access and Changing Structure in the French Engineering Profession, 1800-1850," in Professions and the French State , 1700-1900, ed. Gerald Geison (Philadelphia, 1984), pp. 30-40.

[46] Brunot and Coquand, Ponts et Chaussées , p. 133. The directors turned over 5 percent of their salaries to the state for their pensions as engineers "on leave."

unless subsidized by private wealth. The engineers' duties could often be routine or at least subject to bureaucratic roadblocks. It is easy to imagine that there were discontents, and Honoré de Balzac, that preeminent interpreter of the bourgeois soul, left a memorable literary portrait of a troubled engineer in Gérard of Le Curé du village (based perhaps on his own brother-in-law). Gérard emerged from the Ecole Polytechnique with aspirations for a brilliant career and a yearning for la gloire. Instead, his career, though honorable, brought him mainly hard work, routine, and low pay. He came to dread a future consisting of "counting pavement stones for the state" and waiting for a small promotion every few years.^[47] Balzac's speculations on the psychology of the state engineer were dramatic, to be sure, but not necessarily accurate. There was little evidence of a crisis of morale within the corps. Balzac surely underestimated the engineers' commitment to hierarchy, discipline, and service to the state.^[48] Individual officers may have despaired, but they did so privately. Outwardly the corps projected a sustained attachment to its responsibilities and to its acquired status. Defections from state service were rare. Not until 1851 did the war minister find it necessary to issue a decree regulating permanent leaves of absence, allowing engineers to take outside positions. Even so, officers did not often take advantage of the regulation until the 1880s.^[49] The lack of opportunities may have had much to do with the hesitations. The directorship of the small firms characteristic of the early industrial era was not suitable for men of their talent and standing even if the material rewards were attractive. But the emergence of large-scale enterprise—mines, railroads, machinery construction, and utilities—offered them a lucrative alternative that they might accept as appropriate. The appearance of firms like the PGC allowed this administrative elite to reach out and capture new positions entailing considerable economic power.

Dubochet's successor as director, Bridges and Roads Engineer Joseph de Gayffier, may not have married an actress—the corps would never have allowed that—but he was a trailblazer in his own way. De Gayffier was one of the early members of the corps to leave state service and take a position in private industry. In doing so, he helped create a model that

[47] Ibid., pp. 138-141.

[48] Terry Shinn, L'Ecole Polytechnique , 1794-1914 (Paris, 1980), p. 181, on the mentality of the graduates of the institute. For an assessment of the bourgeois "soul" that differs substantially from Balzac's, see Theodore Zeldin, France , 1848-1945, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1973-1977), 1:11-130. Zeldin stresses the limited ambitions of most French bourgeois.

[49] Brunot and Coquand, Ponts et Chaussées, p. 257; Shinn, Ecole Polytechnique, pp. 94, 167.

would eventually become commonplace in French large-scale industry. In 1858 he was still an exception and perhaps had something of Gérard in him. Born to a wealthy Auvergnat family in 1806, Joseph became a student at the Ecole Polytechnique and at the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées by dint of hard work and uncommon intelligence. When he finished the rigorous training, he began the long, slow climb up the official rungs of the corps. By the age of forty he was still only a second-class engineer earning forty-five hundred francs a year and had already served in the departments of Indre, Somme, Oise, and Côtes-du-Nord. The modest pay and difficult work may have interested de Gayffier in more lucrative endeavors outside the corps. His subsequent employment showed how both the engineers and the corps would have to adapt to new career patterns.^[50]

De Gayffier's first attempt to serve private enterprise went smoothly. In 1845 he left the corps briefly to be director of a public-works firm in Portugal and readily received a leave of absence for that purpose; he was back in the corps within two years. The next involvement with a private firm proved more complicated. De Gayffier asked for another leave in 1856 so that he could take a post with the Grand Central Railroad. His superiors at Bridges and Roads were reluctant to grant the request on the grounds that the position involved directing operations that had been subcon-tracted to another firm. The officials insisted that "the reputation of the corps requires that the position of engineers who take leaves from its ranks . . . must be perfectly defined and must present nothing untoward in the eyes of the public." Clearly the corps was trying to set lofty standards for outside employment, whereas de Gayffier sought to extend those limits· He finally worked out an acceptable definition of the post and received the authorized leave. During his employment with the railroad he earned six times as much as the corps would have paid him.^[51]

The merging of the Grand Central Railroad with a larger line placed de Gayffier in a new predicament. He lost his position but was no longer willing to return to the corps· He was reprimanded for not reporting to his assigned post when the leave ended. Soon he suffered the further humiliation of being passed over for promotion to first-class engineer. He apparently spent two years in this ambiguous situation before the offer from the PGC arrived. Perhaps an exceptionally disgruntled state engineer was the only sort that private enterprise could attract at that time.

Why board members of the PGC selected de Gayffier to direct the firm

[50] Archives nationales, F¹⁴ 2233¹ .

[51] Ibid. See especially Conseil général des Ponts et Chaussées, deliberations of August 7, 1856.

is not clear. His assignments as an engineer had prepared him for work with railroads. He had planned canals, dredged harbors, and supervised the laying of track, but he had no experience whatsoever with the gas industry. Moreover, his reputation within the corps had its blemishes; internal reports described his character as "inconstant" and the quality of his work as "mediocre." Nonetheless, like most of his colleagues at Bridges and Roads, de Gayffier had had experience administering large projects. It is possible that de Gayffier had made important contacts when he worked with the Grand Central Railroad, for that was a Pereire undertaking.^[52]

Still working out the terms by which state engineers would serve private enterprise, the directors of the corps did not approve de Gayffier's new post without some clarification. The officials were concerned that this position would associate him too closely with commercial operations, considered beneath the dignity of the corps. They had to receive assurances that de Gayffier's functions would entail the oversight of a large corporation serving a useful public purpose and that baser matters, such as purchasing coal, would be the responsibility of his subordinates. With those assurances de Gayffier was allowed to begin his thirteen-year career with the PGC (1858-1871). Though he was undoubtedly pleased to earn many times the salary of a Bridges and Roads engineer, his status in the corps did not cease to weigh on his mind. Apparently self-conscious about being only a second-class officer, he campaigned for a promotion even as he assumed the directorship of the PGC.^[53]

Emile Camus succeeded de Gayffier as director in 1871 and remained at the helm of the firm for the next twenty years. The son of a prosperous notary from Charleville (Ardennes), Emile had entered the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées after graduating fourteenth in his class from the Ecole Polytechnique. Like his predecessor, he had held several positions in private firms before his employment with the PGC, and none had been in the gas industry. In 1858 he had taken leave from the corps to head a firm that transformed more than three thousand hectares of marshland around Mont-Saint-Michel in Brittany into arable land. This demanding project won high praise for its technical accomplishments. In 1860 Camus was named assistant director of the PGC. How Camus came to the attention of the gas company is not, in this instance, a mystery: he had married a

[52] Ibid., report of prefect to minister of commerce, January 3, 1855; undated fiche from Corps des Ponts et Chaussées.

[53] Ibid., report of March 24, 1859; prefect to minister of commerce, July 30, 1860.

relative of de Gayffier in 1852 and had worked under his direction at the Grand Central Railroad in 1856.^[54] In fact, the last director of the PGC, Léon Bertrand (appointed in 1901), was also a relative of Camus and de Gayffier.^[55] The company was thus under the control of one "dynasty" for thirty-eight of its fifty years, showing the narrowness of the search for a chief executive officer. De Gayffier's successors also owed him gratitude for helping create the precedent of leaving the corps to serve a profit-making enterprise. Camus did not face questions from his commanders in the corps about the appropriateness of his position; he received a leave of absence as a matter of course.

Stéphane Godot, who became director in 1892 (serving until 1901), was the only one of the PGC's chief officers to have displayed any personal rebelliousness or an inclination to think critically about wider social questions. As a twenty-year-old student at the Ecole Polytechnique he committed an (unknown) offense that resulted in his expulsion. Receiving indulgence from the war minister, he was readmitted but dropped from ninth to twenty-fifth place in the class. Perhaps as a result of the chastising experience, he redoubled his efforts as a student at the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées and graduated second.^[56] The rest of his life was not a model of passive conformity, however. He became interested in the school of thought inspired by Frédéric Le Play and developed a reputation as an industrial paternalist. When the PGC faced a new era of industrial relations in the early 1890s, Camus turned the post of director over to Godot. The union leaders took the change as a conciliatory measure. He resigned in 1901, ostensibly for reasons of health, when a dialogue about industrial reform was no longer necessary.^[57]

Godot's successor, Léon Bertrand, showed no such signs of rebelliousness or questioning. He was the son of a professor at the Ecole Polytech-nique who was also an immortal of the Académie française. Léon obtained only enthusiastic praise from teachers and superiors: his character was "excellent," his work habits "irreproachable."^[58] In a sense Bertrand marked the completion of an evolution among the PGC's leaders, from nonconforming entrepreneurs to unconventional state engineers to model officers of France's most distinguished technical corps.

Each of these engineer-directors was part of a national elite, not only

[54] Archives nationales, F¹⁴ 2185¹ ; F¹² 5101.

[55] I have been unable to discover the precise relation among all three engineers, but an elegant tomb in the Père-Lachaise cemetery attests to the alliance of their families.

[56] Archives nationales, F¹⁴ 11481.

[57] See below, chapter 4, on Godot's relation to the gas personnel.

[58] Archives nationales, F¹² 8516; F¹⁴ 11520.

as a result of his own membership in the corps but also through family membership.^[59] A generation or two earlier, their progenitors had been successful professionals. Camus's father had been a notary, Bertrand's grandfather a physician. The path of further ascent had led through the grandes écoles and from there to high state posts. The directors' family trees contained numerous maîtres de requêtes and auditeurs of the Council of State, judges, and professors. Relatives in banking or business were fewer. Among the last group were those who had also "parachuted" from a state corps into industry. Official documents were always able to categorize the directors' parents as well-off, but huge fortunes were rare. De Gayffier's personal estate of 632,000 francs was probably typical. Though substantial, it was not the wealth of a Dubochet or even of a board member like the banker Dassier, who died with a fortune of more than four million francs. By moving into the PGC, engineer-directors added sizable income to the prestige and power their relatives enjoyed as hauts fonctionnaires .^[60] Perhaps the lure of lucre was not so powerful among most of their cob leagues who remained in the corps, or perhaps desirable opportunities were lacking. As we have seen, the PGC kept its search for chief executives within narrow limits.

Was the Corps des Ponts et Chaussées the most appropriate source of leadership for the PGC? It is hard to identify specific qualities and training that made these engineers essential to the firm. Their education, highly abstract and oriented toward mathematics, did not ensure a technical grasp of industrial problems. The most valuable asset they possessed was the ability to deal as equals with the other graduates of the grandes écoles they were likely to meet in the course of doing business. As polytechni-ciens, they could address the prefect or municipal engineer as mon cama-fade and use the informal tu .^[61] Such standing was worth something, but the deepest reason that the PGC's board turned to the corps to find its chief executive was no doubt a conventional, uncritical respect for hierarchy. State and society defined these men as the nation's administrative elite.

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A clear sign that the Ecole Polytechnique and the state's technical corps did not produce men with precisely the necessary preparation to direct gas production was that the PGC recruited the engineers in charge of opera-

[59] Ezra Suleiman, Elites in French Society (Princeton, 1978); John Armstrong, The European Administrative Elite (Princeton, 1973).

[60] AP, D Q⁷ , 12341 (fols. 56-57); Shinn, Ecole Polytechnique , p. 90.

[61] For an interesting illustration of the right to use informal forms of address as well as of the inevitable contacts made at the Ecole Polytechnique, see Ibid., no. 155, Fontaine to Godot, April 26, 1902.

tional departments from other schools. Heads of divisions, departments, and factories were graduates of the Ecole Centrale des Arts et Manufactures (founded in 1829) or the external classes of the Ecole des Mines.^[62] Both of these institutes had assumed the task of training industrial leaders. Though they lacked the supreme prestige of the Ecole Polytechnique, they stood just beneath it. The bourgeois family that placed a son in one of these state schools had reason to be pleased. Industrialists often chose one of these alternatives over the Ecole Polytechnique for their heir if he was serious about continuing in business.^[63]

The Ecole Centrale and the external classes of the Ecole des Mines, with their industrial mission, were products of the emerging factory era. So were their graduates. Just as the early directors of the PGC departed from convention by leaving state service and creating a new role for themselves at the helm of large firms, lower managers were creating their own social persona. The PGC was born at the moment when engineer-managers of industrial firms were appearing. Enrollment figures at the two schools attest to the rapid expansion of the milieu (table 5). No more than the PGC's director did the heads of departments or plants build their identity around business administration. Their professional designation was "industrial engineer," a new occupational title that came into common use around the time the PGC was founded. Earlier all who used the title "engineer" had been members of a state corps. The birth of civil or industrial engineering as an established occupational category can perhaps be dated from 1848, when the Society of Civil Engineers was founded.^[64] Managers at the PGC

[62] The term "external classes" needs explanation. Technically, the Ecole des Mines was an extension of the Polytechnique. It enrolled two sorts of students. The "student-engineers" were graduates of the Polytechnique, usually top-ranking ones. These students were destined for the Corps des Mines, which, like the Corps des Ponts et Chaussées, was a highly prestigious body of state engineers. The Ecole des Mines also admitted "external" students, men who had generally not attended the Polytechnique and had gained admission through an examination. These students were not eligible for the Corps des Mines and were being trained for industry.

[63] The early history of the Ecole Centrale is well served by John Weiss, The Making of Technological Man: The Social Origins of French Engineering Education (Cambridge, Mass., 1982). See also Louis Guillet, Cent ans de la vie de l'Ecole Centrale des arts et manufactures, 1829-1929 (Paris, 1929). On the Ecole des Mines, see Louis Aguillon, L'Ecole des Mines de Paris: Notice historique (Paris, 1889), and Gabriel Chesneau, Notre école: Histoire de l'Ecole des Mines (Paris, 1932). The external classes of the Ecole des Mines were not at first so exclusive nor so rigorous as classes at the Ecole Centrale but eventually became much more demanding. Not until its later years did the PGC recruit heavily from Mines.

[64] Terry Shinn, "From 'Crops' to 'Profession': The Emergence and Definition of Industrial Engineering in Modern France," in The Organization of Science and Technology in France , 1808-1914, eds. Robert Fox and George Weisz (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 184-210; John Weiss, "Les Changements de structure dans la profession de l'ingénieur en France de 1800 à 1850," in L'Ingénieur dans la société fran-çaise, ed. André Thépot (Paris, 1985), pp. 19-38.

benefited from its growing social acceptability. Already in 1856 Gustave Flaubert was able to have Charles Bovary's assertive mother entertain aspirations that her son would be either a judge or a civil engineer

The sorts of firsts that PGC engineers could achieve were well illustrated by the career of Louis Arson, the chief of the factory division for thirty-eight years and, as such, the principal operational manager Arson graduated from the Ecole Centrale in 1841 with the first diploma awarded in mechanical engineering. One of his early jobs was with a machine-construction firm that made the first French locomotives and the engines for the first transatlantic steamships. He was the first graduate of the Ecole Centrale to sit on its advisory board.^[65] Arson and his colleagues at the PGC were members of the generation that helped establish the social persona for France's industrial managers. It was certainly not the case, however, that the first generation imagined itself without governing norms and models. Only by adapting some of the formal structures

[65] Archives nationales, F¹² 5082; "Discours de Mont-Serrat," Bulletin de l'Association amicale des anciens élèves de l'Ecole Centrale 35 (1903-1904): 98-102. On Arson's private life and family, there is a carton of interesting documents: AP, D E¹ , Fonds Lestringuez.

of the traditional professions did industrial managers gain social acceptance.^[66]

The distinctive features of the French engineering profession, as it had developed under the tutelage of the state, deeply marked the careers and work culture of the PGC's managers. One manifestation was the reconstruction of the professional hierarchy within the company in the form of closed castes. As we have seen, top managers were graduates of the most exclusive schools, the Ecole Polytechnique and the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées.^[67] Middle and lower managers were recruited from the technical institutes of the next rank, the Ecole Centrale and Ecole des Mines. These graduates were excluded from top management regardless of their record of achievement on the job, but they had their own privileges. They monopolized the administration of divisions, departments, and factories. By contrast, men with diplomas from the least exalted of the engineering institutes, the Ecoles d'Arts et Métiers (gazarts as they were known), were relegated to modest posts. It was not that these schools failed to provide rigorous training and produce capable students; but the social level of recruitment was lower and the prestige less resounding. The officers of the PGC accepted the gazarts mainly for staff positions.^[68] Thus the PGC allocated managerial posts on the basis of criteria external to the firm and replicated the hierarchy of the engineering profession.

Notions about the ways managers should do their work came from the engineering profession as well. Managers inevitably looked to the engineers of the state corps to define their responsibilities and work culture.^[69] State engineers provided guidance on how a technically trained elite would function within a bureaucratic setting. They inspired ideals of au-thoritativeness, independence, and bureaucratic loyalty. The managers of the PGC, following the officers of the corps, eschewed specialization and readily delved into all aspects of administration, including nontechnical ones. Far from regarding mundane details as beneath them, they wel-

[66] Robert Anderson, "Secondary Education in Mid-Nineteenth-Century France: Some Social Aspects," Past and Present , no. 53 (1971): 125.

[67] The one exception proves the rule. Eugène de Montserrat, a graduate of the Ecole Centrale, was named assistant director in 1901. The PGC was liquidated before he could have moved up to the top post, if indeed that was a genuine possibility for him.

[68] C. R. Day, "The Making of Mechanical Engineers in France: The Ecoles d'Arts et Metiers, 1803-1914," French Historical Studies 10 (1978): 439-460. Not all large corporations relegated the gazarts to minor posts. See Claude Beaud, "Les Ingénieurs du Creusot à travers quelques destins du milieu du XIX? siècle au milieu du XX?," in Thepot, L'Ingénieur, pp. 51-59.

[69] On the functioning of the engineers of the corps, see Jean-Claude Thoenig, L'Ere des technocrats: Le Cas des Ponts et Chaussées (Paris, 1973), pp. 165-214.

comed involvement in every aspect of supervision. Yet even when they were directly involved in decision making, they posed as impersonal authorities who could evaluate a matter with detachment. The PGC's managers also emulated the state engineers by asserting a degree of independence from their immediate employer and identifying with a larger scientific community. They did so chiefly through their personal research projects, which were related only tangentially to their current position in the enterprise. The factory superintendent, Paul Biju-Duval, and the chief of gas production, Albert Euchène, published findings on the specific heat of iron and nickel. The assistant factory head, Edouard Servier, studied the chemistry of coal tar and made noteworthy empirical observations. His superior, Arson, turned out a steady stream of gadgets from his laboratory.^[70] Though there was a good deal of tinkering and research in progress, it was not usually coordinated or directed by the firm toward established goals. The projects reflected the personal interests of the managers, and they considered the materials, laboratories, and personnel of the company at their disposal to pursue their work. The company accepted such independence and even expressed pride in the accomplishments of its engineers when they won scholarly recognition. The only limit it sought to place on the independence of its personnel was prohibiting paid consultation for other firms.^[71]

Though there was this independent aspect to the managers' work culture, the impact of the French engineering tradition was to reinforce loyalties to the organization. Nurtured under the aegis of a powerful state while capitalism was still a weak motor of change, French engineers hardly had a chance to form an autonomous professional group with individual careers as the focus of professional life. Instead, state engineers imparted a sense of comfort with bureaucratic procedures, lifelong commitments to the organization, and ambiguity about the morality of the marketplace.^[72] The acceptance of hard work and modest rewards coupled with a respect for hierarchical authority that characterized the corps d'état certainly influenced the managers of the PGC. Thus, entitling themselves civil engineers was not a superficial affectation: they were making a statement about their cast of mind and their expectations on the job.

By the late nineteenth century some contemporaries viewed it as a pe-

[70] Bulletin de l'Association amicale des anciens élèves de l'Ecole Centrale 35 (1903-1904): 232; AP, V 8 O , no. 677, deliberations of October 7, 1874; no. 672, deliberations of June 26, 1867; no. 1060, report of October 10, 1859.

[71] AP, V 8 O , no. 666, deliberations of June 26, 1858.

[72] This analysis follows the thinking of sociologist Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Power and the Division of Labor (Stanford, 1986), pp. 122-124.

culiarity of French industry that engineers so dominated managerial posts in private enterprise. Though the monopoly of the profession was especially complete in France, the situation was not unique.^[73] In any case, as France's industrial prowess retreated before that of its neighbors, the dominance of engineers became a source of regret and anticipated reform. Industrial critics denigrated the training that French engineers received. The attacks began with the fossilized education at the apex, the Ecole Polytech-nique, on the grounds that its instruction was too mathematical, too theoretical, and contemptuous of the practical problems posed by industry. The PGC, like most firms, implicitly accepted such criticisms, for it drew its personnel from schools that were more specifically oriented toward the application of science. However, observers familiar with German technical training argued that the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées, the Ecole Centrale, and the Ecole des Mines ultimately resembled the Ecole Polytechnique more than the German schools. All of the French institutes placed far too much emphasis on theoretical approaches and mathematical training; all relied heavily on lectures even though laboratory exercises were necessary for good instruction in the rising fields of organic chemistry and electricity; all led French engineers to develop general knowledge and eschew the specialization that would have been more beneficial to industry.^[74] The critics made some worthy points, but they postulated for the engineers a narrow, technical role in production. The responsibilities that managers held in a firm like the PGC did not justify the sort of specialization and laboratory training that the critics desired. Indeed, the partial concentration that French technical institutes did permit often proved superfluous because the graduates' assignments were unrelated to their academic specialties. The ideal of the elite schools, theoretical training aimed at rapid assimilation of new concepts, was not as outmoded as the critics maintained.

[73] Max Leclerc, La Formation des ingénieurs à l'étranger et en France (Paris, 1917). The dominance of engineers in France was not as unusual as Leclerc believed. See Heinz Hartmann, Authority and Organization in German Management (Princeton, 1959), p. 162; Jürgen Kocka, "Entrepreneurs and Managers in German Industry," Cambridge Economic History of Europe (Cambridge, 1978), 7(1):492-589; Chandler, Visible Hand, p. 95.

[74] Louis Bergeron, Les Capitalistes en France (1780-1914) (Paris, 1978), p. 70; Leclerc, Formation des ingénieurs; André Pelletan, "Les Ecoles techniques alle-mandes," Revue de métallurgie 3 (1906): 589-620; Antoine Prost, Histoire de l'enseignement en France, 1800-1967 (Paris, 1968), p. 303. The presumed deficiencies of French engineering education have been summed up and forcefully reasserted in Robert Locke, The End of Practical Man: Entrepreneurship and Higher Education in Germany, France, and Great Britain , 1880-1940 (Greenwich, Conn., 1984).

It is no wonder that the Ecole Centrale was proud of the versatility of its students.^[75] Generalized training for careers modeled on the state engineers was what managers wanted and needed.

A more pertinent criticism came in the early twentieth century from Henri Fayol, the founder of managerial science in France and one of the most respected engineers of his day.^[76] Fayol readily acknowledged the multiplicity of disciplines that managers had to master. For him, the deficiency in training arose from its exclusively technical character. Though engineers faced responsibilities for personnel, marketing, accounting, and financing, they received no formal instruction whatsoever in administration. Fayol refused to regard a capacity for mathematical reasoning as a sound basis for judgment in these areas. For decisions in these nontechn-ical fields the PGC followed the British model of empirical training on the job. Perhaps Fayol underestimated another quality that French technical training succeeded in imparting, a sense of confidence in handling the disparate responsibilities of business management. The engineer-managers of the PGC appeared comfortable with their multiple duties: their decisions may not have been especially keen, but they were consistent and conscientious. Such comfort with nontechnical fields may explain why the engineering profession ignored Fayol's challenge for so long.

The influence of the state institutes extended to staffing. In countries like Britain, where such institutes did not exist, filling managerial positions was a great problem. Owners refused to trust salaried executives to use their capital honestly and efficiently, so kinship and friendship played a large role in hiring.^[77] The engineering schools of France provided the guarantees of probity and expertise that personal familiarity did across the Channel. The PGC relied on the recommendations of the school directors more than any other source of recruitment. Faith in the excellence of the alma mater, reassurances provided by shared experiences, and established contacts made managers draw their new colleagues from their own schools. Factory chief Arson recommended one engineer after another from the Ecole Centrale. As his influence waned and Paul Gigot, his assistant, took charge, appointments gravitated to the Ecole des Mines, Gigot's alma mater.

More than excellence of training, the engineering institutes offered the

[75] Weiss, Making of Technological Man , p. 225.

[76] General and Industrial Management , trans. Constance Storrs (London, 1949). Fayol first published his influential tract in 1916, but it was based on talks given before the war.

[77] Pollard, Genesis of Modern Management , pp. 11-13.

PGC a cadre of managers with the proper attitudes and firm character. Despite minor variations in curriculum, all the institutes sought to impart an ideology of sobriety discipline, and assiduousness. Standards of accomplishment were very high, and the schools worked the students mercilessly. Consciousness of class rank, continuously reassessed, ritualized the view of life as a constant struggle. Any student who did not embrace hard work and persistent application left the program. Those who remained developed a sense of intellectual and moral elitism. For good reason one historian of the Ecole Centrale has labeled it a "factory of the bourgeoisie."^[78] Although not all graduates attained the schools' ideals, the PGC found among them a group of men with ample aptitude for science, a passion to apply it, and a commitment to the work ethic. The PGC took full advantage of the discipline inculcated at the Ecole Centrale and Ecole des Mines.

Satisfied with the elite schools and loyal to them, the PGC regarded the Third Republic's efforts to create new institutes of applied technology in the last two decades of the century with complete indifference. The company gave no support whatsoever to the creation of the Ecole de Physique et de Chimie Industrielle when it was founded in Paris in 1882 and hired only a few of its graduates for humble laboratory posts.^[79] The firm did not wish to make a place for specialists and technicians lacking elite diplomas in its managerial structure.