Doctoral Dissertation Research: Building the Roads: Expertise, Labor, and Politics in France, 1720-1799

Stanford University, Stanford CA

Investigators

Abstract

Introduction. This research project will serve to enhance a doctoral dissertation that investigates the socially diverse, collaborative process of construction in relation to 18th century political culture and social change. The project focuses on road construction in provincial France. Its goal is to analyze expertise, worker experience, and the politics of local public works projects. This is feasible since the use of unpaid, rural labor (in the corvée des grands chemins) as the principal road construction workforce from the 1730s to the French Revolution generated extensive archives. Previous scholars have preferred to study the products of road construction; as a result, they gave little attention to local practices displayed in these archives, despite the considerable amount of energy that was absorbed by the construction, which was drawn from families, villages, and provincial administrations. Intellectual Merit. The researcher begins with a geographic focus on Brittany. He will study archival documents left by workers, property owners, engineers, parish assemblies, provincial representatives, and royal officials. He will then perform an analysis of local conditions that is to be suitably contextualized by including sections on the origins of the corvée, the resonance of local road construction in Enlightenment economic and legal theories, and Revolutionary administrative and ideological changes. He will also use digital GIS mapping to compare regional data over time and space. The researcher has already noted that constant corvée reforms served to transform parish and provincial culture; it also served as a framework for royal and revolutionary discourse on justice and public utility. The archives reflect a society juggling military, commercial, and administrative initiatives with technological and fiscal limitations. His use of these archival materials will contribute to a better understanding of diversification and mobility in rural labor, urban-rural networks, and distribution of formal expertise and tacit knowledge. It will serve to explain how collectively built highways became secular sites of community action where workers outnumbered engineers and political elites prioritized in earlier scholarship. Potential Broader Impacts. The researcher's dissertation will shed light on the labor issue of construction worker invisibility. As a result, it could provide insight into the cultural, political, and economic networks linking twenty first-century construction workers to local populations and global corporations. Resituating workers in their social and political environment illuminates rich worker-community links. Publication of this dissertation in book form will contribute to education about the social impact of transport systems in Old Regime France and have ramifications for current debates about contemporary counterparts to such systems.