The Coachmen of Nineteenth-Century Paris

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 183 perfectly adept at mathematical analysis. Avoiding the facile caricature of a clash of theory versus practice, Picon describes the debates about working mathematics (and what kinds of mathematics) into a course of studies that included substantial field practice. As a backdrop to all this there was a more profound change in the way in which engineers conceived the world and their work: instead of viewing the natural and artificial world as static and constructed according to general aesthetic rules exemplified by the classical orders, engineers now began to think and design in terms of a dynamic world of fluxes, nodes, and forces that expanded to include the sphere of economics and human work and was amenable to mathematical analy­ sis. We see here a change as fundamental as a Kuhnian scientific revolution or Foucault’s radical change in episteme. For Picon this “swing” is autonomous: it occurs in France before the Industrial Revolution and in England after that Revolution. But it is not isolated, for if it does not “cause” the Industrial Revolution, it has contributed to maintaining its momentum and creating the modern world. Janis Langins Dr. Langins is associate professor at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at Victoria College, University of Toronto. He is working on the history of engineering and fortification. The Coachmen of Nineteenth-Century Paris: Service Workers and Class Con­ sciousness. By Nicholas Papayanis. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993. Pp. xvii+247; illustrations, tables, notes, bibli­ ography, index. $45.00. The Coachmen of Nineteenth-Century Paris, by Nicholas Papayanis, is a well-done study on an interesting topic that ultimately leaves the reader a bit disappointed. This disappointment stems from several sources: the claims of the author; questions about his methodology; and the severe anticlimax of his final chapter, which deals with a subject that most interests the readers of this journal—the impact of the introduction of the automobile on the coach-driving trade in Paris at the beginning of the 20th century. But it all boils down to the fact that although Papayanis is a thorough and diligent scholar, his study seems a bit out-of-date in terms of recent trends in French labor history and almost “mechanical” in terms of its analysis and conclusions. The Coachmen ofParis is, in short, a book that falls short of its potential due to methodological and interpretive difficulties. The central concern of this book is the development of collective attitudes and identities among Parisian coachmen during the latter half of the 19th century. Papayanis argues in a convincing manner that a number of variables—neighborhood relationships, the influence of friends within and outside their occupational group, their relationship with their customers, ideas borrowed from the French Revolution and 184 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE socialist and syndicalist theorists, their experience during strikes, and the impact of the periodic economic crises of the late 19th century— played a role in this development but that “the unique features of the cab industry and the daily work-site experiences of coachmen” were the most important (p. 211). The Parisian cab trade during this period was characterized by the presence of a huge semimonopolistic concern, the Compagnie Générale des Voitures de Paris (CGV), numerous smaller companies, individual owner/operator coaches, and, by the 1880s, several cooperative organizations of varying sizes. A coachman’s attitudes toward his employer and toward his trade were heavily influenced by whether he was a mere cog in the CGV machine, the personal friend of the owner of the small company he drove for, or the owner of his own cab. Moreover, the continued presence of owner/operators and cooperative organizations, despite the dominance of the CGV, perpetuated the hope among proletarian coachmen that they might someday escape their position of mere employees and move up into the ranks of petty entrepreneurs. The structure of the Parisian cab trade therefore created and maintained a certain degree of tension and ideological ambivalence among coachmen; some accepted their position as workers and tried to take steps to improve their condition through union activity and periodic strikes, while others saw themselves as

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