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Beyond Private and Public Research: The Legal and Organizational Reality Behind Industrial Research Institutes in Interwar France

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Abstract

The initiatives attempting to forge links between the academia and the industry flourished in France after World War I. The so-called “industrial institutes” shared a common goal: to reinvigorate the French economy through science. Because of their focus on applied research, they differed from traditional engineering schools that usually neglected laboratory work and innovation. However, while the industrial institutes were a distinct category that shows broader trends in science-industry relations, from a formal point of view they did not constitute a coherent category. The term “institute” was ambiguous and applied to various legal and administrative arrangements. While the French state attempted to unify terminology by introducing “faculty institutes” through the 1920 Decree on the constitution of universities, the measure was not sufficient to englobe all types of institutions. The diversity of organizational realities behind the industrial institutes is, however, useful for analyzing power structures and hierarchies in a given industrial sector. The legal form of an industrial institute was conditioned by the state and the robustness of the industry that funded it. As such, the history of the French industrial institutes may constitute a fertile ground for broader analyses on the impact of power relations on the legal reality behind the initiatives uniting science and industry.

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Notes

  1. For a slightly different yet relevant discussion, see Kylänen (2014).

  2. Académie française, Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, Académie des sciences, Académie des sciences morales et politiques, Académie des beaux-arts.

  3. For an extensive list of schools and institutes created between 1900 and 1930, see Shinn (1989: 681).

  4. The National Office of Liquid Fuels was a public establishment (with contractual capacity) created in 1925 and attached to the Ministry of Commerce and Industry (Ministère du Commerce & de l'Industrie 1926).

  5. Loi du 12 juillet 1875 relative à la liberté de l'enseignement supérieur (Loi Laboulaye)

  6. Conseil d’Etat—a French supreme court for administrative justice.

  7. While the reference to the collaboration with the University of Paris was removed from the statutes, it was not prohibited neither, making Labroue’s demand unsatisfied. Numerous key researchers in the Institute were members of the University of Paris.

  8. It should be added, though, that the public utility recognition should not be confused with yet another legal instrument: the recognition of the Institute of Optics engineering school by the French state by a decree from 4 December 1932 (Anonymous 1933). It subjected to the school to the law from 25 July 1919 on the organization of technical industrial and trade education (loi Astier). The law extended government control over a given school, but it guaranteed better recognition of the degrees it delivered. While the state recognition was more of a formality, it added one more layer of legal complexity to the entangled administrative situation of the Institute of Optics.

  9. See, for example, the history the nitrogen fixation industry in France, affected by inconsistent policy choices of the French government (Sakudo 2011: 201).

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  1. EA 4574 SPH (Sciences, Philosophie, Humanités), University of Bordeaux, 40 rue Lamartine, 33405, Talence, France

    Marcin Krasnodębski

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Correspondence to Marcin Krasnodębski.

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This study has been carried out with financial support from the French State, managed by the French National Research Agency (ANR) in the frame of “the Investments for the future” Programme IdEx Bordeaux–LAPHIA (ANR-10-IDEX-03-02).

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Krasnodębski, M. Beyond Private and Public Research: The Legal and Organizational Reality Behind Industrial Research Institutes in Interwar France. Minerva 56, 333–355 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-018-9345-5

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