We’re still looking for an image of Dr. Gille.
Our French colleague Bertrand Gille (1920–1980) died on November 30, 1980; he had just passed his sixtieth birthday, and he still had many research and publication projects in mind. Gille, a very active scholar whose curiosity led him into many diverse intellectual domains, was the major historian of French technology and perhaps the major historian of our times.
Gille had developed a global conception of the history of technology, and he attempted to present the image of that conception in one of his last works, the Histoire des techniques, published in 1979 in the famous French collection, Encyclopedic de la Pleiade. Although the Pleiade volumes are always collective, Gille had himself written 1,300 pages out of a total of less than 1,500, not counting the index and tables.
However, Bertrand Gille was not only a historian of technology. Throughout his career his research was guided by his studies at the Ecole des Chartes, which were ended in 1943 and completed later by his licence d’histoire. His doctoral thesis, La Banque et la credit en France de 1815 à 1848, published in 1959, was only a small part of a longer work of summarizing the extremely abundant archives of several great French banks of the 19th century. Pursued over a course of more than ten years, his investigations resulted in the publication of the voluminous Histoire de la maison Rothschild, whose two volumes (1965, 1967) amount to more than 1,000 pages.
This orientation of Gille’s researches is explained by his training as an archivist-paleographer and his position, at the beginning of his career, in the business archives of the Archives nationales of France. But it constitutes only one facet of his activities. In 1947 he had published his thesis at the École des Chartes, Les Origines de la grande industrie metallurgique en France, which constituted the point of departure for his work as a historian in metallurgy which developed parallel with his work as an economic historian.
Thus he published works on the economic history of Russia (1949), on the business archives in the Archives nationales (1957), a second doctoral thesis on the formation of the great capitalist enterprises in the first half of the 19th century (1959), another book on French investments in Italy from 1815 to 1914 (1968), and a new study on the bank of France in the 19th century (1970). As if the diversity of all these topics did not satisfy him, he also regularly pursued research into the history of technology.
The first manifestation of that interest was a small review which was at first called Métaux et civilisation from 1945 to 1951, then called Technique et civilisation until 1956. Although the journal was dis continued because of the end of the private financing of which it had been the beneficiary, the collection remains an important source for every aspect of the history of technology. Although Gille succeeded in interesting several collaborators to write for the journal, he was the principal author and often the only author for numerous issues. Moreover, he acted in the same capacity for two other journals for which he was the moving spirit. First there was the Histoire des enterprises, published from 1958 to 1963, at a time when he had succeeded in creating a center for business history, but which disappeared when Gille was named professor in 1959 at the Faculté des lettres of Clermont-Ferrand. The other journal, which Gille maintained for a dozen years, was the Revue d’histoire de la sidérurgie (1960-68), which continued under the title Revue d’histoire de mine et de la métallurgie (until 1972). In this journal he published the major part of his research on metallurgy while he was participating in the development and founding of the Musée du fer at Jarville, near Nancy. The major part of this research was published in a volume, La Sidérurgie française au XIX siecle (1968).
When one looks at the dates given above which mark out the two fields of research in which he was interested, one can see how Gille’s capacity for work led him to the forefront in both business and technological history. But one is still more astonished to realize that in the same years his curiosity and his researches extended to other epochs and other subjects in the history of technology. Very soon he became interested in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, making a systematic search for all manuscripts which he was able to find in the great European depositories. By 1959 he was able to work out the full section dealing with the Western Middle Ages in the first volume of the Histoire générale des techniques, published in 1962, then the part on the 15th and 16th centuries in the second volume (1965).
But in between he had published (1964) Les Ingénieurs de la Renaissance, without a doubt the best known of his works and certainly the most original of all his works in the history of technology. At the same time, one should mention his collaboration in volume 2 of the multivolumed History of Technology, edited by Charles Singer. However, it is impossible to mention all the contributions and all the articles written by Gille; there are over 100 of them, representing the themes of his two principal research directions: technological and business history.
Although his publications were fewer in the 1970s, his research remained undiminished. He left Clermont-Ferrand to become director of studies in Section IV of the Ecole pratique des hautes etudes, and he gave a course in the history of technology at the University of Paris I. Then he devoted several years to writing the Pleiade Histoire des techniques.
Of all his works, it is this last one which might be faulted somewhat, for in it he attempted to write the history of technology during all historical periods from prehistory until our own times. His text is brilliant, particularly his opening “Prolegomenes a une histoire des techniques.” In some twenty pages he drew a picture of the history of technology; he attempted to explain the reasons for its isolation from the major current of historiography; and he sought to define a mod ern history of technology which would be integrated with other historical research, as opposed to a history of inventions which would be narrow and segmented in scope and without ties to other human activities. Then he put forth his concept of “technological systems” and the methodological principles which are now the basis of our research. But it is indeed evident that while deciding to deal with every period of every technology by himself alone, he could not avoid certain errors, especially in the contemporary period. These errors are not completely negligible, but no one can have such an extended knowledge without exposing himself to some accidental errors. The choice of subjects of the various parts of the book appear artificial; each of the parts covers about fifty pages only, and Gille wrote them himself without any collaborators. It was a question of attempting to tie together the evolution of technology with economic, geographical, scientific, and historical-sociological analyses, and at bottom, with political analyses. These fragments would have been better able to find their places if they had been integrated into a general text.
Gille’s attempt to give a global image of the history of technology as he conceived it was not perfectly convincing. But he intended to publish other works which would have been complementary to the encyclopedic summary: a collection of texts on the history of technology in the Middle Ages and in the modern epoch, and a study on the progress of technology and economic theories. One can see that his mind always remained attracted toward very diverse directions, through his projects dealing with work in French towns during the modern epoch and a history of economic concentration in France. None of these appeared. After re-editing his Ingénieurs de la Renaissance (1978), his last work was Les Mechaniciens grecs, la naissance de la technologie (1980).
Naturally it was a question of putting together his researches which, over the course of several years, had led him into an area which he had not hitherto explored. He seemed to have put to rest his eco nomic studies when he announced the preparation of several works on the history of technology: “Technology in the Century of Light,” “The Theaters of Machines,” “The Archaeology of Medieval Technology,” and “Technological Knowledge.” From that list of projects, one can see that he was far from having exhausted the enormous fund of knowledge which he had amassed. Several months before his death, I told him of my great admiration for his ability to work so hard; he responded that he always was engaged in at least two projects at the same time and that he was thus able to have one ready for publication nearly every year.
With the death of Gille an astonishing force has disappeared from our domain of activity. The great diversity of his researches was joined with a high degree of quality. It is difficult indeed to imagine such an active and brilliant mind as his, and one served by such a high degree of intelligence.
Bertrand Gille was a Corresponding Member of SHOT. In 1970 he was awarded its highest honor, the Leonardo da Vinci Medal.
Maurice Daumas
Originally published as Maurice Daumas, “Bertrand Gille (1920–1980),” Technology and Culture 22, no. 4 (1981): 839–42, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.1981.a890972.
Hughes, Thomas P. Review of The History of Techniques. Vol. 1: Techniques and Civilizations; vol. 2: Techniques and Sciences ed. by Bertrand Gille. Technology and Culture 29, no. 3 (1988): 688-690. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.1988.0133.
Sleeswyk, André W. Review of Les Mechaniciens grecs: La naissance de la technologie, by Bertrand Gille. Technology and Culture 22, no. 4 (1981): 776-778. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/890943.
Gille, Bertrand. Les Mechaniciens grecs: La naissance de la technologie. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1980.
Smith, Cecil O., Jr. Review of Histoire des techniques: Technique et civilisations, technique et sciences, by Bertrand Gille. Technology and Culture 22, no. 4 (1981): 771-776. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/890942.
Gille, Bertrand., ed. Histoire des techniques: Technique et civilisations, Technique et sciences. Encyclopédie de la Pléiade. Paris: Gallimard, 1978.
“The Leonardo da Vinci Medal.” Technology and Culture 12, no. 2 (1971): 235-237. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.1971.a893960.
Keller, Alex. Review of Les Ingénieurs de la Renaissance, by Bertrand Gille. Technology and Culture 6, no. 2 (1965): 271-274. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/894743.
Gille, Bertrand. Les ingénieurs de la Renaissance. Paris: Hermann, 1964.
Gille, Bertrand. La Sidérurgie française au XIXe siècle: Recherches histioriques. Switzerland: Droz, 1968.
Daumas, Maurice, ed. Histoire general des techniques. Vol . 3, L’Expansion du machinisme. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968. [Bertrand Gille collaborated on the third volume of Daumas’ book, which covers the period from 1725–1740 to 1850–1860. This volume includes contributions from both Gille and Daumas.]
Gille, Bertrand. “Machines.” In A History of Technology, vol . 2, edited by Charles Singer. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956.
Gille, Bertrand. Les origines de la grande industrie métallurgique en France. France: Éditions Domat Montchrestien, 1947.