The Canal du Midi, which threads through southwestern France and
links the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, was an astonishing feat of
seventeenth-century engineering--in fact, it was technically
impossible according to the standards of its day. "Impossible
Engineering" takes an insightful and entertaining look at the
mystery of its success as well as the canal's surprising political
significance. The waterway was a marvel that connected modern state
power to human control of nature just as surely as it linked the
ocean to the sea.
The Canal du Midi is typically characterized as the achievement
of Pierre-Paul Riquet, a tax farmer and entrepreneur for the canal.
Yet Chandra Mukerji argues that it was a product of collective
intelligence, depending on peasant women and artisans--unrecognized
heirs to Roman traditions of engineering--who came to labor on the
waterway in collaboration with military and academic supervisors.
Ironically, while Louis XIV and his treasury minister Jean-Baptiste
Colbert used propaganda to present France as a new Rome, the Canal
du Midi was being constructed with unrecognized classical methods.
Still, the result was politically potent. As Mukerji shows, the
project took land and power from local nobles, using water itself
as a silent agent of the state to disrupt traditions of local life
that had served regional elites.
"Impossible Engineering" opens a surprising window into the
world of seventeenth-century France and illuminates a singular work
of engineering undertaken to empower the state through technical
conquest of nature.
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