Practices of Knowledge between judgment and innovation. Surveyors and Building Reports in Paris (1690-1790) – EXPERTS

This research will analyse the expertise mechanism in one of the most important economic sectors - the building industry - during the early modern times. How were the technical, regulatory and controlling language used by the experts to coerce society? How did the technical competence of experts become an authority, even sometimes an “abuse of authority”? We intend to start by undertaking a large and multidisciplinary (legal, economic and architectural) research programme concerning building expertise using a unique archive collection (A.N. Z1J) which contains all the Parisian building surveyors’ reports from 1643 to 1792. 1690 was the year when architects were first officially able to be recognized as experts in the way that masons and carpenters had been for a long time. At that time, the community of surveyors was divided into two different groups: the architects and the contractors who were as well competitor as complementary.

The basis of our work will be to build two bodies of knowledge in parallel: first, the creation of a prosopography of the 234 experts working from 1690 to 1790 by studying multiple sources (manuscripts and printed literature); secondly, the production of an inventory and an analysis of surveyors’ reports. Reflecting the great size of the archive collection, we intend to work on a group of around 10 000 expert assessments, chosen from 1 year in 10, from 1696 to 1786. Each case will be inventoried, indexed, scanned and analysed in detail. The regular series of reports will be studied serially, and to a depth corresponding to their contents.

Three key issues are at stake:
The first one concerns the balance between risk and social innovation. How did risk situations lead to technical and even social innovation? One of our hypotheses is that the confrontation between doubts can lead to the resolution of conflicts between opposing parties. As building surveyors belonged to two different communities (craftsmanship and art), did the expertise depend on the roots of each particular expert? Experts often innovated while working. Does it mean that expertise may lead to innovation?

The second issue addresses the involvement of the law in the democratic decision making. How can the law be used by non-lawyers? The spread of legal principles through society can be found in the different levels of public activities as well as in those of private ones. In our project, we ask how and why did experts, who were familiar with the law, but were not qualified lawyers, set out lawyers’ arguments and convince judges to adopt their positions.

The third issue concerns the organization of real estate value. What were the standards necessary to build a kind of hierarchy of material things? Face to market forces, strict and unbiased standards could be undesirable, knowing that the rigour of the market would find equilibrium between different standards of valuation. How did surveyors precisely build and use both objective and subjective standards to estimate the value of real estate?

Accepting the possibility of an “abuse of authority” by the expert, would the sharing of expertise by different kinds of social actors possessing different kinds of knowledge reduce the risk of abuses of authority and, furthermore, reduce technical risk in general?

The results of the research will be disseminated through a collaborative knowledge basis on a dedicated website in which the two corpuses will be accessed by the scientific community. The analysis of cases will be editorialized in the form of virtual exhibitions for the general public. The final, general report of the results will be recorded in a book and the project will end with two national and international workshops.