Careers in the French Technical Corps

This chapter will examine careers in the technical corps. Engineer and artillery officers were selected (by competitive examination) on intellectual grounds, as well as being socially selected during the ancien régime, while the geographical engineers were not admitted by competitive public examination until the Napoleonic epoch. By that time social barriers had been abolished, but intellectual selection in itself entailed social selection, so that the officers’ social profile did not change all that much, and continued to favour the notables. Promotion in the technical corps was slower than in regiments of the line, though the pace speeded up considerably with the Revolution and war.