The Ascending Republic: Aeronautics, Culture, and Politics in France, 1860-1914 (under advanced contract with The MIT Press) is the first book to address the ballooning revival in late nineteenth-century France and shed light on how that country became the center of pre-World War I aviation. Through extensive research in the popular press and previously unexplored archives across three continents, the book traces how aeronauts navigated the interstices of politics, class, science, gender, and colonialism to rehabilitate the balloon, an artifact that had fallen in status since its invention. The book shows how French civil society cultivated popular enthusiasm for flight decades before the advent of the airplane. Champions of French aeronautics made the case that if the British Royal Navy controlled the seas and the Imperial German Army dominated the continent, then France needed to take ownership of the skies. The French sought to appropriate this newly imagined geopolitical space through a variety of practices, making Paris the global capital of a thriving aeronautical culture that incorporated seemingly contradictory ideas of sacrificial patriotism, aristocratic modernity, technological cosmopolitanism, and colonial anxiety.
In the decades preceding World War I, ballooning in France was neither a trivial pursuit nor a senseless spectacle. Instead, it was deeply entangled with the big questions that troubled French society: What role would science and technology play in France’s recovery after the Franco-Prussian War? Could the newly established Third Republic survive the conflicts between a steadfast aristocracy suspicious of democracy and an ambitious bourgeoisie seeking to convert financial capital into social and political power? How would France measure up against other global players like Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States? And how would this European country exert control over its growing colonial possessions spread across Africa and Asia? The Ascending Republic not only addresses these questions but also explains how, in struggling to answer them, French aeronauts set the contours for the imaginings and developments of aviation in France and beyond. In short, the book offers both a new history of the Third Republic’s struggles in defining itself and reframes our understanding of the history of flight. If most people take the invention of the airplane to be a moment of radical rupture, The Ascending Republic presents a critical prehistory of aviation, arguing that it was a development that drew from ideas and practices that were gestated in the ballooning experiments of the last third of the nineteenth century.
L'Aéronaute, 1863 (Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris).