La rationalisation des savoirs mathématiques français au sein des écoles militaires américaines avant la Guerre de Sécession

• Published in: Philosophia scientiae Vol. 24; no. 1; pp. 33 - 58
• Main Author: Thomas Preveraud
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: German
• Published: Éditions Kimé 01.03.2020
• ISSN: 1281-2463; 1775-4283
• DOI: 10.4000/philosophiascientiae.2165

At the beginning of the 19th century, United States Army officers were trained at West Point Military Academy. This training was considered unsatisfactory on a number of points, including the teaching of mathematics. In 1817, following a voyage to Europe in which he had carefully studied a number of French military establishments, Sylvanus Thayer undertook a significant reform of West Point. The superiority of the French approach—a curriculum structured around an articulation of mathematics and engineering, the use of descriptive geometry and analysis for understanding the art of war, the use of textbooks—was taken for granted in North America to such an extent that the other US military academies founded in the Antebellum Period applied the French approach that had been adopted at West Point. The historiography of the period suggests a more or less passive “French infusion” into US military training. The classic narrative both crystallizes and mythologizes the French influence on the development of the mathematical training of American military personnel in the first half of the nineteenth century. By its univocal nature, this narrative underestimates the influence of intermediary sources—scientific, educational, institutional and editorial—domains where spheres of diffusion came into direct contact with spheres of reception. This article shows how those responsible for teaching mathematics in America’s military schools—directors, teachers and textbook authors—implemented a process whereby they decomposed and then reconstituted French knowledge and teaching methods in order to operate a “transfer” from one side of the Atlantic to the other. In the end, the instauration of this approach on American soil was less polarized and hierarchical than is usually supposed and was in large part forged within the bounds of a very local form of rationalization.