Although maybe not the most fashionable area of study today, French science has a secure place in the classical canon of the history of science. Like the Scientific Revolution and Italian science at the beginning of the seventeenth century, French science, particularly eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century French science, remains a safe, albeit conservative, bet in terms of history-of-science teaching and research. The classic trope of the passage of the flame of European science from Italy to Britain and France in the seventeenth and then eighteenth centuries is well established in overviews of the field. Specializing in research in this area is not, therefore, unreasonable as a career choice if you are aiming for a history-of-science position in Europe or even in the US. The Académie (royale) des sciences, with its state-sponsored model of collective research, provides a striking counterpoint to the amateur, more individualistic functioning of London's Royal Society – a foretaste of modernity in the institutionalization of science. Clearly naive, such a representation of French science serves as a good initial framework on which to hang half a century of critical historical research. If proof of the continued interest for eighteenth-century French science is needed, we can cite the Web-based project around Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie currently in progress under the auspices of the French Academy of Sciences.Footnote ¹ The large number of publications in the history of French science (in English as well as French) make it unreasonable to pick out one or two for special attention here. But what about history of science in France and the academic community that practises this discipline today? Here, I offer a very personal view and analysis of this community, trying to underline contrasts with the history of science in the UK and the US.

It would be a mistake, I think, to start by saying that the history of science is currently experiencing a crisis in France, as it has been in a state of perpetual crisis since at least the 1960s; today's situation seems to me to be no worse (although certainly no better) than it was twenty or even fifty years ago. The field is marginal enough that, given its institutional setting, it is not inconceivable that history of science could disappear altogether, at least in terms of its professional insertion in the French system of higher education. But, once again, this has been the case for at least the last thirty years and maybe for the whole history of the history of science in France. What has evolved significantly in the last three decades is the general situation of higher education in France, placing new pressures on students, teachers and administrators alike. I would like, therefore, to open with a few words about the French higher-education system which is at one and the same time the most competitive, selective and the most open and accessible that I have come across in my career.

In France, the perpetuation of an academic elite is assured by a group of highly selective, relatively small institutions gathered together under the title of the grandes écoles. A holdover from the Napoleonic, if not the Revolutionary, era, these schools play a dual role: attracting the ‘best’ students and furnishing an intellectual (and administrative) elite; their graduates are, even today, overrepresented in the teaching faculties of France's universities, particularly in senior positions and particularly in Paris. Echoing the grandes écoles, there is an institutional shadow world of elite research centres that operate quite independently from the rest of the tertiary system, the best known being the Collège de France. While there are presently no historians of science at the Collège de France, the discipline is well represented at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS). Indeed, the Centre Koyré, the research laboratory associated with the EHESS, has carried considerable weight in the history of science in France since its foundation in 1958.

As a counterpoint to the highly selective entry into the grandes écoles, the French higher-education system is remarkably inclusive; anyone with a baccalauréat has the right to attend a university as an undergraduate (in principle, the university and discipline of their choice). To understand how important this orientation is, one needs to be aware that today 82 per cent of secondary-school students obtain their baccalauréat, or around 250,000 per year. The university is also relatively inexpensive for French and non-French students alike.Footnote ² On the downside (if you admit this openness as a good thing), most French universities are seriously underfunded for their teaching mission, with insufficient administrative and teaching staff for the large number of students who arrive every year, and even with a growing precarious non-tenured adjunct staff to complement the 55,000 tenured faculty (for somewhere around 2.5 million students); the quality of undergraduate university education is, to put it bluntly, not as high as it is in Britain.

Thus French higher education is characterized by stark contrasts, with teaching in the grandes écoles generally dispensed to small classes of rigorously selected students, while at the university it too often consists of lectures in front of hundreds of students. Furthermore, many of these undergraduates are very poorly prepared for the university teaching experience, leading to a dramatic attrition rate: around half of the students who enter the university as undergraduates give up before the end of their course and leave without any kind of degree.

Having sketched this broad canvas of French higher education, we can ask how the history of science fits in. There is no mandatory history-of-science teaching in secondary school or at university. Indeed, as far as I am aware there is no formal possibility of studying the history of science as such as an undergraduate degree, although history-of-science courses are offered around the country in history departments (albeit very rarely), science departments (including medical schools) and philosophy departments (quite common, I believe, although, as one might expect, it is history of science tied into the philosophy of science – the Copernican Revolution à la Koyré, for example). Those who want to specialize in the study of the history of science can do so at master's level at one of the few centres around France. Thanks to a recent national reform of the master's degree there is now officially only one such degree in the field (Epistémologie, histoire des sciences et techniques – history and philosophy of science) offered in Paris, Nantes, Strasbourg, Bordeaux and Nancy, although several other universities, such as Lyon, offer history of science inserted into another master's programme. I am unable to judge the quality of these programmes, but the experience I have had in France suggests to me that the students who go on to do PhDs in the history of science have to complement an eclectic introduction to the field with a great deal of personal study.

Teaching at the universities and the grandes écoles remains very teacher-centred; with no national curriculum, professors teach largely according to their competences, based on their own training and oriented towards their own areas of research. The result is a wide variety of content and approach in the different institutions, meaning that there is little common ground among students in the history of science who have studied in different programmes across the country. I was struck in the US that PhDs in the history of science had a relatively large common base of literature (everyone had read Foucault's History of Sexuality, and Shapin and Schaffer's Leviathan and the Air-Pump, for example), whereas in France I find that historians of science coming from different schools or even just specialized in different areas of research have no such shared references. While there seems to be constant, if not growing, interest from students who would like to study in the field (often dissatisfied scientists with a critical human-sciences orientation), the universities that offer courses or programmes in history of science have relatively few specialists in tenured positions. Although I have no statistics to back up the claim, I imagine that a fair number, if not the majority, of history-of-science courses in France are taught by people who never received any formal training in the field.

One problem is that most people at the university – scientists and non-scientists alike, although particularly scientists – find that history of science is an excellent idea, but when it comes to new tenured posts they are unlikely to fight to open a position in this area at the expense of an appointment in their own discipline. Add to this the very different functioning of the assessment of performance between history of science and the sciences (the number of publications in peer-reviewed journals at the time of defending one's thesis, for example, or the relative unimportance of monographs for scientists), and we begin to see why there is little institutional space for the historian of science within the science faculties. One might think that the mistake is to get into bed with the scientists rather than with historians in history departments. Here we touch on what I would consider the greatest structural problem of history of science in France: the quasi-absence of the speciality in history departments.Footnote ³ For reasons that are too complicated to go into here, French history departments remain quite conservative in their hiring choices and history of science has not found its place in this domain.

As in many other countries, the historian of science is too often caught institutionally between the sciences and the humanities. Quite frequently lodged in science faculties or medical schools, professional historians of science suffer from the same factors that benefit them. Globally, there is money on the side of medicine and science and yet history of science is clearly not a science and the CVs of historians of science do not match up to those of their scientific colleagues, and, maybe worst of all in the eyes of the administration, their students take too long to complete their PhDs.

But all is not gloom and doom. France benefits from an institution that has no British or American equivalent, the Centre national de recherche scientifique (CNRS), which includes an ‘institute’ dedicated to the human and social sciences.Footnote ⁴ It is in this institution that we find the greatest number of specialist historians of science. Although they dispose of full-time research positions, the members of the CNRS often contribute to teaching at the master's level and direct a considerable number of doctoral theses. Thus, while the teaching of history of science is struggling, research in the domain seems in relatively good shape. One indicator of the vigour of contemporary French history of science is the recent publication of an encyclopedic overview of the history of science by the prestigious publisher Seuil. Under the overall supervision of Dominique Pestre (EHESS and CNRS), Histoire des sciences et des savoirs (History of Science and Knowledge) came out in 2015–2016 in three hefty volumes. While this publication bears witness to an interest in the subject and the existence of a critical mass of researchers sufficient to carry out the project, it also reveals certain structural weaknesses in the history-of-science community in France. If we look just at the first volume (From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment) published under the direction of Stéphane van Damme, we see that the texts were contributed by twenty-five different authors, the majority of whom (fourteen, to be precise) are based in Parisian institutions. If the other eleven were from non-Parisian French universities or research units one might argue that this represents a good balance in the history of science across France, as Paris still forms the focus for France's institutional and intellectual life. But eight authors do not work in France at all, meaning that only three of the contributors are in non-Parisian French institutions. This demonstrates what any French academic will tell you, that Paris focuses the ambitions and resources in a field like history of science, encouraging a mandarin-like culture where powerful Parisian figures battle it out for pre-eminence in the field. While not confined to France, such a mandarin culture is an enduring feature of the history of science in this country and you could easily write the history of the field as a series of clashes between leaders and their schools fighting for control over key Parisian institutions and sources of funding.

The best friend that history of science has in France is the sacrosanct liberty of French academics (in terms of both teaching and research) and the protection offered by the status of being a French civil servant (fonctionnaire). If someone chooses to study and teach the history of science, no one can stop them, even if they were originally hired to do something completely different. I have met several members of the CNRS who were hired to do research in nuclear physics and who for political reasons sidestepped into the history of science.Footnote ⁵

But this official institutional perspective does not exhaust the field of history of science in France – far from it. Counting the university teachers and CNRS researchers together there are probably around 150 to 200 professional historians of science in France, and yet every two years the Société francaise d'histoire des sciences et des techniques (SFHST) organizes a national history-of-science conference with around two hundred participants, of whom a minority are professional historians of science. Not counting the numerous students in the field, the most common trajectory consigns history of science to a spare-time activity that flourishes in the favourable conditions provided by retirement. Another significant source of history-of-science research in France is secondary-school science teachers who take an interest in the history of their discipline. The quality of their research is often extremely high, particularly when they have benefited from some postgraduate study in the field. Unfortunately, and mainly due to the problem of competence in English, this work is not as internationally visible as it might be.

Of course, language is a crucial issue for French academics, and we should bear in mind that the 1994 Loi Toubon that imposes the use of French in public institutions is still in force. The French resent the dominance of the English language in academia as elsewhere, and I have to warn any future colleagues that this is only one aspect of a widespread, sometimes unpleasant, but not entirely unjustified, anti-Anglo-Saxon feeling. The language issue plays out most obviously in the area of academic publications. In recent attempts to evaluate its academics, the French government proposed using the ranking of publications provided by the European Science Foundation for the humanities. There were only a handful of journals in this list that would publish French-language articles, and none of these were ranked A in the history of science.Footnote ⁶ The French academic community reacted vociferously to this language problem, and in response the lists of journals were watered down to include a number of weaker titles that published in French. You can see, therefore, the problems that the defence of the French language brings to these kinds of evaluation exercise that have become such an integral part of British academic life. On the other hand, while the resulting solution is faintly ridiculous, there is much to be said for sticking spokes in the wheels of this kind of academic policing measure. Be that as it may, the French history-of-science research community is divided over the issue of the English language. Those colleagues who aim at a high-level career with international recognition publish in English and target the most prestigious journals, while others restrict their publications to the French language. This split between internationally and nationally oriented researchers is even more obvious on the conference circuit. I am quite surprised by how few French historians of science are on the programmes of HSS or BSHS conferences, for example. Even historians of science who publish in major British and American journals are regrettably absent from the accompanying international conferences. This may, however, be at least in part due to the relatively poor funding of research in France.Footnote ⁷ One can only hope that the younger generations of researchers who are much more at ease with English change this trend. Nevertheless, judging by the number of French PhD students I have seen at BSHS conferences recently, this change is not just around the corner. On the other hand, without a mastery of French it remains very hard to get an academic job in France, except for well-established ‘stars’ in the field.

The future prospects of any academic discipline clearly depend on the ‘pipeline’ of new members of the field, and so a brief consideration of the population of doctoral students in history of science is in order. A report from 2005 listed several hundred ongoing theses in the history of science. Looking through the names of the PhD students, what is particularly striking is how many have disappeared from the community altogether. Obviously, it is impossible to know how many in this group envisioned a career in the history of science, but only a tiny minority of them have gone on to pursue one. The basic problem is simply a lack of positions in the field, with only two or three posts per year in the history of science for the hundreds of qualified prospective candidates. While this problem is not specific to French academia, I feel obliged to underline what a pity it is that so many people who would like to pursue a career in the history of science are unable to do so. This being said, I do not see the floodgates of recruitment opening in the foreseeable future.

For those historians of science who do succeed in getting a job, I have noticed that it is not uncommon for them to move away from an exclusively historical approach. In general there is a strong tradition of combining history and philosophy of science in France, with wider ‘science-studies’-type approaches becoming very fashionable at the turn of the century. A number of talented high-profile women and men, who have successfully integrated an Anglo-American approach to the history of science, have gone on to work in related domains that may or may not be included under the broad head of science studies but are not history of science. I am thinking here of Pap Ndiaye (EHESS), who wrote a thesis on the history of Dupont and now works on Negritude; or Christophe Bonneuil (CNRS), whose doctorate was on the history of agricultural practice in Africa and now comments on contemporary debates over GMOs or global warming; or Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent (University of Paris), who has passed from the history of chemistry to studying public opinion and science, nanoscience and nuclear waste (albeit with a historical perspective). Thus we can see that the field's best friend, academic freedom, also represents a potential threat as leading scholars move on to new pastures.

To conclude with a practical tip: if you would like to work as a lecturer in France, you cannot simply apply for a tenure-track position; you first need to submit a dossier to the CNU (Conseil national des universités), a national body that vets future candidates for posts as maître/sse de conférences (the equivalent of lecturer) and professeur/e (professor) at the university and many of the grandes écoles.Footnote ⁸ The CNU is divided into ‘sections’ and history of science falls under the 72nd section (history and philosophy of science).Footnote ⁹ The documents required are detailed on the section's website. If you are feeling confident, you can also apply in the relevant scientific section (this qualification seems to be possible in mathematics but much more rare for the other sciences) or in one of the history sections (21 – ancient history, 22 – modern history). The pay is not very good (particularly for new appointments), but university teachers (and even more so teachers at the EHESS or researchers with the CNRS), even though increasingly under pressure to comply with the project-based financing system run by the ANR (Agence nationale de recherche), enjoy exceptional liberty in terms of the choice and conduct of their research.