Happy Apocalypse: A History of Technological Risk

by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz

How risk, disasters and pollution were managed and made acceptable during the Industrial Revolution

Being environmentally conscious is not nearly as modern as we imagine. As a mode of thinking it goes back hundreds of years. Yet we typically imagine ourselves among the first to grasp the impact humanity has on the environment. Hence there is a fashion for green confessions and mea culpas.

But the notion of a contemporary ecological awakening leads to political impasse. It erases a long history of environmental destruction. Furthermore, by focusing on our present virtues, it overlooks the struggles from which our perspective arose.

In response, Happy Apocalypse plunges us into the heart of controversies that emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries around factories, machines, vaccines and railways. Jean-Baptiste Fressoz demonstrates how risk was conceived, managed, distributed and erased to facilitate industrialization. He explores how clinical expertise around 1800 allowed vaccination to be presented as completely benign, how the polluter-pays principle emerged in the nineteenth century to legitimize the chemical industry, how safety norms were invented to secure industrial capital and how criticisms and objections were silenced or overcome to establish technological modernity.

Societies of the past did not inadvertently alter their environments on a massive scale. Nor did they disregard the consequences of their decisions. They seriously considered them, sometimes with dread. The history recounted in this book is not one of a sudden awakening but a process of modernising environmental disinhibition.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Technology, Politics, Environment, Ecology, France

380 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 18, 2024

Reviews

[Evan Leister · Rating 3 out of 5]

this book's title and cover are a huge disconnect from the book's content in my opinion. the main content is a review of choices in evaluation of risks both as individuals and societies in France primarily during the industrial revolution. massive success here I'm pulling primary sources in French that I'd never be able to read and summarizing and translating sections. there's a few gestures towards Apocalypse as this book is motivated by how people in the present think about climate change risk, but that doesn't really dominate the proceedings.

I would have preferred a bit less opinion in the chapters in the middle of fact discussions. I get the style choice and it offers me some insight into how the author perceives these reactions to risks. perhaps I'm so used to seeing Fact sections and Opinion sections carefully delineated in my professional work that I need to read a bit more persuasive histories. maybe I'll be ready to get back into Sellers now..

[Malcolm · Rating 4 out of 5]

Modernity is an interesting thing, as much an intellectual era as it was cultural, political, and economic. It was/is marked by profound changes in outlook and understandings of the world, of people’s places in it, and of how we make sense of it. Although there is little doubt we’d reached the condition we call ‘modernity’ by the third quarter of the 19th century, the shift begins a hundred or so years beforehand – and in many ways we’re still shaped by those changes 2½ centuries later; most obviously, in the ways we make sense of risk (think approaches to health, the environment, and more).

Not that the history of risk is necessarily something I think about that often. Yet, this book appealed to me and engaged in ways I didn’t expect, partly because it is outside my usual stuff, and partly because Fressoz weaves together an, on the surface, unusual set of fields that make sense – but then that’s a strength of intellectual history, here woven together with a history of science. Focusing on developments in France from the 1760s through to the mid-1800s, although with some comparisons with approaches in Britain, Fressoz traces developments of and shifts in discussions of and approaches to risk, liability, and fault.

His exploration includes discussions of inoculation and vaccination (as the beginning of wider public policy approaches to and through risk), large scale public provision of gas lighting and other gas powered services, the engineering of boilers, and the development of a chemical industry. It includes the provision for national standards – the early approach in France – alongside self-regulation and an insurance/compensation based approach – seen also in France but more prevalent in Britain. Yet woven through it is shifting understandings of approaches to health – environmental, social, and personal culpabilities each with different implications for liability – as well as unpacking the ways in which emerging capitalist and industrial class groups aligned with science to shift liability away from themselves.

Importantly, Fressoz is clear that this is not a linear set of shifts, seeing for instance in that exploration of liability also the emergence of the ‘polluter pays’ principle. He is also clear that these industrial and scientific shifts do not overlay some sort of advanced environmental consciousness, not that environmental concerns were absent. In a world where the oxygenation powers of trees were known and contribution of woodland and forests to air quality understood, a shift to coal as an energy source was seen as environmentally protective because it lessened the demands on wood for energy.

Crucially, also, Fressoz’s grasp of a wide set of literature and sources makes for an eclectic and impressive historical narrative that gave me pause to rethink discourses of and approaches to risk. He gets to this as he wraps up the book in a powerful conclusion that in part takes on a line of thinking prevalent in social theory in the 1990s emphasizing the emergence of a ‘risk’ society and a shift to reflexive capitalism; an approach associated with Ulrich Beck and others. Fressoz shows clearly and without overstating the case that explorations of risk as a social phenomenon and its influence on science, policy, and capitalist development is grounded in the earliest stages of modernity, and that powerful as Beck and others’ analyses were they suffered from an ahistorical approach.

The book was published in French in 2012 – so it took 12 years for it to appear in English. Even so, its insights are sharp and current, it’s a fabulous piece of intellectual history and of the history of science. In his wrap-up, riffing of some work by Walter Benjamin, Fressoz suggests history is not so much a fire alarm as a smoke detector, encouraging us to look more carefully and again at many of the ideas that influence current approaches to climate and environmental policies. It’s also a valuable contribution to histories of the 19th century and our understandings of the intellectual strands of thought that shaped capitalist development and its associated social and cultural conditions. On both these counts, it’s well worth the time. 4½ stars really.

[Zéro Janvier · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jean-Baptiste Fressoz est un historien des sciences, des techniques et de l’environnement, que j’ai découvert dans plusieurs entretiens où il présentait Sans transition, son dernier ouvrage consacré à la soi-disant ‘transition énergétique’, qui fait partie de mes prochaines lectures. Avant de lire le livre par lequel j’ai découvert cet auteur, j’avais envie de découvrir ses livres précédents, à commencer par L’apocalypse joyeuse, une histoire du risque technologique, publié en 2012 dans la collection L’Univers historique chez Seuil.

Sommes-nous les premiers à distinguer dans les lumières éblouissantes du progrès technique, l'ombre de ses dangers ? En occultant la réflexivité environnementale des sociétés passées, ce schéma simpliste dépolitise l'histoire longue de la destruction des environnements et altère notre possibilité d'appréhender lucidement la crise environnementale actuelle. Pour éviter cette amnésie, une histoire politique du risque technologique et de sa régulation sur la longue durée était nécessaire.

L'Apocalypse joyeuse expose l'entrée de la France et de la Grande-Bretagne dans la modernité industrielle (fin XVIIIe -XIXe siècle), celle des vaccins, des machines, des usines chimiques et des locomotives. Elle nous plonge au cœur des controverses vives qui surgirent autour des risques et des nuisances de ces innovations, et montre comment les critiques et les contestations furent réduites ou surmontées pour qu'advienne la société industrielle.

L'histoire du risque ici racontée n'est pas celle d'une prise de conscience, mais celle de la construction d'une certaine inconscience modernisatrice.

Jean-Baptiste Fressoz propose une lecture passionnante de l’évolution de la notion de risque technologique au tournant du XVIIIe et du XIXe siècle. Les 300 pages de l’ouvrage se composent, outre une introduction et une conclusion, de 6 chapitres thématiques :

1. L’inoculation du risque, sur l’échec des premières tentatives de rationalisation du risque auprès du public dans le cadre de l’inoculation contrer la variole au cours du XVIIIe siècle

2. Le virus philanthrope, sur les moyens mis en oeuvre par l’administration impériale au début du XIXe siècle en faveur de campagnes de vaccination

3. L’Ancien Régime et les « choses environnantes », sur le rôle de la police et des notables pour la préservation de l’environnement urbain, avec une gestion coutumière des environnements

4. La libéralisation de l’environnement, où comment l’exemple de l’industrie chimique montre les changements d’approche des risques environnementaux au début du XIXe siècle, avec une régulation en trompe-l’oeil au profit (c’est le cas de le dire) de l’investissement et du développement industriel selon une principe de fait accompli

5. Eclairer la France après Waterloo, où l’auteur compare les expériences française et anglaise sur la question de l’éclairage au gaz, entre rôle des savants, des experts et des témoins et légalisation du risque

6. La mécanique de la faute, sur les notions de vices, de marché de la responsabilité, de catastrophes aléatoires, et gestion du risque à travers des assurances

Le propos de Jean-Baptiste Fressoz est très clair, richement sourcé et documenté, parfois illustré, il se lit facilement et avec plaisir.

J’en ressors avec une vision différente de la soi-disant ‘révolution industrielle’ au XIXe siècle, qui n’était pas une marche en avant inéluctable mais au contraire un processus qui a été contesté, débattu, et où certaines options technologiques se sont imposées par des choix conscients mais pas toujours (jamais ?) démocratiques. J’y vois une sorte de fabrique du consentement au progrès technologique et aux conditions dans lesquelles il s’est déroulé depuis le XIXe siècle. C’est à la fois attristant et encourageant, car cela signifie que rien n’est écrit d’avance, à condition de mettre de la démocratie dans les choix technologiques qui s’offrent à nous aujourd’hui.

[Shannon Clark · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very French book on history. It is worth reading and I’m glad to have read it but it is painfully French in places even as this is an English translation. It is also a double dose of going back in time - first it is about the early impacts of technology and the environment in the 1700’s and 1800’s. But it is also a work that was written in 2012 and translated a few years later though it was only published in English this year. That makes it read a bit as a ln already slightly dated work with the changes in the globe in the past five plus years. It is still worth reading but while it is a work of history aspects of it may not age well over time.

[Erika · Rating 4 out of 5]

Compelling and occasionally brilliant exploration of how French and British (but more French) societies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries adapted the risks engendered by scientific and technological advances, from vaccines to railroads.

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

An ignorant state bureaucrat writing about his fears. Sadly some knowledge would have helped calm him, but won't give him any more money than the ignorance peddled.

[Jake · Rating 5 out of 5]

A312

[Catherine Holloway · Rating 3 out of 5]

Has some interesting history of science analysis, but the translation prefers to use French terms where there was a perfectly good equivalent term in English, which hurts the readability.

[Justin Africawala · Rating 3 out of 5]

interesting, i hope to find a book with a similar thesis that isn't as french-centric is this one