Jean Biarez: His Life and Work - Multiscale Geomechanics: From Soil to Engineering Projects - page 2

concours in 1949 to enter the prestigious Ecole Centrale des Arts et Manufactures
(henceforth referred to as Ecole Centrale ; the institution is now referred to as ECP:
Ecole Centrale de Paris ). After graduating in 1952 with a major in construction, he
completed his military service in the French Navy. For a brief time, he worked for a
newly created building inspection firm, the SOCOTEC.
At the end of 1954, he responded to a double offer of employment by the
University of Grenoble's Faculté des sciences , which was just introducing a course
in soil mechanics, and the newly created SOGREAH ( Société grenobloise d'études
et d'applications hydrauliques ), which was planning to build a laboratory of soil
mechanics. Nowadays, the ties between university and industry are regularly
contested in France, but in the 1950s and especially in the Dauphiné region of
Grenoble, this type of cooperation was considered perfectly natural. This was in part
because in 1907 a major figure in civil engineering, Georges Routin , established
both an experimental laboratory at the Neyret-Beylier firm in Grenoble and
academic courses in hydraulics at the Institut national polytechnique de Grenoble
(INPG).
A bit of historical information will help the reader grasp what was at stake in
French society in the 1950s when Jean Biarez, as a young man, began his
professional career.
The Second World War reduced France to a state of shambles; hence, the most
vital need of the day was to produce energy. The state-owned public enterprise EDF
( Electricité de France ) was given the ambitious task of building hydroelectric dams.
The competence of French engineers, evident in successful projects before and even
during the war, was not so extensive when it came to building earth dams. Their
experience was limited to a few projects successfully completed in Algeria in the
1930s. Even this not so extensive experience was useful in building the dam in
Serre-Ponçon. EDF played a crucial role in organizing and coordinating a veritable
transfer of technology from engineering consulting firms, contractors and clients −
especially from the United States − to the newly created soil mechanics laboratories
in France.
Grenoble benefited from the cooperation between industry and university.
Several technological innovations, such as the mythical houille blanche (“white
coal”, meaning hydroelectric power) of Aristide Bergès (1833-1904), an alumnus of
Ecole Centrale from 1852, are famously connected to Grenoble.
Gradually, the concern of industrialists to train competent engineers became the
task of the university, which was newly equipped with adequate structures (schools
in paper manufacturing, hydraulics, electrotechnics). Of note, the first lecture on
electricity took place in Grenoble in 1892.