Michel Marié, who brought his unconventional research career at the LATTS to a close, passed away in August 2026 in Paris at the age of 95. He was practically of the same generation as Alain Touraine, Edgard Morin and Pierre Bourdieu, with whom he had, in fact, crossed paths at various points in his life, and was one of the first sociologists at the CNRS. But his career as a sociologist – or anthropologist, as he sometimes liked to describe himself – was highly distinctive: he primarily grappled with the major techno-political questions and issues of the ‘Trente Glorieuses’, ranging from the clearance of the slums in Nanterre to the legal frameworks for spatial planning, via the implementation of major technical development projects. On these issues, Michel rejected ready-made, one-dimensional solutions and suggested that engineers should devote themselves more to the ‘ménagement’ of territories and societies – a neologism he had coined – rather than to their ‘aménagement’.
As a young sociologist who had worked in various planning consultancies – notably on the regeneration of the St Leu neighbourhood in Amiens – Michel Marié, as he recounts in the opening pages of *Les terres et les mots*, was suddenly confronted with an unprecedented situation. The year 1958 marked both his entry into the BERU – the Bureau d’Etudes et de Réalisations Urbaines – and the ‘Constantine speech’ delivered by General de Gaulle on 3 September. In this speech and its accompanying documents, the French President announced to the Algerians a vast economic and social development plan, with ambitious yet short-term objectives: universal education for all children, the construction of numerous homes, roads and other infrastructure, the industrialisation of the region, in short, the accelerated ‘modernisation’ of Algeria, in the hope of counterbalancing the growing influence of the FLN. The ‘Constantine Plan’ quickly mobilised a steady stream of engineers, architects and other design consultancies such as BERU. When approached, Michel accepted several assignments within this framework, in Oran, Constantine and Algiers, but he was far from always feeling at ease there. On the one hand, the extent of the ‘otherness’ he encountered in the territories and amongst the indigenous peoples was beyond anything he had previously experienced, leading to significant difficulties in communication and understanding in his day-to-day work; on the other hand, and in stark contrast, the ‘confrontational’ nature of his ‘mission’ colleagues’ approach – to use his own words – raised countless questions for him. From this formative experience, Michel drew two lessons. Firstly, a meticulous and unwavering attention to the richness of the local context, to its own intelligence and to its capacity for response or innovation; secondly, an instinctive wariness of confrontational, unquestionable, impersonal and standardising public action. Twenty years later, he would also be able to demonstrate that this type of approach – with its indicators, its organisational arrangements, its technocratic tools and its methods of calculation – had subsequently been largely adopted in mainland France from the 1960s onwards. In a sense, the ‘mission’-based administration rapidly deployed in Algeria between 1958 and 1961 had, unwittingly, foreshadowed and served as a test bed for other ‘missions’ (for spatial planning, the creation of new towns, …), this time in mainland France, from the early 1960s onwards (DATAR was established in 1963).
In his last post before joining LATTS, Michel had once again taken on the role of ‘bridge-builder’ between the world of social sciences and that of the planning officials at the Ministry of Infrastructure. Within the Research and Innovation Delegation – a somewhat unconventional precursor to the creation of a Research Directorate within the Ministry of Infrastructure – Michel had assembled a small team of ‘de-cloaked’ engineers, with whom he organised a series of seminars for practitioners and researchers entitled ‘Territories, Techniques and Societies’, which focused on various key themes within the Ministry of Infrastructure. These seminars led to the publication of 35 special issues between 1987 and 1998. On a more personal note, Michel leaves behind a number of academic articles and works as diverse as *Situations migratoires (ou la fonction-miroir)* , 1976, co-authored with Thomas Regazzola, published by Galilèe, and *La campagne inventée*, 1977, co-authored with Jean Viard, published by Actes-Sud. But his most significant work is undoubtedly *Les terres et les mots; a journey through the social sciences, 1989, in which he ventures to write his ‘ego-history’, recounting his adventures, missteps and lessons learnt, from his native Picardy to the LATTS, via the Israeli kibbutzim, 1960s Algeria, and Venezuela, or pre-Pinochet Chile.
Michel Marié’s thinking anticipated many of the issues that would lie at the heart of the LATTS. A re-reading of his article ‘Towards an anthropology of major infrastructure projects. The Provence Canal’, written in 1984 shortly before the creation of LATTS, in the Annales de la Recherche Urbaine, provides a good illustration of this.
Firstly, it demonstrates how to understand, from a long-term perspective, the convergence of diverse projects that have been pieced together in a somewhat haphazard manner: this ‘major project’ thus bears a resemblance to the ‘large technical systems’ and infrastructure that were the subject of a collective work by the laboratory. Next, the core of the article focuses on the transition from gravity-fed irrigation via earthen channels and a social system of water-sharing amongst users of the ‘water towers’ to the installation of piped systems and the sale of pressurised water in the Gardanne area. Objects are central to this transformation: pipes, meters, and the mechanisms that drive sprinklers via pressure. Public-private sharing arrangements and the relationships between different territories (those where water is extracted and those where it is used) are also analysed in detail. All these topics were subsequently explored in depth in the journal *Flux*. An original insight, in a digression on the development of the Languedoc region—which further consolidated the engineers’ hold on power—is that it shows that the majority of management and operational posts within the development company were held by engineers returning from Morocco, where they had been able to develop large-scale hydraulic projects without constraints. Highlighting this ‘return from the colony ’ (which ties in with what he had observed regarding the so-called Constantine economic development plan in Algeria and which would also serve as a model for the ‘grands ensembles’) could usefully be revisited in the context of Latts’ work on exchanges with the Global South. Finally, and this is the article’s central argument, these forms of modernisation do not completely eliminate the use of gravity-fed water systems; this balance between old and new forms of use is reflected in the economics of maintaining these networks, another emerging area of research within the laboratory.
Jean Pierre Galland, Gilles Jeannot
A memorial service for Michel Marié will be held on 19 September at 5.30 pm in the Mansart Chapel at Saint Séverin Church in Paris.