Abstract EN:

The purpose of this thesis is the study of a collection of manuscripts entiles oisivetes "miscellanies" of marshal de vauban. Throughout a long career as king louis the fourteenth's fortifications engineer, the marshal wrote several hundreds of essays but selected only twenty-nine of then to compose his oisivetes. Dealing with a wide spectrum of different subjets such as forestry management, colonization, religion or taxation, the book was published in twelve volumes in a similar binding meant to be his intellectual legacy. These essays have been studied as a corpus revealing a deep unity of thougt. Our research of the conceptual frame work that guides the author in his attempt consists in putting the book in an intellectual historical perspective. The author draws from military essays the elements of a method based on cartesian laws implemented in fortifications. This oisivetes can be considered as a keen observation of the interaction of a thougt and its expression or a rhetoric and its concept. Professor chartier's works on the production and reception of writing have inspired and stimulated our approach. Then, the essays are replaced in the philosophical and scientific background of the xviieme century. Numberss provide the thread and the very basis of their rationale. Such texts are also used as the management devices either of a particular issue approached in a innovative way (double-entry table, project of payment of worker-soldiers by the hour, census of populations etc) or of the state in its entirety, the general method being applied in that case to political questions. Finally, this general theory is stusdied as the upshot of the marshal's thought process thatprivileges the interdependance of factors and their compensation as the transposed his military expertise into the field of his concerns as a statesman as througk his "oisivetes could stand as as good a defence bulwork as stone fortifications.