Railroads and European Identity (19th Century - Present)

Octave Fradet (1842-1887), was a French engineer who studied at the École Impériale Polytechnique and the École Impériale des Arts et Manufactures [Centrale] (1867). Starting his career at the Paris-Orléans Railway Company, Fradet served as district inspector for the city of Paris and was mobilized during the Franco-Prussian War. He sailed for Constantinople in 1872, where he became head of the technical office at the Ottoman European Railway Company until 1876, performing extensive studies of routes and supervision of construction sites. A remarkable document from this period is Fradet’s handwritten French translation of the 1872 expedition report by Joseph Cerniks, which covered over 3,000 kilometers from the Mediterranean to Baghdad. Continuing his career in various railroad-related posts, including in Portugal and Serbia, Fradet died in 1887, at the age of 45.

Fradet’s documents have been housed at ENPC since their donation in 2002 by his descendant Philippe Cartier (IPC 1955). This previously unstudied collection of primary sources provides valuable insights into Ottoman Europe—which existed for more than 500 years, shaping European lands and populations in deep and irreversible ways—and into how the new, disruptive technology of railroads reshaped Ottoman Europe in its final century, for better or worse, to unite or divide, to oppress or liberate.

This short article cannot do justice to the extraordinary richness of the twenty boxes of material in the Fradet archive. Examples of items from the archive boxes specifically related to Ottoman Europe include hand-drawn and printed maps, elevations, correspondence, technical drawings and lists, minutes, illustrations, and hand-written or printed reports.

Under the supervision of Guillaume Saquet, the physical archive has been inventoried beyond the catalogue established at its donation, including an initial photographic record (by smartphone) of key documents. Following this, the whole archive was re-organised by the professional archiving service Grahal Solutions. This entailed a process of analysis, description, and provisional classification, followed by a reallocation of existing classifications using a combination of thematic and chronological criteria. Folders were assigned a definitive rating and described in an archival finding aid in Excel format. Finally, each item was cleaned of metal elements and physically classified, including physical repackaging. Following these steps, work on the digitization of the archive was begun with an initial selection of key documents, resulting in the creation of 600 digital images.

At the same time, the EELISA-sponsored teaching and research project commenced under the name of “Railroads and European Identity from the 19th Century to the Present.” In this context, a course entitled “Ottoman Europe: The Final Century” was established at ENPC under the supervision of David Selim Sayers. The course focuses on central research questions posed by the Fradet archive, such as: What are the political and economic implications of transport networks? What is their impact on the territories and populations in their path? And what is the relevance of historical infrastructure projects for our day?

The course is hosted by the Department of Languages and Cultures at ENPC, where a challenging level of course content is common across all classes. This is certainly the case here: students have had little exposure to social sciences or research methods in their previous studies, so the learning curve is steep, including the acquisition of in-depth knowledge on the Ottoman Empire and its context; skills of critical thinking, teamwork, and research; and a variety of English-language competencies.

Further, the Fradet archive requires a cross-disciplinary approach involving fields such as politics and international relations, sociology and anthropology, environmental studies, economics, operational research, and civil engineering. This interdisciplinarity is an essential component of our pedagogical method, as is the multiplicity of languages involved in the process: English as the shared medium of instruction; French as the predominant language of the archive; German as the language of certain key primary sources; and Ottoman and Modern Turkish, as the languages of certain primary and many secondary sources.

The ENPC course component of the project is augmented by a framework of institutional and international cooperation. At ENPC, this framework includes the Heritage and Archives Division, the Department of Languages and Cultures, and the LATTS laboratory. Beyond ENPC, it includes the Paris Institute for Critical Thinking (PICT), represented by our research colleagues Zachary J. Foster and Alexander I. Stingl; İstanbul Teknik Üniversitesi (İTÜ), represented by İskender Gökalp, Ahmet Erdem Tozoğlu, and Selma Saltoğlu; and the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM), represented by Ana Belén Berrocal Menarguez and Nicolas Marine.

The project implicates faculty and students from all participating institutions and comprises historical background lectures on Ottoman Europe in its final century, student visits to the Fradet archive to study the documents directly, and student-led workgroups that will present their research findings, alongside faculty presentations, at a three-day conference to be held at ENPC from January 29 to 31, 2026. An exhibition of significant items from the Fradet archive will open one day before the conference and include a student-made documentary film about the project.

A main objective of the project is to make the original documents in the Fradet archive accessible to students for their research, enabling them to experience the active production process, rather than simply the passive consumption, of historical narratives. For this purpose, students have been granted limited, supervised access to the sources while making sure that the integrity of the documents as physical objects is respected. While a partial digitization has already been carried out, and the digitized sources made available to our partner institutions, our long-term goal is to digitize the entire Fradet archive and make it available to researchers around the world, with web hosting provided by the ENPC Digital Heritage Library and PICT.

If the contributions to the final conference are of sufficient quality, the proceedings will be published online by ENPC and PICT as well as in printed form by PICT Books. We are also in the planning stages of an extended research project in which the Fradet archive will be brought into conversation with similar collections housed by other EELISA partners—some of whom find themselves en route by rail between Istanbul, Berlin, and Paris. We hope to stage exploratory visits during this academic year to investigate archival sources in cities such as Budapest, Bucharest, Belgrade, Sofia, and Istanbul, and we welcome any enquiries by interested parties, whether in the framework of EELISA or beyond.