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Le Mémoire sur l’administration de la police de Paris en 1770 est une référence obligée pour les spécialistes. Rédigé à la fin des années 1760, par le commissaire Lemaire sous la houlette du lieutenant général de police Sartine, en réponse à un questionnaire transmis par la Cour de Vienne à la Cour de France, il a le plus souvent été lu comme « un véritable traité de la police parisienne, où se trouvent indiquées avec une clarté toute française les différentes parties de cette importante admi...

Continued improvement in silicon carbide (SiC) material processing has allowed development of efficient high temperature devices which are uniquely suited to power electronics circuit designs. The 4H-SiC structure has several intrinsic characteristics that facilitate optimal speed and power handling during high temperature device operation. These characteristics include wide bandgap (3.2 eV), high dielectric breakdown (3.5 MV/cm), and high thermal conductivity (4.9 W/cm-K)[1,2]. By combining these properties, SiC bipolar junction transistors (BJTs) can achieve fast, low impedance switching at high voltages (1.2 kV). New generation devices are being developed with increased current handling capability, as well as improved forward voltage characteristics. The device considered here, along with its on-state DC characteristic, is shown in figure 1. The BJTs are approximately 5mm by 5mm, and are nominally rated for a maximum Ice of 50A. Measurements on the Tektronix 371B curve-tracer indicate current gains over 60 at 25 oC and roughly 40 at 150 oC. These results were obtained at collector currents up to 20A. The base current for BJTs is typically 300 to 800 mA, depending on device temperature and the maximum device current required. In order to meet current handling requirements of up to 80A, as required for power conversion in modern military systems such as the hybrid-electric vehicle (HEV), it is necessary to configure these devices in parallel with minimal external cooling. The resulting switching circuits must therefore be validated for operation at high temperatures (package temperatures of 90 oC, and junction temperatures to 150 oC). Validation includes characterization of the devices in clamped inductive circuits with devices configured both alone and in parallel over time. Figure 4 shows measurement waveforms obtained during continuous clamped inductive switching. The primary focus of this work is to establish the overall performance and reliability of these newer generation SiC BJTs in power conversion circuits. Failure analysis and critical performance issues, such as current sharing, energy loss, and total reverse recovery charge are addressed. The initial results of the experiments indicate that these SiC switches have the potential to perform reliably in high temperature power conversion.

Significant development of silicon carbide (SiC) for device applications allows its uniquely favorable properties to be exploited in circuit designs. The 4H-SiC structure has several characteristics that provide optimal speed and power handling. These include wide bandgap (3 cV), high dielectric breakdown (3.5 MV/cm), and high thermal conductivity (5 W/cm-K) [1]. By combining these properties, SiC bipolar junction transistors can achieve fast switching at high voltages (1.2 kV). New generation devices are also being developed with increased current handling capability (above 10 A). However, in order to meet the power handling requirements of FCS systems, such as hybrid-electric vehicle (HEV) power conditioning, it is necessary to configure these devices in parallel and validate their operation at high temperatures (package temperatures of 90 degrees C, and junction temperatures to over 150 degrees C). This report documents experimental characterization of SiC BJTs fabricated by CREE in various applications, including parallel switching. The results presented here indicate that SiC is well suited to meet these goals.

The DIODE computer program at the Harry Diamond Laboratories (HDL) is used to compute current and voltage characteristics in semiconductors or gases. This user's manual serves two main purposes: (1) to document the present DIODE computer program in preparation for proposed improvements and (2) to allow others to use the program without personal instruction. Included are a brief history of the origin of the DIODE computer program, input data requirements, description of the computer code, output, and a discussion of the material parameters. Detailed instructions are included for the use of a remote IBM terminal on the Harry Diamond Laboratories site. Also included is a list of over 100 papers, reports, and oral presentations based on the DIODE program.

The government’s inability to stem the generalization and deepening of the crisis at the very end of the decade doomed liberalization. The new Controller-General, Terray, metaphorically portrayed the liberal experience as “the flood” and imagined his responsibility, in part, as channeling the waters back into their natural reservoirs and building dikes capable of withstanding future inundations of any sort. But he did not take a nostalgically antediluvian approach to the task—at least he tried not to. The problem was that de-liberalization did not bring instant recovery. Terray enjoyed virtually no respite from subsistence troubles during his four year tenure and the subsistence troubles generated other political and economic problems which compounded the difficulty for him.

In considering, across the long run, the increasing success eighteenth century society enjoyed in escaping or attenuating the effects of the deadly old-style subsistence crises—an incomplete triumph which we must be careful not to exaggerate—the role played by government in husbanding resources, containing disease, and organizing social services is often overlooked. If Paris was spared a serious “crisis of mortality” and violent sociopolitical disruptions in the late sixties, it was partly due to the efforts the government made—without enthusiasm, it must be noted—to keep the city adequately supplied in the midst of a grave and prolonged dearth. To be sure, it can be, and in fact was, argued that the methods used by authorities were prodigal and inefficient. The king was said to have spent as much as 10,000,000 livres in purchasing grain and flour, the bulk of which served the capital.1 But it remains extremely doubtful, given the harvest failures, the disorganization of the grain trade, the primitive state of communications and the mood of consumers, that the city could have fared so relatively well without massive governmental assistance. In any case, no one, with the exception of a handful of ideologues and optimists, not even the ministers who fathered the radical program of liberalization, was prepared to court the risks that non-intervention implied.

At every level of administrative life, public officials expended enormous amounts of time, energy and money in dealing with the subsistence question. Virtually everyone who practiced or wrote about public administration, or what was commonly called “police” in the old regime, considered provisioning to be among its paramount concerns. “The abundance of grain,” intoned Colbert, “is the thing to which we must pay the most attention in the police.” A hundred years later his eulogist Necker wrote that “the subsistence of the people is the most essential object which must occupy the administration.” Dupont, physiocracy’s chief merchandiser and a mordant critic of what he believed to be the Colbert-Necker continuum of policy, remarked ironically on the “abundance” of the subsistence subject and deplored the fact that it dominated so much of public business: “nothing can better prove to you that this branch of Administration is truly the first of all [of them] than the multitude of Laws, Regulations, Arrets of Parlements, Ordonnances of Judges, Ordonnances of Municipalities, Ordonnances of intendants or royal agents which have come into place in all times on the matter of the provisioning of grain.”1

Whereas Laverdy used the king’s grain to facilitate the transition from a police to a liberal regime, Terray used it to facilitate the transition from a liberal to a police regime. There are of course other important differences and many striking similarities between the government grain operations of the sixties and of the seventies: we explore some of them in the pages that follow.

The police were structurally fragmented and often divided by interest and ambition but they shared a number of basic ideas about the provisioning question. This chapter deals with the police view of the grain trade and the ways in which the police translated their attitudes into action. It is the story of persistence rather than change, of an overwhelming sense of continuity informed by a belief that things—at least subsistence things—are at bottom always the same. The police clung to the old ways because they were proven ways. Yet it would be a mistake, I argue, to infer from the immobility and the tone of police regulations that the police operated in a mindless, mechanical and timeless fashion. On the other hand, there were limits to flexibility and adaptability. The police were wholly unprepared for the radical innovations which they had to face in the 1760’s when the government turned against the multisecular tradition of regulation.

A few short years after the proclamation of liberalization, the government found itself faced with a burgeoning subsistence crisis and embroiled in a growing debate on the judiciousness of the reform. The reforms were meant to change the way in which the grain trade was conducted. The May Declaration radically altered the conditions of internal commerce and the July Edict opened the frontiers to exports. Taken together, these measures were supposed to build a stronger, more resilient and more dependable commercial structure at the same time that they generated powerful incentives for agricultural expansion. In this chapter we shall consider the impact of the reforms on domestic and foreign trade and especially on the customary patterns of provisioning. In addition, we shall examine the way in which partisans and adversaries of the May and July laws explained the relationship between liberalization and dearth.

The explosion of joy and gratitude which followed the promulgation of the liberal measures seemed to confirm the royal claims. The May Declaration elated the Journal Economique. In it the editors rediscovered the prince whose proud sobriquet had once been “the well-beloved”: they hailed “the august monarch that heaven gave for master to this great kingdom” and characterized him as “so justly cherished by all his people.” They regarded the Declaration as a genuine triumph but they esteemed it more for what it portended than for what it actually was likely to achieve. It was “a first step,” the “forerunner” of an “unlimited” freedom which the king would not deny the nation. La Chalotais, the Procurator General of the Rennes Parlement, asked the councelors to view the Declaration not “as a simple law of interior police but as a Blessing of the Monarch,” as one of those momentous acts which provide for “the happiness of peoples.” More than the measure in itself, it was the certainty that it “will undoubtedly be followed by a complete and general liberty to export” which enraptured the Breton magistrate.1

A dramatic innovation, liberalization, I shall argue, took shape directly from the needs and circumstances of the early 1760’s. Yet insofar as it embodied a certain vision of public administration and economic life—a theory of political economy—it had an ample critical tradition upon which to draw. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to sketch a history of the development of political arithmetic or political economy in the old regime, though such a study, fully integrated into the context of political, economic and social change, is sorely needed. Nor can it attempt to do for the idea of liberty what Mauzi did for “happiness” and Ehrard for “nature,” though such an undertaking, too, would be of great value. I wish only to suggest that liberalization had an important intellectual as well as political and economic preparation, leaving it to others to pursue these connections in detail. I have already discussed on several occasions the critics of the police. Most of them were part of what became the movement for liberalization. I refer to all persons who favored a fundamental reform of the police in the direction of greater liberty as liberals. By liberalism I mean to indicate nothing more than those political, economic and social ideas which informed the attitude of the grain trade reformers and their allies. To others, too, I leave the task of charting out the links between this grain-centered liberalism of the old regime and the Liberalism which triumphed in the nineteenth century.

International audience; I would like to focus here on a very specific case, where space is neither an obstacle nor an ally, but appears as plainly anti-heroic. To do so, I will temporarily move away from the Action genre, to turn to a narrower corpus of films. The space of the office seems opposed to the construction of heroism in every way, firstly because it is a setting that seldom appears in Action films. When heroes want to prove themselves worthy, or when a common man has the occasion to save the day, they usually do so away from their home and work place, in exotic or monumental locales (from the jungles of Commando to the Nakatomi tower in Die Hard).