Unpublished Saint-Venant. Studies of Structural Mechanics (1837-1853)

As a result of recent bibliographic investigations on the Fonds Saint-Venant at the Library of the École Polytechnique in Paris, this paper presents a survey of the studies carried out by Adhémar-Jean-Claude Barré de Saint-Venant in the field of solids and structures mechanics during the first fifteen years of his scientific research on the matter (1837-1853).

Taking into account that these studies appeared only as abstracts of few pages and never received an extended printed version, the main purpose of the paper is to offer a global and reasoned picture of Saint- Venant's prolific work in order to make it easer future investigations of the original manuscripts and get a deeper understanding of the deductive process that brought the French scientist to his fundamental contributions to the theory of elasticity and strength of materials in the period under consideration.