The « revolutionary » youth of Mathieu de Dombasle (1777-1843), a young noble from Lorraine, is marked by his attendance at the Ecole Centrale of Nancy between 1795 and 1797. He was a chemist who from 1809 onwards attempted to transform beet juice into sugar. During the Continental Blockade, he developed his enterprise at Monplaisir, near Nancy, controlling the whole process of fabrication. Halted by bankruptcy in 1814 at the time of the collapse of the Empire, Mathieu de Dombasle, following François de Neufchâteau, devoted himself henceforth to the improvement of plowing whosemalfunctionning he had observed while working on land intended for the cultivation of beets. The context of the Revolution and the Empire constitutes, therefore, one of the explanatory factors in the initial vocational choice of a man who was to become one of the leading agronomists in the first half of the nineteenth century, the inventor of an improved plow, an essential innovation at the beginning of the nineteenth century. He was also the founder of the formal agricultural education in France. Is it, then, legitimate to ask to what extent these upheavals favored technical innovation ?