There have been children dancing on the stage of the Académie de musique throughout the 18th century, but the establishment of a school to professionalise children is a turning point in the history of dance’s institutionalisation in France. The monarchical and then the imperial state started elaborating a cultural project in 1783 whose aim was to train professional dancers according to a specific technique and aesthetic : Pierre Gardel, the main architect for the creation of the École de danse between 1799 and 1817, gave the academic institution rules, organised classes and recruited pupils. But what the study of the administrative archives and of the training practices reveal is the establishment of a system to manufacture bodies. In the meaning of the word as used by Michel Foucault, a "dispositif" to manufacture the bodies of the child dancers will be a heterogeneous complex including discourses, an institution, rules simultaneously behavioural, administrative and moral, and will be the response to a political and ethical project. Focusing on a varied corpus of sources, this paper will show how in the 19th century the Académie de musique aimed to manufacture bodies in the image of the State and how the Académie’s École de danse was indeed a tool for the political government of bodies.