Album of the 1876 class of the École polytechnique, produced by François Gobinet de Villecholle, known as Franck, the official photographer of the polytechniciens.
Full brown cloth, smooth spine, blind-stamped frames on covers, "École Polytechnique" lettering and ornament in gilt on upper cover, publisher's name blind-stamped, combed paper pastedowns, all edges gilt. Binding lightly rubbed, a few marks to spine, headcaps and edges, tears at head of spine, leaves slightly browned and cockled.

The personal copy of E. Magnant, a member of the class who graduated 168th and entered the artillery: his manuscript ownership inscription appears on the front free endpaper, and his portrait features in the album.

An annotated album including the portraits of several polytechniciens who went on to achieve fame.

The album opens with a handwritten page summarising the fate of the class. It records that the great majority of the students were assigned to the army (land artillery, military engineers, naval artillery), while only three, among the highest ranked, were able to enter the Corps des Mines, and twenty-one the Corps des Ponts et Chaussées. The rest were distributed among naval engineering, the state manufactures, the telegraph service, the naval commissariat and the Poudres et Salpêtres (state gunpowder and saltpetre service). The army, generally less sought after by the top-ranked students, thus absorbed the bulk of the class a few years after the defeat of 1870, at a time when the size of each intake had been doubled from 1872 onwards, chiefly to meet the need for officers.
The owner's annotations follow the fortunes of his classmates page by page. Beneath most of the portraits are recorded the graduating rank and the corps obtained, together with notes of resignations and deaths. Where a photograph is missing, a manuscript note gives the reason: most often, the student had died before the photographs were taken.

The class brought together a number of remarkable figures. Robert Nivelle, admitted in the same year to both Saint-Cyr and Polytechnique, chose the X and, like most of his classmates, graduated into the artillery. Forty years later, his successes before Verdun in the autumn of 1916, where he made use of the creeping barrage, earned him the post of commander-in-chief of the French armies of the North and North-East. Yet he was relieved of this command in May 1917, less than a month after the launch of the bloody Chemin des Dames offensive. Léon Charles Thévenin gave his name to a theorem of electrical circuit theory that students still learn today. Robert Bourgeois, son of an Alsatian manufacturer who had opted for France after 1870, graduated 44th out of 258, pursued a career as an artillery officer up to the rank of général de division, and returned to the École as professor of astronomy and geodesy from 1908 to 1929. More modest, but no less enduring, is the legacy of Fernand Magnan, whose portrait appears immediately before that of the album's owner: according to a tradition of the École, the word "magnan", which denotes the refectory in Polytechnique slang, derives from this classmate, reputed to be a gourmet.

A singular record of a Polytechnique class, in which the official photography is complemented by a chronicle kept by one of its own members.