This paper would like to initiate a long-term history of projects, to identify projects as precise socio-historical forms, context specific and subject to historical developments. Projects are rarely studied as such. Scholars usually insist on the individual activity of project-makers or present it as a process of birth of a given object, emphasizing technological and institutional innovations, the singularity of the technical and social arrangements that made it possible. This paper proposes an alternative approach to the study of projects in history, emphasizing the collective and regular dimensions of projects in specific contexts, involving the definition of requirements, norms and standards, of rules for conceiving, writing, drawing, discussing, deciding and implementing. This approach is illustrated by the case of public works projects in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century France, analysing various questions concerning the standardisation of project documents, the intellectual property on projects, the organization of work in project-making, and the state engineers’ rhetoric of the only possible project.