Abstract
Although French bureaucracy already existed, the French Revolution invented the ‘bureaucrat’. The word was first used by the journalist Fouilloux in the Père Duchesne in 1791, writing that the object of his most justified contempt was the bureaucrat, product of the ‘famine pact’, harbinger of a ‘new mode of servitude’.1 The word ‘bureaucrat’ – distinct from both ‘agent’ and ‘administrator’ – was then officially codified by La néologiste française in 1796 as an ‘expression of contempt’. ‘Bureaucracy’, according to the Néologiste, was not a form of government, but, rather, the collective noun for ‘bureaucrats’, and a means to refer to their malign influence.2
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Endnotes
Fouilloux ‘Grande indignation du Père Duchêne, contre les bureaucrates, tous sacrés jean-foutres’, Je suis le véritable Père Duchesne, 4 (July 1791).
Jacques Peuchet, ‘Bureaucratie’, reproduced in Guy Thuillier, Le bureaucratie aux XIXe et XXe siècles (Paris, 1987), 56–61.
Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Néologie, ou vocabulaire de mots nouveaux, à renouveler ou pris dans des acceptions nouvelles (Paris, Year IX (1801)), 20.
J.-R. Surrateau, ‘Fonctionnaires et employés’, Annales historiques de la Révolution française, 30 (1958), 71–73.
J.C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, 1998).
Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004).
Suzanne Desan, The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France (Berkeley, CA, 2004).
Timothy Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary: The Deputies of the French National Assembly and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Culture (1789–1790) (Princeton, NJ, 1996).
David Garrioch, The Formation of the Parisian Bourgeoisie, 1690–1830 (Cambridge, MA, 1987).
William M. Reddy, The Invisible Code: Honor and Sentiment in Postrevolutionary France, 1814–1848 (Berkeley, CA, 1997). This is not dissimilar to historian Theodore Zeldin’s portrayal of the bureaucrat as ‘a sort of Frankenstein’ made monstrous by the ‘ambiguities and insecurities’ of his position: France, 1848–1945, I: Ambition, Love and Politics (Oxford, 1973), 129–130.
Guy Thuillier has also written several books on nineteenth-century bureaucracy in this vein, including Bureaucratie et bureaucrates en France au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1980).
Nicos Poulantzas, Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, trans. David Fernbach (London, 1975), 285–294.
Sarah Maza, The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie (Cambridge, MA, 2003).
Adeline Daumard, Maisons de Paris et propriétaires parisiens au XIXe siècle (1809–1880) (Paris, 1965).
Maurice Agulhon, Le cercle dans la France bourgeoise 1810–1848 (Paris, 1977).
Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The forms of capital’, in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. J. Richardson (New York, 1986), 241–258.
For a definition of ‘symbolic capital’, see, in addition to the works cited above, Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations (Cambridge, 2000), 166, 242.
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© 2012 Ralph Kingston
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Kingston, R. (2012). Introduction: 20,000 Fools. In: Bureaucrats and Bourgeois Society. War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137264923_1
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