Abstract
A courier arrives in the courtyard of the hôtel Conti, hot and sweaty from a five-day ride. He is determined to hand his packet to the Minister of the Interior (whose name is carefully marked on the packet he carries) as the prefect in charge of the eastern département of Doubs had assured him that it was urgent and very important. Instead, the uniformed usher shows him to a vestibule, and tells him to wait. Some hours later, the secretary general authorizes his office to take receipt of the courier's burden. The secretariat signs its contents into the register, and begins to number, date and classify the various pieces for distribution to the appropriate divisions.1 The ministry swallows the packet; the courier is dismissed. He trudges out of the secretary general's antechamber, watched idly by administrators and petitioners as he crosses the cobblestoned courtyard.2
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Endnotes
Pascal Durand-Barthez, Histoire des structures du Ministère de la Justice, 1789–1945 (Paris, 1973), 2.
Thierry Sarmant, Les ministres de la guerre 1570–1792 (Paris, 2007), 111.
Frédéric Masson, Le Département des affaires étrangères pendant la Révolution, 1787–1804 (Paris, 1877), 159, 161.
Edith Bernadin, Jean-Marie Roland et le ministère de l’intérieur (1792–1793) (Paris, 1964), 205.
Alfred-Louis-Auguste Franklin, Dictionnaire historique des arts, métiers et professions exercés dans Paris depuis le treizième siècle (Paris, 1906), 287.
Victor Mercier, Répertoire administratif, guide de la classification générale des affaires publiques ou Dictionnaire complet des attributions de toutes les ministères et de toutes les administrations du Royaume (Paris, 1835).
Rafe Blaufarb, ‘Noble Privilege and Absolutist State Building: French Military Administration after the Seven Years’ War’, French Historical Studies 24, No. 2 (2001), 240–241.
L. Mention, Le comte de Saint-Germain et ses réformes (1775–1777), d’après les archives du dépôt de la guerre, thèse présentée à la faculté des lettres de Paris (Paris, 1884), 12–15.
Late eighteenth-century reforms have been described as a form of ‘corporative’ professionalization, seen in action most famously in the Comte de Ségur’s 1781 ordinance reforming the Old-Regime army by limiting high command to officers enjoying four quarters of nobility: David D. Bien, ‘La réaction aristocratique avant 1789: L’exemple de l’armée’, Annales ESC, 21 (1974), 23–48, 505–534; Jay M. Smith, ‘Honour, Royal Service and the Cultural Origins of the French Revolution: Interpreting the Language of Army Reform, 1750–1788’, French History, 9 (1995), 294–314.
Vida Azimi, ‘L’accès aux fonctions publiques sous l’ancien régime’, Mémoires de la société pour l’histoire du droit et des institutions des anciens pays bourguignons, comptois et romands, 44 (1987), 194. See also Azimi, Un modèle administratif.
Jean-Claude Devos, ‘Le secrétariat d’état à la guerre et ses bureaux’, Revue historique des armées, 162 (March 1986), 91.
On Necker’s reforms, see Bosher, French Finances, 142–164. Louis Petit de Bachaumont, Mémoires secrets pour servir à l’histoire de la république des lettres en France, 36 vols (London, 1783–1789), XVII, 287–288.
Jean-Nicolas Démeunier, Rapport sur l’organisation du ministère fait au nom du comité de constitution par M. Démeunier. Imprimé par ordre de l’Assemblée nationale (7 mars 1791) (Paris, 1791), 5.
Pierre-Hubert Anson, Discours de M. Anson, sur l’organisation du ministère. Imprimé par ordre de l’Assemblée nationale (Paris, [1791]), 3; Demeunier, Rapport, 8–9; AP, first series, XXIV, esp. 688–692.
Decree of 27 September 1791, cited in Henri Alexandre Allon, La chambre de commerce de la province de Normandie, 1703–1791 (Paris, 1903), 343.
Isabelle Guégan, Inventaire des enquêtes administratives et statistiques, 1789–1795 (Paris, 1991), 75–76. See also, G. Bourgin, ‘Statistiques révo- lutionnaires: enquête de Delessart et de Roland en 1791–1792’, Bulletin d’histoire économique de la révolution, publiépar la Commission de recherche et de publication des documents relatifs à la vie économique (1910), 244–302.
Bailey Stone, Reinterpreting the French Revolution: A Global Perspective (Cambridge, 2002), 177–178.
Colin Jones, ‘Bourgeois Revolution Revivified: 1789 and Social Change’, in Rewriting the French. Revolution, ed. Colin Lucas (Oxford, 1991), 69–118.
On the influence of ideas of political economy on the Directory, see Livesey, Making Democracy, 64–71. On its translation into administration, see Dominique Margairaz, François de Neufchâteau: biographie intellectuelle (Paris, 2005), 313–345. See also, John Shovlin, The Political Economy ofVirtue: Luxury, Patriotism, and the Origins of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY, 2006); Richard Whatmore, Republicanism and the French Revolution: An Intellectual History of Jean-Baptiste Say’s Political Economy (Oxford, 2000).
Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis, Rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme, 2 vols (Paris, 1802). On the ‘medical revolution’ (a term coined at the time), see Elizabeth A. Williams, The physical and the moral: Anthropology, physiology, and philosophical medicine in France, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, 1994); Elizabeth A. Williams, ‘The French Revolution, Anthropological Medicine and the Creation of Medical Authority’, Recreating Authority in Revolutionary France, ed. Bryant T. Ragan Jr. and E.A. Williams (New Jersey, 1992); John Pickstone, ‘Bureaucracy, Liberalism and the Body in Post-Revolutionary France: Bichat’s Physiology and the Paris School of Medicine’, History of Science, 19 (1981), 115–142; Martin S. Staum, Cabanis: Enlightenment and Medical Philosophy in the French Revolution (Princeton, 1980); Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (New York, 1994), 64–87; David M. Vess, Medical Revolution in France, 1789–1796 (Gainesville, FL, 1975); Dora Weiner, The Citizen-Patient in Revolutionary and Imperial Paris (Baltimore, 1993).
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Nicole and Jean Dhombres, Naissance d’un nouveau pouvoir: sciences et savants en France, 1793–1824 (Paris, 1989), 42–45, 64, 743–746.
Projects to purify and perfect language were rife in the 1790s: Sophia Rosenfeld, A Revolution in Language (Stanford, 2001), 123–180; Jean Starobinski, La remède dans le mal: Critique et légitimation de l’artifice à l’âge des lumières (Paris, 1989). For a wealth of examples of Revolutionary politicians accusing one another of ‘abusing’ words like ‘sovereignty’, the ‘public’ or the ‘people’, see Jon Cowans, To speak for the people: public opinion and the problem of legitimacy in the French Revolution (New York, 2001).
Degérando, De la génération des connaissances humaines (Berlin, 1802), 95; Des signes, I, 221–223. Sophia Rosenfeld, A Revolution in Language, 217–220, 227–228, describes Degérando’s contribution to the Ideologue circle as a retreat from ‘Ideology’ and a belief in relativity. On this movement within Ideologue circles especially in the National Institute, see also Martin S. Staum, Minerva’s message: stabilizing the French Revolution (Montreal, 1996).
Baron Degérando, Institut du droit administratif ou Eléments du code administratif (Paris, 1829), 5–10, 24–26.
Guy Thuillier, La vie quotidienne dans les ministères au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1976), 80.
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© 2012 Ralph Kingston
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Kingston, R. (2012). A Revolution in Administration. In: Bureaucrats and Bourgeois Society. War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137264923_2
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