Contenu du sommaire : Administrer la Révolution et l'Empire

The word « Government » was formally established for the first time by the Constitution of Frimaire Year VIII to replace the term « Executive » used in the Revolutionary constitutions. Precisely because of this change, it possessed a legal voluntarism – the initiative of the law and a regulatory power assigned to the Consuls – that the Revolutionaries had been inclined to deny to the Executive, entrusting these, rather, to an elected and representative Legislature. The historiography, above all that of legal specialists, has long concluded that this change in attitude and practice represented a critical reevaluation of the Revolution – a kind of revolutionary governmental nihilism that would have produced, by a reaction in 1799, an excess of governmental power. It was in a sense necessary : the re-interpretation of the Revolution implied a condemnation of the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Republics, compared less favorably to the Fifth Republic. Yet the constitutional debates of the Revolution reveal a persistent concern to inaugurate « the power of government » with the aid of the administration. This contributed to the uniformity of the Nation : it controlled men under the impulse of centralizing power of a general administration. In this sense, the « government » was very much a part of the constitutional thinking of the revolutionaries ; indeed, the revolutionaries aimed to make administration an integral part of constitutionalism.

In the classic historiography and legal interpretations, the administration project of 1789-1790 has been frequently obscured by a Weberian interpretation of modernization rationalized by the State. Criticized in the liberal historiography beginning in the nineteenth century as responsible for the territorial anarchy of 1793, it has been lastingly condemned as theoretical speculation, indeed, as a constitutional aberration. This interpretation is first of all the product of a collective trauma experienced by the revolutionaries themselves faced with political impasses, and territorial threats endured by the First Republic. Later, this interpretation was transformed in a literature incapable of thinking of local administration beyond the imperative of control envisaged by the model of the Nation-State. But no doubt this administrative project deserves to be analyzed anew by a fresh angle, free from the interpretative schemes of the nineteenth century, and associating, as with the men of 1789, the aspiration to self-government and rule of general law, an ideal of territorial federation and national unity.

On the eve of the Revolution, an unprecedented public effort was mobilized on behalf of interior navigation. This gave rise to a policy that favored public action, first in theory, then in act, by management practices in which politics and administration were deeply intertwined. This organizational arrangement was shattered with the Revolution. The creation of the Assemblies and an legislative power at once dominant and autonomous, and the institutional instabilities and frequent reorganizations that this entailed within a context of urgency and of shortages caused by the War and the economic crisis, undermined the network and usages previously instituted. These organizational experiments led above all to a clearer demarcation of the administrative and political spheres.

Between 1814 and 1815, with the Restoration of the Bourbons on the throne, scores of entrepreneurs sought to obtain the reestablishment of the title of « manufacture royale ». Even though all their requests were rejected, these efforts incited the administrators of the Bureau of the Arts and Manufactures to evaluate not only the motivation behind the decision under the Empire to conserve the title of « manufacture impériale », for certain enterprises, particularly those linked to the State, but also to examine the use of the title « manufacture royale » under the Old Regime. The results of this inquiry and the examination of the dossiers brought into play several visions of the past, and at the same time led to an interpretation of this institutional status and its economic effects – an interpretation that legitimized the disqualification as a rejection of « privileges ». This article compares the analysis of the dossiers established under the Empire and the Restoration with the results of the program ANR « Privileges » on the privileges of enterprises in modern Europe.

Traduction assurée par l'auteure The French Revolution has swept away venal offices and the Ancien Regime system of cooptation: it has defined civil employment as every citizen's right and duty. This article aims at delineating how evolved the relations of civil servants (elected) and office clerks (appointed) with the State, and the representations they had of themselves as servants of this State, between 1792 and Year IV. The sources are letters of office applicants and letters of acceptation or refusal of political positions. If the themes of disinterestedness and civic commitment prevail in Clerks and civil servants' discourses in Year II, a more individualist ideology appears, that legitimizes personal claims to time for one's family and wealth. State is no more an abstract figure of universality, but a fatherly and charitable body.

The administrative efforts to revive foreign commerce under the Directory still remain largely unknown. The unpublished survey written on December 5, 1796 by the Minister of Foreign Affairs with « enlightened » merchants clearly reveals the issues involved and the methods proposed. Not only does this survey underscore the contradiction between the commercial diplomacy and the politics of the Customs, but it highlights the reasons for the persistent separation between high commerce and the administration as well. Indeed, it was because of the political inability to escape the directed economy of the Year II, and a kind of unbridled liberalism of the Year III that merchants criticized, at the same time as they reactivated, the imperatives of liberty and the protection inherited from the liberalism of the Eighteenth Century. While this survey was never the subject of a systematic statistical study, it has not been without ideological influence, for it made possible the first formulation of a « liberal republicanism » by the person to whom the task of its reading and analysis was entrusted : Charles Théremin.

The period of the Consulate and Empire was marked by the appearance of the first administrative codes, the first syntheses aiming to establish the principles of an administrative science and an administrative law. The authors of these codes – Bonnin, Fleurigeon or Portiez de L'Oise – displayed an awareness of a new governmental and administrative order then being established in France. By comparing the principles found in these theoretical writings with the actual practices in effect during the Imperial era, it is possible to see how the administration was defined and legitimized in its new powers.

Finance constituted one of the most visible manifestations of imperial conquest. It was established from the moment of a victory, to become an integral part of new administrations inspired by the French model. The departmental unit affords the clearest insight into the impact of this new modification caused within the French territory, including its institutions and its personnel. The attached department of Genoa is representative of the upheavals of lands that came under French control : the former Republic, transformed into the « sister republic » in 1797, was no more than the prefecture of a department from 1805 to 1814 ; its territory was again divided, and it was endowed with an entire series of administrative services, particularly financial. « New and Old » Frenchmen shared some fifty posts of different levels of authority : seasoned agents of Revolutionary and Imperial finance, those who survived the former Republic, together with newcomers eager to make a career for themselves, incarnated the Napoleonic administration in Europe.