Contenu du sommaire : La mémoire de l'administration

La mémoire de l'administration

• Avant-propos - Antoine Durrleman
• Introduction - Renaud Dorandeu
• Le passé et l'avenir de l'administration publique. - Guy Braibant
  State Administration : Past and Future. Tradition and modernity are the essential poles of reference in the administration of the state; and while those in charge of administrations should not confine their thinking to past experience, efficiency demands that they have a good knowledge of it and take it into account. The process of uniformization which we are seeing today can only be successful if built on the basis of a solid common ground. Going back to the Age of the Enlightenment, we find both common permanent principles and changing values. Among the first, the aim of the common good, respect for law, the principle of responsibility, the demand for efficiency, and what the European Union's Charter of Fundamental Rights, drawn up in the year 2000, calls “the right to a good administration”. And among the latter, decentralization, transparency, participation and finally, internationalization.

• Acteurs et mémoires d'acteurs

  • Une mémoire fonctionnelle (entretien). - Pierre Legendre
    A Working Memory. Memory, understood as a complex process of reconstructing the past, is one of many social constructs whose function is both to preserve the past and prove the legitimacy of what is done in the present. Seen from this angle, the memory of the administration, as preserved in its archives, enables the administrative state to found its present action. As such, memory is above all a process of censure : its workings are always selective, and choices are made not on the basis of objective scientific reasoning, but in the light of current ideals and ideologies ; memory, in this context, can be seen as referring to an “institutional fantasy”. Since the passion for storing archives often goes along with the illusion of transparency, it is all the more necessary to reflect on our relationship to the past in order to better understand the meaning of the administrative state's traditions and the theologico-juridical foundations of our system.
  • Pour une sociologie historique des sciences de gouvernement. - Olivier Ihl
    For a Historical Sociology of Governmental Sciences. How did state action become an object of scientific enquiry ? Any answer to such a question implies recognition of the fact that the management of both human beings and systems is carried out and legitimized thanks to specialized skills. Since the advent in Europe of absolute monarchies and the development of administrations with a monopoly over all government functions, power has been legitimized by science, rather than by secrecy. As a result, scientists, administrators, philanthropists, writers, magistrates and many others put their knowledge at the service of the “governmental sciences”. Under the pretext of introducing reforms, they impose new notions of rationality on state action and thus contribute to changing the way the administration functions. To explain the emergence of “State engineering” through the institutionalizing of these “disciplines”, we must use two intersecting viewpoints, the first focusing on the job of rationalizing the conditions of state intervention, and the second on the practices that justify and create the need for these specialized “skills”.
  • Archives constitutionnelles et mémoire de la République. - Didier Maus
  • Le comité d'histoire de l'Ecole nationale d'administration. - Robert Chelle
    The History of ENA Committee. With sixty years behind it and its history recounted with dubious accuracy by outsiders, it was time for ENA to set up its own historical committee, which it did in 1999. A description of the Committee's organizational principles and practice, its first program of research, work in progress, and future projects.
  • Encadré - Le comité d'histoire du Conseil d'Etat et de la juridiction administrative. - Jean Massot

• Les politiques de l'archivage

  • République et archives. - Vincent Duclert
    The Republic and Archives. The French Revolution made archives and policy concerning them a major building block in the construction of a modern State and in the elaboration of democratic citizenship. When the National Archives were established in 1790, the National Assembly defined the institution's political aspect : to serve public servants and citizens, to guarantee individual liberties as well as national memory and the modernity of the State. Yet the history of the National Archives is characterized above all by disinterest on the part of both public representatives and officials, and the consequences of this extend far beyond the sphere of action of the institution itself : by neglecting the Archives, those in charge of public policy deprive themselves of one of the major tools of modernization, democratization, and representation. This is the lesson to be learned from observing the rare moments in the history of the French republic when political intent determined archive policy : at the turn of the 20th century, during the Front Populaire, and during the 1950s. It is also a lesson which gives insight into the structural crisis of French Archives since the 1980s, or even since 1959 and the birth of the Fifth Republic, for it is a crisis not unrelated to “democratic doubting”, and to contemporary history's difficulty in accepting its social role.
  • Administration et archives aujourd'hui. - Martine de Boisdeffre
    Administration and Archives Today. Created in 1794, the archives include not only a diversity of documents but sources providing them as well : the administration is not only a producer, but also a manager of archives. Improved archive management is an indispensable tool for the modernization of the state. Well managed archives make for an efficient administration, and the present revision of storage and processing rules, as well as the introduction of electronic archiving, are significant elements of the reform of the state.
  • La mémoire du travail gouvernemental. - Pascal Petitcollot
    A Historical Record of the Government's Work. To keep record of a government's work, the General Secretariat of the government, through its documentation service, processes a huge volume of information which, thanks to modern technology, can be stored away and retrieved more and more rapidly. This information includes not only inter-ministerial projects carried out by the Prime Minister's cabinet, about which one constantly needs to be informed, but also laws and regulations in effect as well as preparatory documents which must be accounted for at any time and in all areas of activity. Along with this, public authorities have continued to explore new ways, thanks to progress in technology, of facilitating citizens'access to records of public data, at least to that which are not protected by the secret of government deliberation : administrative and jurisdictional data banks, dissemination hosts, and telematics services.

• Mémoires et action publique

  • Les modernisateurs dans l'administration d'après-guerre - L'écriture d'une histoire héroïque. - Brigitte Gaïti
    Writing a Heroic History. The modernizers of the post-war administration. The representation of high civil servants as historic figures of the post-war period constitutes an approach to political history that came into being under the Fourth Republic and has flourished ever since, rallying numerous analysts of the political scene as well as a good many of its actors. Paradoxically, the production of a heroic memory of the modernization of post-war France is built on a series of administrative and political defeats suffered by this small group of pioneers, while it neglects to examine the hows and whys of their success.
  • Aux origines des politiques de réforme administrative sous la Cinquième République : la construction du "souci de soi de l'Etat" - Philippe Bezes

Chroniques

• Chronique de l'administration. - Francis Chauvin
• Chronique du secteur public économique. - André G. Delion

Informations bibliographiques