Reinterpreting the French Revolution: A global-historical perspective (56 page)

years to have been crucial to the “coming of age” of the French civil service.

We can see this basic development reflected in the professional experience,

social differentiation, and geographical origins of the civil servants at Paris,

as well as in the bureaucratized routines to which they were increasingly

subjected.

Church has pointed out that, of the 4,340 civil servants he has identified

as staffing the Directory’s ministries, “2 in 7 at least . . . had held adminis-

trative appointments before 1789,” and as such “provided the ministries

45 Denis Woronoff,
The Thermidorian Regime and the Directory, 1794–1799
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), esp. pp. 37–38, 40–42.

46 Ibid., pp. 40–42.

47 Woloch,
The New Regime
, pp. 427–28.

The second attempt to stabilize the Revolution

229

and other bodies with a hard core of fairly senior clerks well versed in the

responsibilities, traditions and expertise of the old civil service.” Yet an

even higher proportion of these 4,340 functionaries had also held signifi-

cant posts in the burgeoning bureaucracy of the early years of revolution.

Thus, as Church has trenchantly remarked, there was a certain analogy

between patterns of recruitment to the state bureaucracy and those to the

armies that were currently carrying out the state’s strategic assignments.

“The Directory completed the assimilation of the hordes of bureaucrats

thrown up by the exigencies and social chaos of the Revolution and married

this new corps with the cadres inherited from the
Ancien Régime
, rather

in the same way as the amalgam operated in the revolutionary army.”48

At the same time, however, the ongoing professionalization of the bu-

reaucracy meant less rather than more “democracy.” Greater subordination

and deference inside the civil service went hand-in-hand with its internal

division along social lines under the new regime. Very few of those in senior

positions came from the army or navy, from the “public sector” admin-

istration of such services as the
postes
or the
assignats
, or from trading or

“menial” service occupations. They came instead from more elitist quar-

ters: for instance, from the liberal professions, the diplomatic corps, the

monde
of justice and old royal officialdom, or even the ranks of religion.

They hailed, in other words, “from a higher social category and from a

more restricted range of professions and administrations than their inferi-

ors in the hierarchy.”49 Even at the height of the Terror, Jacobin egalitarian

tendencies, which had run toward conferring bureaucratic posts upon rev-

olutionary activists and other “unprofessional” types, had had to defer to a

more pragmatic philosophy stressing the war-related need for an efficient

(and thus hierarchical) civil service. With the waning of Jacobin idealism,

social differentiation and a corresponding stress upon hierarchy within

the world of state officialdom were bound to become – and did become –

paramount realities.

Other characteristics stamping the Directory’s civil servants as increas-

ingly “modern” and oriented to the purposes of the state included their

geographical origins and daily work routines. “The vast majority of all the

employees,” Church has observed, “were drawn from the north-east of

France. 40% of the departments produced 85% of the clerks, and most

came from the triangle – Rennes, Lilles and Besanc¸on. Within this area, the

Parisian region dominated, supplying 48.5% of the total.”50 Given that, in

general, the Parisian basin and northeastern regions of France were most

48 Clive H. Church, “The Social Basis of the French Central Bureaucracy under the Directory, 1795–1799,”
Past and Present
36 (1967): 64–67, 72.

49 Ibid., pp. 68–69. Church has of course enlarged upon these themes in
Revolution and Red
Tape
, passim.

50 Church, “The Social Basis of the French Central Bureaucracy,” p. 62.

230

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

closely attuned to the purposes of the Revolutionary Government and/or

most directly vulnerable to attack by the British, Austrians, and Prussians,

it is significant that these “hotbeds” of Gallic patriotism supplied a dis-

proportionate number of functionaries to the state. Granted, citizens were

driven into government service in part by expediential considerations –

for instance, the desperate need for security in a time of economic up-

heaval and the traditional and unquenchable French taste for office. Still,

it would be unwise to take no account of the “idealism released by the

Revolution among the young who saw in the civil service a chance . . . of

serving the Republic.”51 Such officials, many of them in their forties, thir-

ties, and twenties, were most likely predisposed to internalize the state’s

expansionist values. As the 1790s wore on, moreover, this process must

have been helped along by the integration of these state servants into the

increasingly precise routines, punctilious work schedules, and voluminous

paperwork of government bureaucracy.

The revolutionary state, then, continued under the Directory to assimi-

late the French nation into its administrative framework and to “fine-tune”

its bureaucratic procedures. But what of its finances? Here, obviously, was

the acid test for the government – especially in light of its unprecedentedly

costly foreign policy. What becomes very clear, in reviewing this question,

is that the war, in this as in some other revolutionary connections, was

both a stimulating and an inhibiting factor. It spurred the country’s leaders

to initiate or continue significant fiscal reforms yet simultaneously raised

insuperable barriers to the full realization of those reforms.

Certainly there were ongoing and new success stories in this period.

It is first of all important to acknowledge that, whatever problems the

revamped Treasury and Finance Department encountered, they remained

vastly more efficient than their predecessor agencies of prerevolutionary

times. The budgetary and accounting reforms so dearly achieved earlier in

the decade were preserved, and slippery financial operatives like Gabriel-

Julien Ouvrard never secured the kind of stranglehold upon state finances

that the venal accountants and the tax farmers of the old France had

enjoyed.52 More specifically attributable to the period of the Directory,

however, and equally important for the future, was the comprehensive

overhaul of the country’s system of taxation. To begin with, the allocation

and collection of direct impositions, together with any appeals to which

they might give rise, were now to be transferred from local elected func-

tionaries to committees of appointed officials working in the departments

under the vigilant eyes of central government
commissaires
. The direct

taxes themselves were also being taken thoroughly in hand. Legislation

51 Ibid., p. 68.

52 Bosher,
French Finances, 1770–1795
, pp. 251, 317.

The second attempt to stabilize the Revolution

231

established a system of four basic imposts (on trade licenses, on land, on

“doors and windows,” and on citizens and their movable property) that

was destined in essence to last down to the start of World War I. Again, the

Directory invented or revived a host of indirect taxes: they ranged from

highway tolls to powder and saltpeter and tobacco imposts to mortgage,

registration, and stamp duties.53

Thus the revolutionaries labored in the late 1790s to resuscitate state

finances. Tragically, however, they were floundering in a bottomless ocean

of war making – their own state’s ever more ambitious war making – and

thus they never could find a way to stave off national bankruptcy. For

one thing, all their attempts to rescue the revolutionary concept of a paper

currency – first in the guise of the
assignats
, then in a form of the
mandats
territoriaux
– were fated to fail.54 The French were never able to confiscate and sell enough
biens nationaux
, whether in France itself, in Belgium, or

elsewhere, to cover the immense gap in governmental accounts between

revenue and (war-dominated) expenditure. That taxpayers had in effect

been on strike since the earliest days of the Revolution, and that expenditure

for war simply could not be contained, only made the situation worse. So,

for that matter, did the decision in 1796 to make the
assignats
convertible into the newer
mandats
at one-thirtieth of their nominal value. Both paper

currencies were hopelessly discredited, and the
mandats
were withdrawn

from circulation in February 1797. A state bankruptcy no longer avoidable

by any means was then adumbrated in a law of 30 September 1797. Under

its terms, only one-third of the public debt was “consolidated” – that is,

declared a “sacred” charge on which full interest would continue to be

paid – while redemption of the remaining two-thirds of state indebtedness

was indefinitely put off. (In March 1801, the state “legally” finalized what

became known as the “bankruptcy of the two-thirds.”) “The consequent

shock to public credit may be imagined,” Albert Goodwin has written.

“The spectre of national bankruptcy which had haunted Mirabeau in the

early days of the revolution had at last materialized.”55

The all-consuming war cast a dark shadow over every aspect of rev-

olutionary finance. It imposed a regime of forced loans during 1795–99

deliberately shorn of any “progressive” traits that could revive memories

of Jacobin “terrorism”; the loans wound up fattening the purses of contrac-

tors and bankers indispensable to the government’s survival.56 It helped to

53 Albert Goodwin, “The French Executive Directory – A Revaluation,”
History
22 (1937): 201–18.

54 Refer to Seymour E. Harris,
The Assignats
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1930); and Goodwin, “The French Executive Directory,” pp. 322–23.

55 Ibid., pp. 323–25.

56 On this point, see Gross, “Progressive Taxation and Social Justice,” p. 121; and Woronoff,
The Thermidorian Regime and the Directory
, p. 97.

232

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

stymie the authorities’ effort to draw all fiscal operations into the public

domain: thus, Ouvrard was allowed after 1797 to take naval supplies out

of a government
régie
and to manage them as a private enterprise “in the

manner of the ancien régime.”57 It worked directly against the govern-

ment’s goal of generating more taxable revenue through economic devel-

opment, not only by cutting French entrepreneurs out of international

trade exchanges, but also by drafting young men away from “neglected

arts, agriculture, and commerce” at home.58 And, most fatefully perhaps,

the war’s crushing financial burden forced the state into an ever-greater re-

liance upon booty from the conquered territories. During 1797–99, Denis

Woronoff has suggested, the revenues extorted from that source “brought

in . . . about a quarter of the annual budget.”59 This (along with all other fis-

cal devices associated with the war) could only divert French leaders from

tackling and resolving their country’s financial and underlying economic

problems.

Military adventurism, then, both stimulated and retarded the modern-

ization of French governance during 1794–99. But it had a more consis-

tently negative impact upon projects of cultural and social amelioration.

Whether we review the educational reforms launched by the Thermidorian

Convention and the Directory or ponder some of their projects of charity

and other forms of
bienfaisance
, we can see how the ever more massive

commitment to war (in combination, to be sure, with other factors) ex-

erted a baleful influence upon the Revolution’s final efforts to “improve”

French humanity.

This was notably the case when it came to primary education. Under the

auspices of the so-called Lakanal Law of 17 November 1794, the Republic

was supposed to furnish a primary school with a schoolmaster (
instituteur
)

and schoolmistress (
institutrice
) in every commune with at least one thou-

sand souls. The teachers, endowed with the dignity of public functionaries,

were expected to teach such subjects as arithmetic, writing, reading, the

Constitution, the Declaration of the Rights of Man, “republican” morals,

geography, basic principles of the French language, the history of “free peo-

ples,” and some elements of “natural science.”
Instituteurs
and
institutrices
were to receive from the central government annual salaries of 1,200
livres

and 1,000
livres
, respectively (and supplements would go to teachers in

larger cities). They were also promised state pensions upon retirement.

Initially, the districts (which at this point in the Revolution still functioned

as administrative units) played a central role in the competitive selection of