Francia­Recensio 2016/4
Frühe Neuzeit – Revolution – Empire (1500–1815)
Jean Tulard, Marie­José Tulard, Napoléon et quarante millions de sujets. La centralisation et le Premier Empire, suivi d’un dictionnaire des 134 départements à l’apogée du Grand Empire, Paris (Tallandier) 2014, 416 p., ISBN 979­10­210­0147­3, EUR 24,00.
rezensiert von/compte rendu rédigé par
Michael Rowe, London
In 1812, when it reached its maximum extent, Napoleon’s French Empire counted 134 departments. These stretched from Rome to Hamburg, and encompassed millions of Dutch, German and Italian speakers as well as Frenchmen. This volume, by Jean Tulard and Marie­José Tulard, provides a description of the administrative edifice that was supposed to wield the territories together. Napoleon’s regime, like others of similar paranoid disposition, relied on a series of parallel administrative hierarchies that spread, tentacle like, out from the capital into the localities. The department, administered by a prefect subordinate to the Minister of the Interior, belonged to one such hierarchy. Others, as described in this book, included the police district, the military division, and various ecclesiastical circumspections of which the diocese was the most important. Even freemasons were arranged into their own hierarchical structure that led up to Paris. The authors deserve credit for their thoroughness in including them all. The best parts of the book – at the beginning and towards the end – focus on the antecedents of Napoleonic centralization, and on its limitations. Most of section 1, on the antecedents, follows terrain that is familiar enough. The Old Regime attempted to centralize, but provincial and estate privilege greatly blunted royal absolutism. Nonetheless, despite its limitations, pre­1789 France appears a great deal more coherent than the neighbouring Holy Roman Empire. This tends to undermine recent historiography on comparative eighteenth­century European governance that stresses the similarities between the Continent’s polities. France, this book reminds us, was sufficiently centralized on the eve of the Revolution for ordinary French people to ask for de­centralization in the »Cahiers de doléances«. They did not get this, of course, but rather greater centralization still that was facilitated by the abolition of legal privilege. Again, this is familiar terrain. Less well­known are the various detailed schemes for administrative reform hatched in the final years before the Revolution. Key reforms of the 1790s, including above all the sub­division of France into departments, drew on ideas generated under the Old Regime.
Civil war and war against the rest of Europe in the 1790s inevitably drove centralization forward. Napoleon’s Consulate (1799–1804) continued the process, pushing centralization to the extreme according to the authors. The prefect, an office created in 1800, was at the heart of this development. This book includes some interesting observations, including on the capacity of prefects to overawe Lizenzhinweis: Dieser Beitrag unterliegt der Creative­Commons­Lizenz Namensnennung­Keine kommerzielle Nutzung­Keine Bearbeitung (CC­BY­NC­ND), darf also unter diesen Bedingungen elektronisch benutzt, übermittelt, ausgedruckt und zum Download bereitgestellt werden. Den Text der Lizenz erreichen Sie hier: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by­nc­nd/4.0/
local notables, on the politics of appointment, the increasing recruitment of members of old noble families, and at the same time moves towards greater professionalization. The ideal prefect needed to be technically proficient at administration, especially when it came to the operation of military conscription where he played an important role. At the same time, he needed to cut a good figure locally, in order to assume a leading role in the social life of the elite within his department. The government recognized that the prefect’s wife was an important collaborator in this representational aspect of her husband’s duties, a gender dimension factored into personnel policies. Yet, despite their apparent splendour and prestige, prefects were nonetheless vulnerable. Napoleon’s police, under the notorious Fouché, kept an eye on them; and regime changes, as occurred on three occasions in 1814 and 1815, were accompanied by purges of the prefectural corps, though significantly the office itself survived.
The Napoleonic edifice proved even more fragile at the lowest level, that of the municipality and commune. The majority of the communes were small and rural, and simply did not possess the administrative expertise to fulfil the increasing demands the central government placed on them. Again, this will be familiar enough to most readers from the existing literature on Napoleonic France. More interesting are the observations on communications technology, and how this impacted upon administrative practice. The whole rationale behind the departments had been to bring the administration closer to the people, by insuring that key public offices were no more than a day’s horse­ride away. The introduction of the semaphore telegraph, pioneered in France by Claude Chappe, promised to shrink France further. The reader is interested to learn that the telegraph was employed to transmit Napoleon’s order to arrest Pope Pius VII in 1809, an almost incongruous use of modern technology in a dispute between Emperor and Pope more resonant of the days of Gregory VII and Henry IV.
Such fascinating details and episodes stand out in a work that otherwise covers much familiar terrain. The last third (p. 257–380) is essentially a work of reference, containing as it does a list of departments along with key data. Much of this appears to replicate what can be seen in the almanacs produced at the time. Researchers might find the consolidation of this information useful, but the original almanacs themselves are readily available not least via Gallica, the digital library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. It is also a shame that the book focuses entirely on European France, excluding the overseas colonies. Where this book is important is in its location of the Napoleonic reforms within the context of what had been either implemented or at least proposed under previous regimes, and in its assessment of the strengths and weaknesses especially of the departments and communes.
Lizenzhinweis: Dieser Beitrag unterliegt der Creative­Commons­Lizenz Namensnennung­Keine kommerzielle Nutzung­Keine Bearbeitung (CC­BY­NC­ND), darf also unter diesen Bedingungen elektronisch benutzt, übermittelt, ausgedruckt und zum Download bereitgestellt werden. Den Text der Lizenz erreichen Sie hier: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by­nc­nd/4.0/