Building the bureaucracy

However weak or strong, no ruler in charge of a political unit larger than a family can operate without subordinates who look up to him and, in one way or another, are dependent on him.

During the period under consideration, the outstanding change was the one which led from indirect rule by feudal lords to direct government exercised by salaried officials on the king's behalf. Attempts to move in this direction had been made since the time of France's Philip Augustus (1179-1223); however, the obstacles produced by time, distance, and the king's own irregular income proved decisive and it was only around the middle of the fifteenth century that real progress began to be made under King Louis XI. By 1610, the year in which Henry IV died, the process had gone far enough for the difference between the two kinds of personnel to be defined very precisely by a French lawyer, Charles Loyseau. The former derived their power from the possession of land and the rights which they exercised over their own vassals; the latter were appointed by the king whom they served with or without pay.

As their titles indicate, originally the royal servants attended the king's person. They were in charge of the various departments of the household, such as the wardrobe, the kitchen, and the stable; others kept the seal or looked after the women's quarters.^[136] As monarchs expanded their power at the expense of church, aristocratic landowners, and towns, these officials were turned from appointees who looked after the royal domains into government administrators. For example, it was common for the master of the castle (castelan) to assume responsibility for various public works and also for public morality, sumptuary laws, and the like. The master of the wardrobe found himself looking after financial affairs; the chancellor, originally a clerk, concerned himself with the day-to-day working of the justice system; and the marshal - whose original respon­sibility was to maintain order among the royal bodyguards - began acting as commander-in-chief in war, now that monarchs were decreasingly inclined to do so themselves.

In principle the household, consisting simply of servants great and small, was independent of the feudal hierarchy. In practice the two were always intertwined; the reason being that, both in order to enhance the authority of his servants and by way of giving a certain luster to the court itself, its officials were often selected from among the nobility. To guaran­tee a steady supply, the sons of feudal lords were often brought to court where they served as pages and acquired an education considered ap­propriate to their status. Conversely, men of humble birth might distin­guish themselves in the king's service and, by way of their reward, marry into the feudal aristocracy and thus obtain estates as well as tenants and rights over them.^[137] Except in England, where most forms of aristocratic privilege were abolished after 1688, the two hierarchies retained their incestuous links as long as the ancien regime lasted.

Sooner or later, the expansion of the household into additional fields led to its transformation. Its development into a public administration was arrested; instead, overwhelmed by its own size and the extent of its responsibilities, the situation was inverted. A royal official whose job was, say, looking after the country's financial system could not at the same time attend to the expenditure of the palace; nor could an army comman­der-in-chief take responsibility for the royal bodyguard, particularly now that kings no longer took the field: so the two became geographically separate. Such tasks, which were minor by comparison, were delegated to others. The household was swallowed by its own offspring, so to speak: it became simply one of a great many administrative departments whose responsibility happened to be looking after the monarch's person, his residences, his property, and the like.

Possibly because it was always highly centralized, the first important country to witness the transformation was England. Throughout the fifteenth century, and especially after the Wars of the Roses had come to an end, the size of the household grew and grew; after 1507 this process coincided with the personal characteristics of Henry VIII who, unlike his father, preferred activities such as hunting, composing music, and womanizing to attending the affairs of government. This combination of circumstances enabled the chancellor, Thomas Cromwell (served 1532­40), to bring about a ‘‘revolution in government.''^[138] By way of an in­dication of what was happening the great seal became the official sign of the realm, while the signet and private seal declined into insignificance, continuing in use simply as the king's personal signs in letters that he sent to his relatives and similar missives.

Now that they were no longer simply the king's attendants, top ad­ministrative officials changed their titles from mere secretaries - as was still the case under Emperor Charles V - to the more grand-sounding secretaries of state. The peace conference held at Cateau-Cambresis in 1559 was probably the first in which the representatives of both France and Spain carried that title; shortly afterwards we find Florimond Rober- tet, known to history as le pere des secretaires d'etat and the third official in a line bearing that name, countersigning decrees issued by the sovereign.^[139] The developing impersonal character of the office is obvious from the fact that he, like his opposite number in England, William Page, performed his duties under several monarchs in a line; when finally dismissed by Henry III in 1588, he found it necessary to compose an Instruction for his successor. The first full-sized manual intended for the use of secretaries of state was written in 1631 by another Frenchman, Jean de Silhon. Clearly the position was being institutionalized.

The rise of bureaucratic organization also meant that the traditional household ordinances were no longer adequate to their task. The first such ordinance on record was produced for France's Louis IX in 1261; widely imitated by other courts, its function was to define the duties of various cooks, servants, and other assorted personnel responsible for their master's welfare. Between 1600 and 1660 they were replaced, or rather supplemented, by the various systems of government published in coun­tries such as Sweden, England, and Prussia. The background to the preparation of these documents varied. In Sweden the Regeringsform of 1634 owed its existence to Chancellor Oxenstierna and the need to do without a reigning monarch during the minority of Gustavus Adolphus' daughter, Christina.

Unlike the personnel that had served previous rulers, early modern European bureaucrats were neither priests, nor slaves, nor necessarily aristocrats. Over time their sources of income also changed; regarded as a method for remunerating governors and administrators, feudal rent - i.e., the assignment of lands and tenants in the form of a fief - had become unimportant by the second half of the fifteenth century. Starting with France and the Papal State, in most countries it was replaced by a system whereby offices were sold to the highest bidder. While many offices did carry salaries, those were almost always niggardly in relation to the standard of living expected and the expenses involved, the more so since holders were supposed to pay the latter (including the maintenance of their subordinates, of ‘‘families'') out of their own pockets. This was a fact which many rulers understood but, owing to financial constraints, could not change. Consequently they were forced to agree to a system of compensation by way of rights that were attached to the office, fees that were due to it, and monopolies that its holder could exercise.

The system of venal offices continued to develop throughout the six­teenth and seventeenth centuries. In France it reached its apogee during the reigns of Henry IV, Louis XIII, and Louis XIV, all of whom, pressed to raise money for their wars, created new offices and sold them by the hundreds. In 1604 the Paulette, named after Secretary of State Paulet, put the final touch on the structure.

Nor was there anything to prevent a person from holding multiple offices. Richelieu, for example, was a master at this practice; he bought and sold offices until, in addition to his principal one of first secretary of state (with its salary of 40,000 livres per year), he held several governor­ships as well as tax-farming rights in numerous provinces (raising his real income into the millions).^[140] Accumulating offices was one way of making oneself powerful, additionally so as the king was often dependent on his officials for loans; on the other hand it explains why historians are so often frustrated in their efforts to determine who was responsible for what. Offices could be willed to one's heirs (as happened to Montesquieu who inherited the one that had belonged to his uncle), and even be assigned as dowries. In this way they almost came to resemble family heirlooms.

In two countries, England and Prussia, venal offices failed to develop to the same extent. In England, where the landowning class was rich, the justices of the peace had made their appearance as a result of the Peace Act in 1361. In theory it was the king who appointed them from among local notables; in practice, by the second half of the fifteenth century, doing so had become the responsibility of the lord chancellor and the lord keeper of the seal, who in this way exercised considerable powers of patronage. The justices worked without pay, carrying out administrative duties and supervising public order in each county; the day-to-day cost was borne by means of ‘‘funds'' into which went the proceeds of fees, licenses, confiscations, and the like. The system's greatest advantage, which commended it both to sovereign and Parliament and explains its extraordinary longevity, was that it was cheap to run. This was all the more so because the justices' subordinates, i.e., the sheriffs and the constables, were maintained at the expense of the counties and parishes rather than out of the royal exchequer. The result was that much of the King's Justice, though carried out in his name, had little to do with him.

In Prussia, by contrast, the nobility was poor and tended to get poorer after the devastation suffered during the Thirty Years War and the Great Northern War. This fact enabled the electors - later, the kings - to draw it into their own service by offering salaries; the role played by other forms of income was, by comparison, minor. In 1723 Frederick William I took the final step by prohibiting the sale of offices altogether and ordering that all the revenues generated by the administration be passed directly into his own treasury instead of remaining in locally administered funds, as previously.^[141] Thus one country bypassed, and the other cut short, the period in which offices could be bought and sold and their owners compensated themselves out of the proceeds. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, the typical Prussian system whereby the adminis­tration was staffed by university-educated bureaucrats at the top and by ex-NCO types at the bottom was in operation. Pummeled into shape by Frederick the Great, it became the most advanced in Europe. At the other extreme England was both run by amateurs and underadministered by continental standards; an impersonal, salaried bureaucracy failed to de­velop.

10

The move from feudal lords through state entrepreneurs to appointed, salaried officials also led to a shift from a geographical to a functional division of labor. The first secretaries of state who, rather than being jacks of all trades, specialized in any particular function appeared in France during the reign of Henry IV. Around the middle of the century both France and Prussia introduced the so-called generalites: in other words, administrative divisions whose responsibilities were not limited to certain provinces but covered the entire realm and involved specialization in some particular field. As might be expected, the earliest generalites looked after justice, finance, and military administration where they took care of recruitment, supplies, and pay. Somewhat later they were joined by a secretary of the navy.

Perhaps the most important characteristic of the modern state is its territoriality. Therefore it is somewhat surprising to find that the distinc­tion between internal and external affairs, and the establishment of separ­ate administrative structures for each, appeared only comparatively late in the day. Owing to the ties that linked them to each other as well as the often scattered nature of their domains, medieval rulers up to the six­teenth century did not have centralized foreign ministries; instead each provincial governor was also responsible for looking into the affairs of his neighbors across the border. Diplomatic affairs were conducted by means of ad hoc envoys on the one hand and intermediaries (who were often ecclesiastics) on the other.^[142] Far from being strictly salaried employees working for each party, the persons who made up both categories expec­ted to be maintained and rewarded by the rulers with whom they negotiated.

As we saw, the practice of establishing permanent diplomatic represen­tatives with foreign princes originated in Italy after 1450. Interrupted by the Reformation and, above all, the Counter-Reformation, the use of such representatives was resumed after 1600 or so, by which time the term ‘‘ambassador” had replaced the earlier agent, legate, factor, procurator, or orator and was confined exclusively to personnel sent by the ruler of one state to represent him in the court of another. After 1648 their numbers grew. France, for example, had twenty-two in 1660 and thirty-two in 1715; whereas William III of England appointed 80 diplomatic representatives during his reign, his successor Anne com­missioned 136. By this time even a minor German principality, such as Hanover, found it necessary to maintain no fewer than sixteen officially accredited ambassadors.

Numerical growth soon made it necessary to have a central directory that would look after the ambassadors, send them instructions, and read their reports, all in addition to running the apparatus which transmitted messages from and to foreign capitals and which, for reasons of secrecy, was usually kept separate from the public mail systems developing inside each country. From the 1620s on France had an unbroken line of sec­retaries of state whose task was to look after foreign affairs. Under Louis XIV the post was held by a succession of able diplomats such as Lionne, Pompone, Colbert de Croissy, and Torcy.

Though sovereigns not seldom circumvented their own assistants and engaged in personal diplomacy, around 1720, Spain, Prussia, Sweden, and Austria all had more or less well organized foreign ministries headed by a single secretary of state. Britain proved an exception; reflecting the way in which the country had been put together, it had a secretary for the south, who in addition to England and Ireland looked after Catholic countries, and a secretary of the north who looked after Scottish affairs and also after relations with Protestant ones (as well as Poland and Russia). It is true that there was often a tendency for one secretary to dominate the other, so that in practice there was a foreign minister; such was the situation under Bolingbroke in 1711-14, Stanhope in 1714-21, and the elder Pitt in 1756-61. Still, it was only in 1782 that George III - the most efficiency-minded English ruler in three centuries - succeeded in having separate home and foreign secretaries instituted.¹³

Compared to the empires which had preceded them, these early mod­ern states were remarkable for the number of their administrators. Rome,

D. B. Horn, The British Diplomatic Service (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), p. 2. about which our information is relatively abundant, at its zenith may have had 50-80 million inhabitants; yet the Empire was governed by no more than a few thousand centrally appointed bureaucrats, all the remainder being local magistrates selected by the cities (later they were appointed by the procuratores or else their positions became hereditary) and client rulers. By contrast, France, with a population fluctuating between 18 and 20 million, had 12,000 officials in 1505, 25,000 in 1610, and perhaps 50,000 during the early years of Louis XIV.¹⁴ The number of top-ranking intendants also increased, from an average of two per year appointed between 1560 and 1630 to no fewer than eight or nine assigned to their posts each year from 1630 to 1648. By the time Richelieu died in 1642 every single royally governed province, or pays d'election, had its own intendant. As already mentioned, the growing power of the intendants presented an irritant to the nobility and was one factor behind the series of noble uprisings collectively known as the Fronde. This did not prevent the French example from being imitated elsewhere, particularly in Spain, Prussia (where the corresponding officials were known as Generalkommis­saren), and Sweden.¹⁵

Even more spectacular than the growth in the number of officials was the rise in the quantity of paperwork that the invention of print permitted. From about AD 1000 on, medieval rulers were no longer illiterate; for all that he preferred the sword to the pen Richard the Lionheart could write as well as anyone. Still it is said that, on one occasion when Emperor Charles called for pen and paper, none could be found within the walls of the palace. Whether or not the story is true, certainly he began his reign by traveling from the Netherlands to Spain with the most important gover­nment papers packed in chests which were carried on the back of mules and, from time to time, abandoned in some castle as they became too heavy to carry about. By the end of his own reign such a solution was no longer practicable, and under his son Philip II the situation was entirely transformed. In the 1580s a single inquiry into the affairs of a royal governor lasted for thirteen years and consumed 49,545 sheets of paper. The age of modern bureaucracy had truly arrived.

Besides producing overwhelming amounts of paperwork, the invention of print had other results. Previously, administrative papers of every sort, produced in a very small number of copies, could easily be lost or destroyed. Hence the best way to preserve them (and also to protect them

¹⁴ Figures from R. Mousnier, Le conseil du roi de Louis XII a la revolution (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1971), ch. 1.

¹⁵ For the development of these officials, see O. Hintze, ‘‘The Commissary and His Significance in General Administrative History: A Comparative Study,” in The Historical Essays of Otto Hintze, F. Gilbert, ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 267-302. against counterfeiting) was to have their contents inscribed on some durable material and displayed at a prominent public place. Such was the case of the laws of classical antiquity - not, as the Roman Twelve Tables show, that this method was always foolproof. The use of print solved the problem, making royal decrees and ordinances available to anybody who wished to consult them and all but eliminating the possibility of fal­sification; already the Tudors were familiar with the saying ars typographia artium omnium conservatrix (the art of print conserves all other arts).^[143] Before long scarcity was replaced by its opposite, surfeit. Mountains of material were produced, filling chambers and lining corridors; unless properly looked after, they would soon become so disorderly as to be impossible to use. It became necessary to find entirely new systems for storing and retrieving documents. It is no wonder that, from about 1550 to 1650, one ruler after another is found establishing a central state archive.

In the long run, this kind of bureaucratic expansion itself made it necessary for officials to operate according to fixed rules. The latter governed entry into the service, working hours, division of labor, career management, and the modus operandi in general. Partly in order to break the control of the local nobility over appointments, partly under the influence of the chinoiserie that was fashionable at the time, Frederick II in

1770 instituted a system of entrance examinations. His example was soon followed by Bavaria, which during the third quarter of the eighteenth century developed one of the world's most advanced administrations. In

1771 it was to became the first modern country to take a nationwide census, albeit the work was done in a rather desultory way and took ten years to complete. Thus officials begot paperwork, and paperwork officials.

The purpose of the various measures was to ensure uniformity, regular­ity, and a reasonable standard of competence, and in this they were generally successful. On the other hand, every step taken toward profes­sionalism also brought with it a reinforced esprit de corps. Already the introduction of entrance examinations meant that monarchs were no longer free to decide whom to take into their service; it was found that the more centralized any government the more indispensable the officials who ran it on the monarch's behalf. This in turn translated into an ability to insist on their rights and enforce them even against his will, if neces­sary. Among the most important such rights were freedom from arbitrary dismissal, acceptable pay, a regular promotion ladder based, for the most part, on seniority, old-age pensions, and a certain dignity which they shared with the king.

The term ‘‘bureaucracy” itself was coined in 1765 by Vincent de Gourmay, a French philosophe who specialized in economic and adminis­trative matters. The context in which he did so was pejorative; to him it was a new form of government added to the three that had been laid down by Aristotle, i.e., monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. Significantly for the future he saw a need to reduce the number of pen-pushers in favor of laissez faire, a term he also invented.¹⁷

By this time officials, who for centuries past had been the king's men, were beginning to think of themselves as servants of an impersonal state. The process whereby Staatsdiener were separated from konigliche bediente spread from the bottom up. The latter lost status until they degenerated into mere flunkies, whereas the most important among the former were soon coming to be known as ministers. It climaxed in 1756 when no less an authority than Frederick II described himself as ‘‘the first servant of the state.'' As if to emphasize the growing separation between the court that looked after his personal affairs and the administration that was now running the Prussian state, he also ended the system whereby the latter's employees were fed from the royal kitchens.

The fact that the growing size and power of the administration was not without its dangers was understood at an early time. Already one of Philip Il's ambassadors, when rebuked by his master for insisting on ceremonial, found it in him to reply that Vuessa Majesta misma no es sino una ceremonia - ‘‘Your Majesty himself is nothing but a ceremony.''¹⁸ By the 1640s the Spanish bureaucracy, which unlike the French one was not torn to pieces by civil war, had become the most advanced in Europe. No wonder that commentators such as Saavedra Fajardo and Quevedo y Villegas took alarm. They expressed the fear that it might undermine personal gover­nment and, indeed, end up by rendering the king himself superfluous.¹⁹

As the next century established ‘‘legitimate'' government - meaning that the king's identity, provided only he had been born to the right woman and in the right bed, no longer mattered much - that fear began to be turned into reality. The monarchs' own reactions to this development varied. Some were content to allow the process to run its course while

¹⁷ Baron Grimm and Diderot, correspondance litteraire, philosophique et critique, 1753-1769 (Paris: Caillot, 1813), vol. IV, p. 186.

¹⁸ Quotedin J. H. Elliott, Spain and Its World 1500-1700 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1969), pp. 15, 142.

¹⁹ See J. A. Maravell, La philosophie politique espagnole au XVIIIe siecle dans les rapports avec l'esprit de la contre-reforme (Paris: Vrin, 1955), p. 241. simultaneously denying that it existed. Such was the case of France's Louis XV: while spending almost half of his time hunting and the rest with Madame de Pompadour, in 1766 he issued a ringing declaration to the effect that ‘‘it is in my person alone that sovereign power resides... the whole system of public order emanates from me.''²⁰ Others, such as Prussia's Frederick II, vainly tried to swim against the tide by working unceasingly. He also sneered at his French colleague, claiming that it was not Louis XV who governed but a group of four, namely the secretaries of war, of the marine, of foreign affairs, and the controller-general.

Frederick's Prussia was, in fact, the perfect example of the dilemma that bureaucracy created. On the one hand he vehemently demanded ‘‘system'' as indispensable for running the country and making the best of its limited resources. On the other he inveighed against those who, even as they manned the system and provided the information on which it rested, ‘‘wanted to govern despotically while their master is expected to be satisfied with the empty prerogative of signing the orders issued in his name.'' Well aware of his subordinates' tendency to procrastinate and obstruct when it suited their purpose, he tried to contain the problem by loosing salvo after salvo of edicts and rebukes. In the 1770s he even resorted to divide-and-rule by importing French officials to occupy top positions in the postal system and the treasury, which caused his own native bureaucrats to complain about ‘‘despotic and arbitrary methods... in the fashion of the Spanish Inquisition.''²¹ Given that no country was as dependent on its bureaucracy as Prussia - an entirely artificial creation lacking both tradition and geographical unity - it is no wonder that, in the long run, his efforts availed him little. The older he became and the greater Prussia's population - during his reign it increased from 2.5 to 5 million - the more his rule restricted itself to inspection tours and occasional acts of capricious interference.

At the end of the eighteenth century the Prussian bureaucracy was, relative to the population, the largest in the world,²² thus making certain that the trend set under Frederick the Great would continue under his less capable successors. Frederick William II (1786-97) was primarily a bon vivant. His chief interest in life was his mistresses; once provided with those, he took little further interest in affairs. Frederick William III (1797-1840), though conscientious (a ‘‘perfectly honest man'' is how he was once described by Napoleon)²³ did not have it in him to oppose his

²⁰ Quoted in M. Antoine, Le conseildu roisous le regne du LouisXV(Paris: Droz, 1970), p. 9.

²¹ Quotations from Rosenberg, Bureaucracy, Aristocracy and Autocracy, p. 197.

²² See the tables in M. Mann, The Sources of Social Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), vol. II, appendix A.

²³ Napoleon I, Correspondance (Paris: Plon, 1858-), vol. XIII, p. 368, no. 11026, Bulletin No. 9 of the Grande armee, 17 October 1806. ministers or, for that matter, his formidable wife Queen Louise. Both were ‘‘absolute” kings who soon discovered that their real role was limited to putting their seal on the recommendations made to them by their ministers. By that time the judiciary, too, had become independent and the sovereign had lost the prerogative of meddling with the juridical decisions that his subordinates made. As Frederick II recognized toward the end of his reign, doing so was to diminish their authority, throw a spanner into the system's works, and render the laws upon which it rested ineffective.

Far from suffering a setback, the story that began during the later Middle Ages culminated after Napoleon's defeat of Prussia in 1806. Into the gap created by the failure of the royal cabinet, the army, and the top levels of civilian government, there stepped a tiny but determined clique of gebildete - meaning university-educated - officials of bourgeois origin such as von Stein and von Hardenberg, both of whom had recently been ennobled. Centering around the Council of State or Staatsrat, the system they built was essentially one of enlightened bureaucratic despotism tempered by the will of the upper classes; as Stein himself was to write, Prussia was ruled by ‘‘buralists'' who, ‘‘come rain or sunshine... write, write, write... in silence, in offices behind closed doors, unknown, unnoticed, unpraised, and determined to raise their children as equally usable writing machines.''²⁴ Technically they were responsible to a king who, carrying the title of Allerhochste or ‘‘all highest,'' remained the legitimate sovereign and an active power not subject to human judgment. In practice he operated through the ministers - whose countersignatures to all royal ordinances were required - and his personal intervention in the operation of the administrative machine was all but eliminated.

Fifteen years before the Prussian collapse, the entire vast French sys­tem of venal administration had been brought down at a single blow together with the societe d'ordres in which it was anchored. As in Prussia, the bureaucracy was pulled up by the roots and taken out of civil society, so to speak; as the divorce between the two, which had been in the making since the second half of the seventeenth century, became final as the former developed a separate identity and was set up over the latter. Addressing the National Convention, Mirabeau put it as follows: hence­forward France would recognize only two kinds of persons, i.e., citizens on the one hand and government officials on the other. These brave words were soon followed by deeds. Napoleon cleared away the debris left by the Revolution. The old mishmash of intendants and provincial governors, pays d'etat and pays d'election (the latter subject to direct royal

24

H. F. C. von Gagern, ed., Die Briefe des Freiherrn von Stein an den Freiherrn von Gagern, 1813-1831 (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1833), pp. 90-2. rule, the former not), was abolished. Its place was taken by an ultra­modern, highly centralized, salaried government apparatus whose top echelons consisted of the cabinet and the conseil d'etat and whose ten­tacles spread uniformly into every departement and arrondissement. Later it became the model for every country occupied by the French including Italy,²⁵ the Netherlands,²⁶ much of Germany,²⁷ and Spain.²⁸

Since the Revolution had eliminated the societe d'etats as well as the provincial parliaments, flattening and atomizing society, the power of the French bureaucracy soon reached unprecedented heights. During the next century the forms of government were designed to undergo many changes from empire to absolute monarchy to constitutional monarchy to republic and (after another empire) to republic again. Each time a revol­ution took place the administrative structure was shaken. However, after a few individuals had been executed or dismissed, it emerged stronger than before; much as the waves of the ocean do not affect the underlying currents, so the foundations laid in 1800-3 have, in many ways, survived to the present day. In theory it was a fine-tuned machine completely under the government’s control and responsive to its commands. In practice not even a Napoleon - as a contemporary saying went, ‘‘il sait tout, il peut tout, il fait tout’’ - was able to run a country of 30 million by decree, the more so because he was often absent on campaign.

By this time Britain with its centuries-old system of unpaid adminis­tration sustained by corruption had fallen far behind. From the 1790s on, the demand for reform began in earnest. One voice which called for an end to the prevailing confusion between the private and the public was that of Jeremy Bentham; despairing of being heard in his own country and influenced by the French example, he even wrote many of his works in French.²⁹ Whereas Bentham was a philosopher and a liberal, Burke was a parliamentarian and a conservative who in many ways led British public opinion in opposing everything that the Revolution stood for. Hence it is surprising to find him calling for the creation of a class of men ‘‘wholly set apart and dedicated for public purposes, without any other than public duties and public principles; men without the possibility of converting the

²⁵ M. Broers, ‘‘Italy and the Modern State: The Experience of Napoleonic Rule,’’ in F.

Furet and M. Ozouf, eds., The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Culture (Oxford: Pergamon, 1989), vol. III, pp. 489-503.

²⁶ J. P. A. Coopman, ‘‘Van Beleid van Politie naar Uitvoering en Bestuur, 1700-1840,’’ Bijdrage en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, 104, 1989, pp. 579-91.

²⁷ I. Mieck, ‘‘Napoleon et les reformes en Allemagne,’’ Francia, 15, 1987, pp. 473-91.

²⁸ C. Munoz de Bustilo, ‘‘Remarks on the Origins of Provincial Administration in Spain,’’ Parliaments, Estate and Representation, 14, 1, 1994, pp. 47-55.

²⁹ See in particular his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (New York: Methuen, 1970 [1789]).

estate of the community into a private fortune; men denied to self­interest, whose avarice is for some community; men to whom personal poverty is honor, and implicit obedience stands in the place of freedom.”³⁰

In the event, the British government took several measures to moder­nize the country's administration. The Regulating Act which Lord North, as prime minister, passed through Parliament in 1773 prohibited tax collectors and persons engaged in the administration of justice from taking part in trade or accepting presents. The percentage of senior officials who received salaries rather than fees increased; the fact that ministers spent more time in Parliament, thus leaving day-to-day ad­ministration in the hands of their permanent undersecretaries, also rep­resented a step toward bureaucratization. These steps had gone into effect only when the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars broke out and gave government more important things to worry about than Bentham's ‘‘felicific calculus,'' the formula by which he hoped to figure out the measures best adapted to maximize the happiness of each person in the realm. The old creaky machinery was retained. On the whole it func­tioned admirably, financing the country's own military effort, sub­sidizing that of its allies, and ending the war on terms that made Britain the greatest power on earth. Progress resumed only in the 1830s, by which time industrialization had transformed the country, creating a strong urban middle class which insisted on ending the old aristocratic corruption.

After the Reform Bill of 1831 had abolished the rotten boroughs and extended the electorate by 60 percent the last sinecures were done away with. New legislation was passed, barring members of Parliament from holding offices; next, in the 1840s, the reforms of Sir Charles Trevelyan led to the institution of the modern civil service with regular entrance examinations, a promotion ladder, retirement pensions, and a fixed if sometimes whimsical way of doing business. Remarkably enough, it was modeled upon the system first organized by the East India Company - the private organization to which the government had delegated control over the subcontinent - where Trevelyan had spent fourteen years of his career.³¹

Though the details varied, in all countries the century and a half after 1648 was characterized above all by the growth in the power of state

³⁰ E. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London: Oxford University Press, 1920 [1791]), p. 174.

³¹ For these reforms, see E. W. Cohen, The Growth of the British Civil Service, 1780-1939 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1941), ch. 5; and E. T. Stokes, ‘‘Bureaucracy and Ideology: Britain and India in the Nineteenth Century,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 30, 1950, pp. 131-56. bureaucracy, both that part whose function was internal administration and the division responsible for external affairs. However, the more powerful and the more centralized the bureaucracy rulers needed in order to control their states, the more it tended to take that control out of the rulers' hands and into its own. Among the first to sense which way the wind was blowing were those excellent weathervanes, the great aristoc­ratic families of France and England. Even before 1789 they were begin­ning to desert their respective courts, the latter in favor of London (where real power tended to become concentrated at Whitehall) and the former in favor of their country seats.^[144] By 1798 things had progressed far enough for the Dictionary of the French Academy to define bureaucracy as ‘‘power, influence of the heads and staff of governmental bureaus.'' Fifteen years later a German dictionary of foreign expressions explained it as ‘‘the authority of power which various government departments and their branches abrogate to themselves over their fellow citizens.''^[145] As for royalty itself, from 1848 on many of them resumed their travels by making use of the railways. With real power for the most part taken out of their hands, the place where they found themselves at any one time did not matter too much anyway. This applied even to Germany's Wilhelm II, who, though still closer to absolutism than any other monarch except for the Russian tsar, absented himself from Berlin for months on end and acquired the nickname of Reisekaiser (traveling-emperor).

Though its pace varied, the growth in the number and power of the bureaucracy that has been documented in this section took place regar­dless of the state's lineage, i.e., whether it was absolute, constitutional, or parliamentarian; had been set up by armed coercion, as was mostly the case in France, Austria, and Prussia, or with the aid of capital as in the Netherlands and, in a different way, England; and ultimately even whether it was national or multinational, centralized or federal, monar­chical or republican. If lazy rulers such as England's Henry VIII and France's Louis XV found themselves trapped and sidetracked by their own bureaucracies so, though for the opposite reasons, did industrious ones such as Spain's Philip II and Prussia's Frederick the Great. If hereditary rulers enjoying lifetime power failed to master the machinery they themselves had created, so, though again for the opposite reasons, did elected ones with their much shorter terms of office. As Hegel recognized, by the beginning of the nineteenth century the point had been reached where the bureaucracy itself became the state, elevating itself high above civil society and turning itself into the latter's master.