Political Order and Political Decay Read Online Free Page B

if not in name. 10
    The second major accomplishment of the revolution was the creation of a modern bureaucratic state, something China had achieved a couple of millennia earlier. The French Old Regime was a curious hybrid. Beginning in the middle of the seventeenth century, centralizing monarchs like Louis XIII and Louis XIV had created a modern system of administrators based on officials known as intendents. Sent from Paris to the provinces, they had no kinship or other ties with the local population and therefore could govern more impersonally. As Alexis de Tocqueville noted, this was the beginning of the modern centralized state in France. 11
    But the intendents had to operate in parallel with another administrative group, that of venal officeholders. French kings were perpetually short of money to finance their wars and lifestyles. Starting with a major bankruptcy known as the Grand Parti in 1557, the government resorted to increasingly desperate measures to raise money, including the outright sale of public offices to wealthy individuals. Under a system known as the Paulette, introduced in 1604 by Henry IV’s minister Sully, these offices could not only be bought but also handed down to children as part of their inheritance. These venal officeholders, of course, had no interest in impersonal public administration or good government; what they wanted was to milk their offices for all they were worth.
    Although French governments of the late eighteenth century made two major efforts to eliminate the venal officeholders, both were defeated because this elite group held great power and had too much to lose as a result of reform. The rottenness and unreformability of this system was one of the factors leading to the revolution itself. During that event, all of the venal officeholders were dispossessed of their offices, and in many cases of their heads for good measure. It was only after the decks had been cleared in this purge that a new Conseil d’État could be created in 1799, an institution that would become the pinnacle of a truly modern bureaucratic system.
    The new administrative hierarchy would not have worked but for the creation of a more modern educational system designed to support it. The Old Regime had established technical schools in the eighteenth century to train engineers and other specialists. But in 1794 the revolutionary government created a number of Grandes Écoles (schools) such as the École Normale Supérieure and the École Polytechnique for the specific purpose of training civil servants. Such schools, the forerunners of the post–World War II École Nationale d’Administration (ENA), were fed in turn by a system of lycées or elite secondary schools.
    These two institutional innovations—introduction of a new legal code and creation of a modern administrative system—are not the same thing as democracy. But they nevertheless achieved certain egalitarian ends. The law no longer privileged certain classes who got to manipulate the system to their own advantage; it was now committed to the equal treatment of all individuals, in principle if not always in reality. Private property was no longer subject to feudal restrictions, and a new, much larger market economy could begin to flourish as a result. The law, moreover, could not be implemented without the newly reformed bureaucracy, which was freed of the corrupt baggage it had accumulated over the centuries. And both together—law and an administrative state—acted in many ways as a constraint on the arbitrariness of would-be absolutist rulers. The sovereign had theoretically unlimited powers, but he had to exercise them through a bureaucracy acting on the basis of law. This is something that the Germans would label the Rechtsstaat. It had a very different character from the totalitarian dictatorships that would arise in the twentieth century under Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, whose reality was a despotic state