ANÁLISIS DE LA RED DEL SRI

On a typical day in the Ministry of the Interior, a courier arrived in the courtyard of the hôtel Conti, hot and sticky from his three-day ride from an outlying province. He was determined to hand his packet to the Minister personaliy, for the prefect

had assured him that it was urgent and very important. Instead, the uniformed

usher showed him to a vestibule, and told him to wait. Some hours iater, the Secretary-General authorised his Secretariat to take receipt of the courier’s burden. They signed it into the register, and began to number, date, and ciassify its contents for distribution to the appropriate Divisions.^ The Ministry swailowed

the packet; the courier was dismissed. He trudged out of the Secretary

General’s antechamber, watched curiously by both administrators and petitioners as he crossed the cobblestones of the yard.^

Having taken receipt of the correspondence, the Secretary Générai took responsibility for the matters he deemed important enough for the Minister's personai or immediate attention. The buik of the prefect’s missal made its way to

^ This narrative has been constructed primariiy from a memorandum on the organisation of the Ministry of the Interior, dated 29 Ventôse Year X, in Archives Nationaies (A.N.), f/1 a/634. I have also incorporated details from a number of other organisational memoirs in A.N. f/1 a/1. Aithough the numbers of those employed fluctuated during the Revolution, peaking at the 345 cierks employed in the Ministry of the Interior after its reformation in Year IV, there were never more than 250 employees working in the Ministry of the Interior between 1799 and 1818: A.N. f/1 bi/531. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs operated along similar lines, but was complicated by the special measures surrounding secret despatches ["Organisation des bureaux des Relations Extérieures, 22 frimaire an

4," Archives du Ministère des Affaires Étrangères (A.A.E.), Organisation et

Règiements du Ministère, vol. I (1547-1806), part 2 [PER L, Volumes no. 3 bis]. Because less than 100 people worked in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at any

one time [A.A.E., Compatabiiité (Volumes), vol. XVIII], there were no Division

Chiefs - Bureau Chiefs dealt directly with the minister. The Ministry of Police was modelled directly on the Ministry of the Interior [A.N. f/7/3006].

^ The Ministry of Foreign Affairs kept three couriers of its own who could be depended on to handle diplomatic material. The Ministry of Interior used local

the Division chiefs, who, like the Secretary General, cherry-picked the few files they thought most significant, and divided it once more for re-distribution to the

bureaux chiefs. Each time the file was dismembered, a clerk recorded the

destination of each piece. All in all, it took over a day for the package’s various reports to reach the Ministry’s bureaux.^

In the Bureau of Agriculture, work was under way on a memoir on farming in the départements, aggregating information from reports on the fortunes of the year’s

harvest, the number of sheep and the land devoted to them. One rédacteur,

compiling a notice on pasturage and the dangers of eating alfalfa, had called for information from the prefect a month earlier. When sections of the courier’s letter

arrived, they were indexed by a commie d'ordre, and divided among the

members of the bureau. The report on alfalfa made its way to the rédacteufs

desk. Although he had requesting it specifically, he placed it to one side: it could only be useful after he had received replies from the other prefectures, the deliberations of the Agricultural Society, and the opinions of his correspondents."*

The other rédacteurs also flipped through their respective papers while the

commis d’ordre noted the prefect’s queries in his work sheet. Using one column to suggest what action the ministry should take, he left another empty to register

the bureau’s eventual reply. In time, the rédacteufs report built into a portfolio,

accompanied by a quick analysis on a single sheet of paper. Both register and portfolio were later sent with the Division chief to elicit the minister’s approval in their biweekly meeting (if the matter was more urgent, the Division chief would have to send it through the Secretary General).® The prescribed forms of office practice made the minister's burden manageable. He could treat the business of

® See A.N. f/1 a/634, on the delays involved in moving paper between offices. "* Such a request was answered in "Observations sur la nature des pasturages de l’Arrondissement de Pontarlier, département du Doubs," 21 July 1813, A.N. f/10/252. Although the bureaux responsible for Manufactures and Commerce had become a separate ministry in 1811, the bureaux related to Agriculture and Food Stuff remained a separate division of the Ministry of Interior, with Nicolas Fauchat as Division Chief. Silvestre, the perpetual secretary of the Society of

Agriculture, continued to head the bureau of agriculture itself. The close

relationship between the Parisian Agricultural Society and the Bureau of

Agriculture is described in “Société d’Agriculture,” A.N. f/10/211. Several

correspondents' reports can also be found in A.N. f/10/252.

twenty to thirty bureaux with some degree of comprehension. Once the Minister had marked them "approved", the reports returned to the bureaux where expéditionnaires copied them in a firm and legible hand to be sent to the Secretariat for dispatch.

In a single room, the Bureau of Agriculture dismantled and remade dossiers. It pillaged cartons for auxiliary knowledge. Documents were moved from box to box, leaving an impossible trail of destruction. Scraps of paper containing vital information vanished behind heavy writing desks or between the dusty cartons

piled to one side. Though the commis d’ordre and the bureau chief both battled

valiantly against the paper drift, and kept the official register in minute detail, they still found it impossible to make sense of the clutter and disorder.® Ignoring this chaos, the members of the bureau worked all the more furiously, copying out answers, drawing up summaries of the prefects' correspondence for presentation to the minister, comparing and contrasting yields with those of other years and other regions, plucking details of technological advances to be shared with the "Nation". They passed in and out of the office as they wished, to drop in next door to borrow a document, to discuss problems, or simply to ask help with their workload.^ if the prefect had mixed information on pasturage into a report on

abattoirs sent to the Bureau of Commerce, rules or no rules, the rédacteur would

have to make his own way there to retrieve it.® The process of analysis in the

® For example, A. Didot and Lefebvre, in a letter to the Minister of Police,

Pluviôse Year V [A.N. f/7/3006], describe the punishing schedule of a commis

d’ordre. Both claimed to work from nine in the morning until six in the evening without a moment's rest, staying late on the evenings military service had interrupted their ordinary day's work.

^ Note on Mardlez, Bourgogne and Gebert, A.N. f/10/225. The difficulty of getting information from other bureaux through "official" channels is described in A.N. f/1 a/634.

® Prefects were increasingly provided with blank templates and forms so that their information could be easily absorbed into the communication channels in the ministry; for example, "Envoi au Manuel des Administrateurs," A.N. f/1 a/57. For a criticism of prefects' correspondence, see A.N. f/1 a/634. Ambassadors were equally sloppy in their correspondence with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which also attempted to order and regulate their correspondence: "Pour servir de Règle

à la correspondence des Employés, vendémiaire an IV", A.A.E. Organisation et

Règiements du Ministère, vol. I, part 2. Administrative manuals also provided

models for administrators to copy: Ciaude-Joseph Lalouette’s Eiémens de

ministry was a messy one: breaking down the original packet into small pieces to be compared and incorporated in reports was a far from simple task.

The hierarchy of correspondence, from Secretary General to Division Chief to

Bureau Chief to commis d’ordre to rédacteur Xo expéditionnaire, and back again,

eventually to reach the Minister for his signature, remained a characteristic of ministerial organisation throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. The role of the Secretary General and Division Chiefs emerged In 1792.® In the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Charles LeBrun appointed Rouhière as Secretary

General of his Department, and replaced his premier commis with Division

Chiefs. Jean-Marie Roland also appointed the Ministry of Interior's first

Secretary General in 1792, establishing a communications hierarchy like that described above. Before this reform, a letter took eight days to circulate between

the offices of the five premier commis offices, each responsible for a different

geographic area.^^ Roland appointed Luc-Antoine Donin de Champagneux as Chief of a new "First Division", to overlook and co-ordinate all the Ministry's

contacts with the 83 départements.^^ The organisation of central administration

principles and the rules of practical administration, by outlining the various

regulatation governing the way information was to be compiled. Rémy

Fleurigeon, Code Administratif, ou recueil par ordre alphabétique de matières de

toutes les Lois nouvelles et anciennes, relatives aux fonctions administratives et de police,... Jusqu’au premier avril 1809 ..., 6 volumes (Paris: de Valade, 1809) also provided sample forms and procedures for the local administrators to follow. On the rules restricting the movement of clerks between offices inside the Ministry, see Chapter Two.

® Church, Revolution and Red Tape, p. 60, claims that the Ministry of Justice in

1792 was the first to appoint a Secretary-General. This would indicate that

Louis-Jérôme Gohier, appointed by Dominique-Joseph Garat, was the first to

preside over this form of Ministry organisation: Almanach National de France

(1793) (Paris: Testu, 1793), p. 125. That this system remained in place into the second half of the nineteenth century is testified by the fact that it is the mode of

organisation described in Balzac's Les Employés, written in 1836 and that

discussed in Jules Delbousquet’s reform project. De l'organisation des

administrations centrales des divers ministères: des droits et des devoirs des employés {Paris: Charles Hingray, 1843).

'° Ibid., p. 152.

” Bernadin, Jean-Marie Roland et le Ministère de l'intérieur, p. 205. See also,

Almanach National {1793), pp. 128-131.

Bernadin, Jean-Marie Roland et le Ministère de l'Intérieur, pp. 205-206. This

reorganisation was also the moment of a large-scale purge of old-regime personnel, which Roland found hindering his reform efforts. He replaced forty

into Divisions based on function, and not geographic domain, remained in force from then onJ^ The abolition of the ministries by the Convention in 12 Germinal Year II, and their replacement by Executive Commissions, did not mean that civic-professional structures were abandoned, as the Commissions appointed their own Director Generals to distribute work among the bureaux.*"^ Neither did Lucien Bonaparte’s decision to reorganise the Ministry of interior on the 18 Germinal Year Vlli (April 1800), abolishing the Divisions and replacing their

Chiefs with four rapporteurs, mark a radical break. The Ministry of interior at this

time employed just over sixty employees, which made the distribution of correspondence less complex and allowed the Minister to deal directly with bureau chiefs. Lucien’s reorganisation also maintained the Secretary General as the linchpin of a hierarchy of correspondence.^®

The rédacteur

yNho

if the minutely organised breakdown of correspondence through the

administrative hierarchy looked good on paper but proved unwieldy in practice.

clerks for "political" reasons, including all the premier commie except Antoine- François LeTellier (pp. 207-208).

A report from the Section de i'intérieur oi the Conseii d'État to the Minister of

the interior in 1812, A.N. f/1 bl/7, dossier 5 [1812], noted that a division of ministerial bureaux into Divisions based on the classification of its duties was standard practice (aithough the exact nature of that classification varied according to the manner in which each minister envisaged his brief).

See the detailed discussion in Church, Revoiution and Red Tape, pp. 87-93.

Church notes that the Commission des Réiations Extérieures changed little from

the organisation laid down in 1792. When the Minister of Interior was re­

established, its organisation into Divisions and the appointment of a Secretary General was reinforced in a law of the 10 Vendémiaire Year IV.

Ministerial order, 18 Germinal Year VIII, A.N. f/1 a/1. Lucien's Ministry of the Interior was not very different from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which employed a similar number of employees. When Chaptal, after replacing Lucien in January 1801 (Pluviôse Year IX), restored the payroll to about 160 employees, he rescinded the changes.

efficiency was not its primary purpose. Moreover, administrators abandoned the rules as they saw fit, by asking help from the bureau next door, or by supplementing the prefect's letter with the views of private correspondents or

societies. In fact, the hierarchy, so carefully detailed in organisational

documents, tended to be highly malleable in practice. There was leeway in the offices, and there needed to be, if the administrators were to get their job done. In practice. Division Chiefs encouraged this “useful latitude", although constantly pressured by their Minister and their political masters to keep a tighter reign on the offices.