When Civil Servants Doubt the State

Studies on the commitment of the German population to the war effort during the first global conflict have underscored that the consensus broke down as early as 1916.Richard Bessel talked of a process of "demobilization," and saw a strong continuity between the experience of war of the civilian population and the revolution of November 1918.According to him, mobilization during the war was the manifestation of a great bureaucratic effort that eventually failed to muster popular support because the political and military elites had lost touch, so to speak, with reality and the population. 1 This article seeks to further this reflection, focusing on the attitude of the local administrative elites, and on the deterioration of their relations with the central political and military authorities.Indeed, the lack of support of local elites for the monarchical state during the revolution of 1918 is not solely explained by the context of military defeat, although it greatly contributed to feeding their despair.It seems that the perception of the regime's failure began earlier, and that its chronology goes back to the formulation of criticisms regarding the dysfunctions of the war economy.Thus, we will examine how the loyalty of those local elites crumbled, and how they felt solidarity with the claims of the population and denounced the inability of the central state to manage provisioning. The Mirror of LocaL civiL ServanTSThis approach is in line with the research direction that Gerd Krumeich suggested a decade ago when he pointed out that, by comparison with the multiplication of studies since the 1980s on the war experiences of soldiers 1

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