Bureaucracy, Politics, and Revolution

Saint-Just's view of the bureaucracy was that sur trente mille qui sont employes, il en est peut-etre fort peu a qui le peuple donnerait sa voix.l In saying this he spoke for many commentators, past and present, who have regarded the revolutionary bureaucracy as actively royalist in outlook and who by implication have regarded political forces as the most important influence on bureaucracy in general. This paper sets out to examine both of these contentions in the light of the evidence of the Commission des Dix-Sept, an interesting but unjustly neglected body set up in 1795 to purge the revolutionary civil service of royalists.2 The commission, virtually on its own admission, failed to produce the many royalists that it believed were to be found in the bureaucracy, mainly because few were to be found there. The failure of the commission provides strong grounds for rejecting the prevailing belief that the revolutionary civil service was dominated and directed by royalists. It is a secondary object of this paper to argue that, although many commentators are convinced that bureaucracies always respond to political change, this is not invariably the case. Contemporaries were convinced that during the Thermidorian Reaction many royalists found their way into the bureaucracy. This belief has not always received the attention it deserves, and it is analyzed here as a reflection of the assumption, favored by many modem sociologists, that political forces are the essential dynamic of bureaucracy. On the basis of the commis

Bureaucracy · Commission · Political science · Politics · European Political History Analysis · Law · Political Theory and Influence · Public Administration

• Bureaucracy and Bureaucratization

  Open Access•N Eisenstadt, S Ν Eisenstadt et al.•Current Sociology•1958

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