9 - Administration, Police and Governance

Summary

This vision of centralised, top-down administrative efficiency is commonly regarded as quintessentially Napoleonic. It seems far removed from the idealism and indeed localism of 1789. The evolution of French legal thinking on the ideal relationship between the administration and people can be tracked at the most fundamental level in the constitutions of 1791, 1793, 1795 and 1799.² The 1791 constitution envisages administrators as essentially private citizens elected temporarily to perform precisely defined and limited public functions, all under the supervision of a king demoted by the same constitution from divinely ordained sovereign to bureaucrat-in-chief. The ‘Jacobin’ 1793 constitution, unsurprisingly, strengthens the themes of equality and disinterested duty, but adds a paranoid tone in its implication that the administration might at any point be corrupted and turn into an oppressive instrument. The 1795 constitution avoids the hysterical rhetoric, but nonetheless shows a concern that at the very least administrative bodies are prone to nepotism and petty place seeking.