SHOWING HOW CENTRALISATION HAD BEEN ABLE TO INTRODUCE ITSELF AMONG THE
ANCIENT INSTITUTIONS OF FRANCE, AND TO SUPPLANT WITHOUT DESTROYING
THEM.
Let us now briefly recapitulate what has been said in the three
preceding chapters. A single body or institution placed in the centre
of the kingdom regulated the public administration of the whole
country; the same Minister directed almost all the internal affairs of
the kingdom; in each province a single Government agent managed all the
details; no secondary administrative bodies existed, and none which
could act until they had been set in motion by the authority of the
State; courts of extraordinary jurisdiction judged the causes in which
the administration was interested, and sheltered all its agents. What
is this but the centralisation with which we are so well acquainted?
Its forms were less marked than they are at present; its course
was less regular, its existence more disturbed; but it is the same
being. It has not been necessary to add or to withdraw any essential
condition; the removal of all that once surrounded it at once exposed
it in the shape that now meets our eyes.
Most of the institutions which I have just described have been imitated
subsequently, and in a hundred different places;[30] but they were at
that time peculiar to France; and we shall shortly see how great was
the influence they had on the French Revolution and on its results.
But how came these institutions of modern date to be established in
France amidst the ruins of feudal society?
It was a work of patience, of address, and of time, rather than of
force or of absolute power. At the time when the Revolution occurred,
scarcely any part of the old administrative edifice of France had been
destroyed; but another structure had been, as it were, called into
existence beneath it.
There is nothing to show that the Government of the old French
monarchy followed any deliberately concerted plan to effect this
difficult operation. That Government merely obeyed the instinct which
leads all governments to aim at the exclusive management of affairs--an
instinct which ever remained the same in spite of the diversity of its
agents. The monarchy had left to the ancient powers of France their
venerable names and their honours, but it had gradually subtracted from
them their authority. They had not been expelled but enticed out of
their domains. By the indolence of one man, by the egotism of another,
the Government had found means to occupy their places. Availing itself
of all their vices, never attempting to correct but only to supersede
them, the Government at last found means to substitute for almost all
of them its own sole agent, the Intendant, whose very name was unknown
when those powers which he supplanted came into being.
The judicial institutions had alone impeded the Government in this
great enterprise; but even there the State had seized the substance
of power, leaving only the shadow of it to its adversaries. The
Parliaments of France had not been excluded from the sphere of the
administration, but the Government had extended itself gradually
in that direction so as to appropriate almost the whole of it. In
certain extraordinary and transient emergencies, in times of scarcity,
for instance, when the passions of the people lent a support to the
ambition of the magistrates, the Central Government allowed the
Parliaments to administer for a brief interval, and to leave a trace
upon the page of history; but the Government soon silently resumed its
place, and gently extended its grasp over every class of men and of
affairs.
In the struggles between the French Parliaments and the authority
of the Crown, it will be seen on attentive observation that these
encounters almost always took place on the field of politics, properly
so called, rather than on that of administration. These quarrels
generally arose from the introduction of a new tax; that is to say, it
was not administrative power which these rival authorities disputed,
but legislative power to which the one had as little rightful claim as
the other.
This became more and more the case as the Revolution approached. As
the passions of the people began to take fire, the Parliaments assumed
a more active part in politics; and as at the same time the central
power and its agents were becoming more expert and more adroit, the
Parliaments took a less active part in the administration of the
country. They acquired every day less of the administrator and more of
the tribune.
The course of events, moreover, incessantly opens new fields of action
to the executive Government, where judicial bodies have no aptitude to
follow; for these are new transactions not governed by precedent, and
alien to judicial routine. The great progress of society continually
gives birth to new wants, and each of these wants is a fresh source of
power to the Government, which is alone able to satisfy them. Whilst
the sphere of the administration of justice by the courts of law
remains unaltered, that of the executive Government is variable and
constantly expands with civilisation itself.[31]
The Revolution which was approaching, and which had already begun
to agitate the mind of the whole French people, suggested to them a
multitude of new ideas, which the central power of the Government
could alone realise. The Revolution developed that power before it
overthrew it, and the agents of the Government underwent the same
process of improvement as everything else. This fact becomes singularly
apparent from the study of the old administrative archives. The
Comptroller-General and the Intendant of 1780 no longer resemble the
Comptroller-General and the Intendant of 1740; the administration was
already transformed, the agents were the same, but they were impelled
by a different spirit. In proportion as it became more minute and more
comprehensive, it also became more regular and more scientific. It
became more temperate as its ascendency became universal; it oppressed
less, it directed more.
The first outbreak of the Revolution destroyed this grand institution
of the monarchy; but it was restored in 1800. It was not, as has
so often been said, the principles of 1789 which triumphed at that
time and ever since in the public administration of France, but, on
the contrary, the principles of the administration anterior to the
Revolution, which then resumed their authority and have since retained
it.
If I am asked how this fragment of the state of society anterior to the
Revolution could thus be transplanted in its entirety, and incorporated
into the new state of society which had sprung up, I answer that if the
principle of centralisation did not perish in the Revolution, it was
because that principle was itself the precursor and the commencement of
the Revolution; and I add that when a people has destroyed Aristocracy
in its social constitution, that people is sliding by its own weight
into centralisation. Much less exertion is then required to drive it
down that declivity than to hold it back. Amongst such a people all
powers tend naturally to unity, and it is only by great ingenuity
that they can still be kept separate. The democratic Revolution
which destroyed so many of the institutions of the French monarchy,
served therefore to consolidate the centralised administration, and
centralisation seemed so naturally to find its place in the society
which the Revolution had formed that it might easily be taken for its
offspring.
FOOTNOTES:
[30] See Note XXIV., Traces in Canada of Centralisation of the old
French Monarchy.
[31] See Note XXV., Example of the Intervention of the Council.