Assessment as innovation: The case of the French administration in the nineteenth century

In the light of the sources we have examined, the continuous expansion of assessment may be broken down into three periods.

The first ran from the 1790s to the 1830s. This saw a still-limited number of categories of functionaries being brought under the remit of assessment at this early stage. First among these were customs personnel, who, as Jean Clinquart has shown, were subject to periodic reports as of the revolutionary period.

Jean Clinquart: L’administration des douanes en France sous la Révolution, Neuilly-sur-Seine 1978, p. 178.

A second period stands out distinctly: 1840 to 1860. This twenty-year period clearly saw a decisive expansion in the practice of assessment within the French administration, judging by the number of categories for which it was imposed one after the other. The most emblematic reform during these years of upheaval, and the best known, is certainly that decided by the minister of justice, Eugène Rouher, in 1850.

Royer: La notation; Jean-Claude Farcy: Les sources judiciaires de l’époque contemporaine, xix^e–xx^e siècles, Rosny-sous-Bois 2007, pp. 97–100.

During the third and final period, starting in around 1860, assessment spread even further. It now included intermediary and upper-ranking state bureaucrats who had not been part of the great wave of 1840–1860. It arguably reached managerial staff working for the Postes, who were assessed from at least 1868.

Search conducted in AN, sub-series F⁹⁰.

Admittedly this expansion was not limitless. A certain number of professions escaped assessment throughout the century, starting with senior bureaucrats whose career files hardly ever contain any assessment sheets.

Information about councilors of state provided by Chloé Gaboriaux; search conducted in sub-series F¹⁷ of the AN for inspectors general of public instruction.

Let us now look at the content of these assessments, as evidenced in the countless assessment sheets held in the archives. Two elements strike the observer immediately: first, the sheer breadth of information requested about the individual being assessed, second, the fact that the sections to be filled in are largely identical from one branch to the other, be it for a forest warden, subprefect, magistrate, or rural postman.

The individual report that procurators general and chief justices had to fill out about magistrates of all orders provides, in its updated and expanded 1871 version, is an excellent overview of all the questions asked, with few exceptions, in all the assessment sheets of the various types of functionary at the turn of the century. It is exceptionally long, running to sixty-three items, excluding those relating to surname and first name, conferring it with sufficiently broad scope to cover all the aspects raised in other branches, for most of which the report sheets tended to be more succinct. Many of the questions about magistrates related to their attributes, ranging from straightforward identification of individuals to their main personality traits as well as their social position. There are fifteen questions about their ancestry, marriage, »social position and fortune«, health, character, and private behavior. The information elicited clearly places this portrait of magistrates within the world of notables typical of a Balzac novel, as illustrated, inter alia, by questions on »the state or profession of the father«, the »name and profession of the father-in-law«, and the »social position or fortune resulting from marriage«. A second set of questions relates to more strictly professional aspects, if we restrict for the moment the adjective’s meaning to its current limited sense. It thus lists the diplomas and »titles« obtained by the individual being assessed, his »instruction« in various domains, any distinctions and blames accrued, his attitude to work – »exactness, zeal«, »activity« – and, lastly, his skills, ranging from his »sagacity« and »judgement« to his capacities in various situations in which he performs his job. Lastly, a third type of question – sixteen in all – relates to the magistrate’s prior, present, and future career: his career path prior to holding his current post, any interruptions in service, and, lastly, his desires for his future career. The eminently practical dimension of these assessment documents, relating to personnel management by the ministry, is clearly apparent here, going into such details, in certain reports, as the number of years to be taken into account in calculating retirement pensions. The person, job, and career thus form the general framework, for magistrates and all servants of state, structuring the individual reports and assorted documents which proliferated in France during the nineteenth century.

Studying the items used in a dozen other administrative professions, differing both in terms of their field of activity and hierarchical position, corroborates that this tripartite structure of person/job/career applied everywhere, though with a few changes in emphasis at times. Looking simply at the words used reveals very few differences from one document to another. The same items, formulated in the same way, are found nearly everywhere – from character, to »zeal«, to »health«, to »relations with superiors/authorities and the public«, to »style«, and »entitlement to promotion«. Still, this does not preclude certain dissimilarities. Some of these are quantitative. Thus, while the number of items tends to hover around thirty or so, this ranges from seven for diplomatic personnel to sixty-three, as we have seen, for magistrates. Such discrepancies may relate to only one part of the form. The professional section in the assessment sheet used for high school teachers is very similar to that for magistrates, except that the thing under appraisal is what happens in class, rather than in court. Yet many of the questions about the individual person have been expunged: the traditional questions about »health«, »character«, and »private behavior« are still present, but there is no trace of the questions about marriage, number of children, social position, and so on. No doubt this results from the particular means of assessing teachers, largely during specific inspections and not as an ongoing process. However, we should not read too much into discrepancies in the number of questions: first, because differences in the number of sections arise partly from certain of these assessment sheets amalgamating items listed separately in others; second, because the final observations in the reports, along with many other documents in the career file, always provide scope for going into greater detail about a given aspect of the assessment, particularly for matters unrelated or only partly related to the job. In fact, the only real oddity worth noting is the extreme brevity of the questionnaire for diplomatic personnel, in comparison to all other professions, no doubt due to this corps’ resistance to any technical or formal appraisal: it is well known how fiercely it opposed competitive recruitment processes during the Third Republic.

Isabelle Dasque: Les diplomates de la République (1871–1914), Paris 2020, pp. 308–320.

More significant, however, are the presence of items specific to each administrative profession. The documents are often precise about the specific skills and tasks of each job. Assessors are thus asked to appraise the capacity of subagents working in the Postes to correctly use apparatus with dials; equipment with mirrors; Morse, Hugues, and Meyer telegraphs; and so on. Enquiries are made into the skills of forest wardens in matters relating to »sowing and planting«, »training coppices«, »timber marking«, and so on. For labor inspectors, the assessments sought to ascertain the surface area of the section covered, the number of communes therein, the number of establishments to be inspected, the number of visits actually carried out, and whether they kept their archives and documents correctly. As for army officers, the assessments sought to establish their »aptitudes« for »campaigning«, for »maneuvering in mountainous country«, and »on horseback«, as well as the job held at the time of the assessment. However, one would search in vain for any such precise questions on the tasks carried out by agents voyers or sub-inspectors in the Enregistrement [one of the various tax sub-administrations]: here, all that counted was their attitude to work – their »zeal« and »activity« – on which there was a whole battery of questions, as if discipline were of greater import here than any specific skills.

The mirror held up to each profession thus shows slight variations, together at times with an increase in the number of sections as the century progressed. Nevertheless, the overall image, applicable to all branches, of the ›good functionary‹ would appear to have been established at a very early stage, as embodied in the shared conceptions in these assessment documents. They are a practical echo of the reflections of Vivien in his »Études administratives«, the three first editions of which (1845, 1852, and 1859) coincided exactly with the great expansion in assessment. Although this practitioner and theoretician of the state does not directly tackle the question of assessment in this fundamental work, the way it is composed highlights the same points as those emphasized in the existing or subsequent assessment documents. In the chapters about »Functionaries’ duties to the state« and »Functionaries’ duties to the public, to each other, and in their private life«, the councilor of state devotes paragraphs to probity, appropriate behavior, assiduity, zeal, and obedience. These pages sketch out and above all construct the same image of functionaries as that which emerges from the assessment documents: that of an individual whose qualities or defects transcend the limits of the private and professional. We could summarize this by describing the conception as holistic: each part – here, the detail of the individual’s attributes and skills – is associated with the person, which is what is really under appraisal. Such a conception precludes enquiring solely into professional aptitude, which, though part of the final portrait, is in no way the full picture. Above and beyond the definition of what a functionary is, this conception is profoundly anchored in its century – the century when, in succession, physiognomy, phrenology, and criminology related the moral to the physical, and saw in a person’s features, the form of their skull, or details of their face the signs of their morality and aptitudes. It is also the century when novelists, first the realists, then the naturalists, carefully described the slightest details of their characters’ appearance and past experiences to build up a complete psychological portrait backed up by every perceptible detail.

Let us add that, apart from the Postes, assessment was not quantitative, as far as we know, before the 1900s. It was exclusively a matter of words. Attempts to introduce quantitative assessment were indeed made in the early nineteenth century, for example, in prefectural administration,

Karila-Cohen: Monsieur le Préfet, pp. 40–42.

So it is clear that the phenomenon of assessment not only expanded, and became general within the institution, but also introduced a fundamental change in how the administration operated. It is thus permissible to define it as an innovation in its own right and to conceive of it in such light.

It should first be noted that there was never any plan to generalize assessment across the French administration as a whole. The idea of extending it across the entire function publique arose during the Belle Époque, when the specific question of whether to communicate assessment reports to the person concerned was first raised.

Thuillier: Pour une histoire de la notation, pp. 454–468.

Apart from this case, any (very incomplete) efforts to align assessment procedures seemingly occurred at the reduced scale of the ministerial department, no doubt partly because the services specifically devoted to personnel were small. It is thus certainly no coincidence that assessment was introduced in the Mines administration only a few months after having been introduced in the Ponts. While high-ranking civil servants certainly played a key role in driving dissemination, and while they thereby figure among the »innovative functionaries« discussed by Jacques Chevallier,

Jacques Chevallier: Science administrative, Paris 1994, p. 571.

Thus, the primary realm where assessment was disseminated was within ministries. No doubt they were not totally hermetic: first, because men moved from one ministry to another and could thus carry innovation with them, as we may suppose happened in the case of Rouher and his entourage; second, because assessment forms were sometimes collated and published, once again facilitating the circulation of knowledge about, if not the actual practice of, assessment.

For example, A. Beaunis: Répertoire des modèles de l’administration des contributions indirectes avec l’analyse des instructions qui s’y rapportent, Poitiers 1895.

The exceptional fortune of assessment throughout the nineteenth century was based on an emergent administrative ideology. A prime place to track this is the thirty or so ministerial circulars directly about assessment that we have identified. Admittedly, many are highly technical and so unfortunately not at all forthcoming. Others have more to say, explaining the reasons for acting in such manner. In these cases, it is always the administration’s need to know its personnel that is put forward as an argument. In 1833, the conservators of forests were informed that assessments »help determine the Administration’s opinion on all its agents«.

Circular of 26. 12. 1833, quoted in: Baudrillart: Recueil chronologique, p. 672.

The wish to organize all promotions as carefully as possible was grounded in two reasons. The first was a moral reason, as it were: It was a matter of treating functionaries fairly, as evidenced for example in an 1813 circular for the Douanes, which presents fair assessment as the surest way of ridding the administration of »indiscreet requests« seeking to unduly favor such and such an officer.

Circular of 17. 10. 1813, quoted in: Lois et règlements, vol. 7, p. 329.

In addition to the goal of making the management of administrative personnel more effective, we need to add the wish of successive regimes to ensure their functionaries’ obedience. Our interpretation here needs to tilt towards Michel Foucault’s analyses concerning matters of discipline. In 1850, the great circular introducing assessment in the ranks of the magistracy shows, for instance, the totalizing, virtually absolutist ambition of this undertaking, which seems to be yet another expression of some panoptic utopia.

Michel Foucault: Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison, Paris 1975.

These phenomena played out over the lengthy course of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, there is reason to believe that the state’s attention to the competence and obedience of its officials intensified in the years 1830–1850: first, because it was over these decades that the project of rationally reforming the administration won the support of liberal elites;

Françoise Dreyfus: L’invention de la bureaucratie. Servir l’État en France, en Grande-Bretagne et aux États-Unis (xviii^e–xx^e siècles), Paris 2000, p. 171.

The concept of appropriation, though long neglected in the scholarship, is particularly useful for understanding how an innovation, particularly a complex one, gradually takes root in an organization, in this case the public administration. The concept is doubly useful in that it endows change with temporality, and directs our focus towards the actors, here the functionaries, called upon to give meaning to the change in which they were taking part.

Roxana Ologeanu-Taddei et al.: La capacité d’appropriation, une capacité organisationnelle immatérielle négligée dans l’adoption des systèmes d’information et de gestion, in: Innovations 47 (2015), pp. 79–100, at p. 81.

Filling out assessment sheets produces, by definition, two positions: an assessor and an assessed. The assessor is, in the first instance, the person referred to in many circulars as the ›immediate superior‹, that is, the person placed one rank above: the prefect for the subprefect, the divisional labor inspector for the departmental inspector, the head of office for a ministry employee, and so on. The title of ›immediate superior‹ – sometimes appearing in this minimal form, as was the case for the Postes – was very often written across the bottom of the form, followed by a blank space for final observations and signature. It should be noted that in many cases the immediate superior was not the sole assessor, the opinion of his own superior often being required, sometimes even that of his superior’s superior, thus exhibiting on the sheet itself the administrative hierarchy from base to apex. At times, the addition or comparison of opinions could acquire a most convoluted complexion. As of 1890, no fewer than four different appraisers expressed their view of high school teachers: alongside and after the inspector general, the only true assessor in the precise meaning of the term, came the board inspector, the rector of the board, and the headmaster.

Le Guennec: Être professeur, p. 163.

It would clearly be wrong to state that all assessors visibly behaved in all cases in perfectly rationalized manner when writing down their opinions of their subordinates. On reading these assessment documents, one is struck by the severity, the brutality even, of the opinions expressed by the hierarchical superiors. »Always slow and stilted«, one may read about one quartermaster in 1896;

Francis Garcia: La carrière des intendants militaires de 1870 à 1914, unpublished PhD thesis, Université Bordeaux Montaigne 2015, p. 800.

This notwithstanding, most of the reports and assorted documents written in the early nineteenth century display a real concern for reaching an exact analysis of the skills of the functionary being assessed. Most prefects filled out the forms with great seriousness of purpose, seeking which of their subordinates could constitute the »functionary of tomorrow«, to use an expression in widespread use in several branches. This manner of weighing things up, of assessing areas of skill, of pointing out limits, at times indicating that these might be overcome with time, is to be found in the vast majority of the reports on the various administrative professions. In short, assessing was a matter of looking to the future: of gauging and evaluating, including the long term, the usefulness of a given functionary within the organization in the light of a certain number of its shared norms. The need for the ›immediate superior‹ to be impartial was, for that matter, a point the circulars often insisted upon with great solemnity. As early as 1813 one may read in an instruction to the Douanes that the »head of administration« should be visited by »religious fear« in carrying out this »duty«, for »the impression of the judgements hazarded may follow an employee throughout his career« and thus ultimately turn out to be irreparable.

Circular of 17. 10. 1813, quoted in: Lois et règlements, tome 7, p. 330.

The corollary of this interiorization was that of affecting the functionary under assessment, which is admittedly harder to ascertain. We should point out straightaway that most functionaries knew the criteria by which they were judged, since in many branches they had to fill out the most factual part of the form themselves (date and place of birth, previous positions, et cetera), and could thus easily read the printed sections their hierarchical superiors had to fill out about them, though before these were completed. The date at which functionaries obtained partial access to the form admittedly differed widely from one sector to another. Thus it was only in 1905 that agents in the Travaux Publics [the highways service] were asked to »write in person their wishes [to change position] on their reports, together with factual information about their diplomas, service abroad, family position, et cetera«,

Aux travaux publics, in: Le Journal, 8. 6. 1905, p. 2.

Of course, this observation does not imply that all functionaries attached great importance to the assessments made of them, if simply because, in an administrative organization that was still far from resembling a Weberian ideal-type, many were not strictly speaking embarked on a career. The different perceptions and reactions to assessment is a topic of reflection in its own right, which would require factoring in the major differences in terms of social and cultural capital in the French administration of the period. These reservations notwithstanding, it would seem that a certain number of functionaries did care about their assessments, given that these exerted a certain influence over their potential for promotion.

Le Guennec: Être professeur, pp. 101f.

Insofar as many functionaries very frequently found themselves in the position of assessing or being assessed, one may clearly argue that assessment, as a practice, played a decisive role in producing the nineteenth-century French functionary. We may say that the state was, in a way, invented via this fundamental innovation. The list of required skills set out, administration by administration, decade after decade, on everyday forms, carved out – or helped carve out – a particular mental and institutional landscape in which French functionaries had to operate. As of a very early stage, a concern with skill and properly executed work was an overarching value for state service in France, and above all formed part of the relationship with the public. One can understand nothing of the complex phenomenon by which the French state extended its hold over society in the nineteenth century without factoring in the constant reminder to functionaries of the need to serve the public, either via direct questions on »relations with the public«, or by checking that the work of the state was being correctly carried out by its servants. These documents were a modest tool in an immense conquest: that of a territory to be developed, and that of a population to be acclimatized to the in turn repressive, in turn protective presence of the state. For turning »peasants into Frenchmen«,

Eugen Weber: Peasants into Frenchmen. The modernization of rural France, 1870–1914, London 1977.