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. ⁽²⁸⁾ No doubt these reports were fairly summary in nature: the model appended to the circular of 24 April 1812 does not even contain a set of assessment criteria, ⁽²⁹⁾ which, strictly speaking, means it falls outside our study. But examination of the archives proves that a certain number of report forms used as of the 1790s and 1800s used two distinct sections for assessing the competence of customs officials, ⁽³⁰⁾ enabling us to assert that customs personnel were indeed assessed as of this period. Although this is exceptionally early, it may be readily explained if we remember that this branch traces its history back to the Ferme Générale [general tax form], which was bureaucratized at an extremely early stage because of the number of people it employed. Other categories followed. In 1811 the first form appeared for sub-prefects, secretaries general, and prefectural councilors. ⁽³¹⁾ This time there is a proper matrix of assessment criteria of over fifteen separate points. Although this form was not rolled out widely over the following years, it strongly shaped the content of those used as of the 1830s, and, in retrospect, was the matrix for the assessment sheets used for prefectural officials through to the Second Empire. The importance of their office, combined with their number, explains why the central state also started assessing police commissioners at an early stage. It is likely that the first report cards about them date from 1817, ⁽³²⁾ which is not surprising given the Bourbon Restoration’s role in professionalizing police careers. Let us finally note that in 1828 it was decided to make assessment obligatory for personnel administering public forests. ⁽³³⁾

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. ⁽³⁴⁾ It provided for establishing individual records, theoretically yearly, for nearly all working magistrates. The circulars of 15 and 18 May 1850 provide a detailed account of the reasons behind this reform, and how to go about implementing it. Such explaining was unhabitual, and no doubt reveals the ministry’s desire to avoid upsetting this corps, who jealously protected their prerogatives and traditions, and to get them to cooperate in a task which, it was admitted, was going to be »considerable« and »arduous«, in Rouher’s words, at least to begin with. ⁽³⁵⁾ Assessment was then rolled out for many other categories of officials. Military officers were included at the turn of the 1850s. ⁽³⁶⁾ As for high school teachers, Manon Le Guennec is no doubt right in suggesting that it was in the mid-1840s that an assessment form appeared for use by inspectors general of public instruction. ⁽³⁷⁾ Broadly, the same chronology applied to primary school inspectors ⁽³⁸⁾ and schoolmasters, whose inspection report acquired what we have described as the specific characteristics of assessment between 1835 and 1862. ⁽³⁹⁾ Staff working at the Contributions directes [direct taxation offices] started to be assessed as of the early 1840s, ⁽⁴⁰⁾ tax collectors as of 1844, ⁽⁴¹⁾ managerial staff working for the Ponts et Chaussées and the Mines [the state service in charge of mining resources] – and engineers, conducteurs [middle-ranking agents, below engineers but above laborers], and gardes-mines [the equivalent of conducteurs] – as of 1856, ⁽⁴²⁾ and so on. It is no exaggeration to speak of a decisive expansion in assessment over the course of these twenty years, which truly were a pivotal phase.

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. ⁽⁴³⁾ It surely encompassed diplomatic staff, apart from heads of mission, whose files only include assessment sheets as of 1880. ⁽⁴⁴⁾ It applied equally to labor inspectors, as a matter of course, one might say, since the corps was only created in 1874, de jure for divisional inspectors and de facto for departmental inspectors. The files examined suggest assessment was initially very irregular in this administration, but soon became methodical, in 1882 for divisional officers, and ten years later for their subordinates, when they all became state officials. ⁽⁴⁵⁾ The years 1860–1914 also saw the expansion of assessment to include subaltern administrative staff. This was admittedly not a wholly new phenomenon, but it increased spectacularly, successively affecting all or some ministry employees, ⁽⁴⁶⁾ postmen, ⁽⁴⁷⁾ gendarmes, ⁽⁴⁸⁾ and even museum wardens. ⁽⁴⁹⁾ Lastly, assessment started to make its way into the ranks of the local administration. This change was partly driven by the state, which, as of the 1870s and 1880s, sought to monitor chief officials working for the octroi [local taxation offices], ⁽⁵⁰⁾ – along with agents voyers of higher rank [agents working for departmental services in charge of local roadways], that is, those in charge of a district or a department, and some cantonal highways agents. ⁽⁵¹⁾ Yet municipalities also took part in this movement, introducing assessment for their particularly numerous octroi personnel. ⁽⁵²⁾

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. ⁽⁵³⁾ At the other end of the scale, certain subaltern staff, such as road menders ⁽⁵⁴⁾ or blue-collar workers in schools, were not assessed either. ⁽⁵⁵⁾ Nor were most of those employed in the départements and communes, including, in this case, mid-ranking staff, such as heads of department in prefectures ⁽⁵⁶⁾ and large city halls. ⁽⁵⁷⁾ This was no doubt because there was very limited scope for promotion, exclusively within the locality, obviating the need to use an especially formal procedure. Lastly, let us add the case of the parish clergy who, as is known, were folded into the embrace of the fonction publique under the Concordat regime. ⁽⁵⁸⁾ We should doubtless not underestimate these limits; but, as may be seen, they were not on the same scale as the transformation of which we are speaking. For the period under study as a whole, this transformation was nothing less than spectacular.

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. ⁽⁶⁰⁾

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, ⁽⁶¹⁾ but they were short lived. Generally, language must have seemed a superior order to numbers, deemed too mechanical for reaching an overall appraisal of a functionary’s worth. In this respect, the assessment of officials was part of the nineteenth-century’s enthusiasm for statistics and predilection for various kinds of survey, seeking to shed light on all aspects of the political and social realms, ⁽⁶²⁾ though it was not affected until a very late stage by the trend over the century towards quantifying many of these descriptions: what was being assessed was a matter of subjective, even nuanced apprehension, which figures cannot communicate, at least not without supplementary explanation. So it was a matter of choosing one’s words and knowing how to vary them. The examples given by Pierre Mickeler of assessment sheets for officials working in one of the tax sub-administrations in the nineteenth century are revealing in this regard. The answers to the question on the »administrative intelligence« of these agents vary, depending upon the date (between 1868 in 1899) and the individual assessed, being judged, to give some examples, as »ordinary«, »slow«, »cultivated«, »developed«, »fairly pronounced«, »open«, »middling«, »keen«, »weakened by alcoholic excess«, or »nebulous«, without forgetting longer formulations such as »understands slowly«, or »serious and penetrating mind, perhaps a little too subtle«. As may be seen, the direct style of these assessments is reminiscent of the art of the epigram: whether in praise or criticism, the word or formula is pithy. If, however, we place all the documents about a given individual end-to-end, we are transported to a different literary genre. These apparently dull administrative lives are now endowed with some of the charm of a novel, what with the passage of time, dashed ambitions, valiant successes, and private joys and misfortunes running through one report to the next. They represent a magnificent resource for a history of administrative emotions.

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. ⁽⁶³⁾ As we have seen, however, assessment was already well established by this time and becoming routine in most sectors of the administration. In any case, it would seem there was little in the way of circulation of assessment norms and practices between ministerial departments. We have found but a single instance of such circulation, which brings us back to the figure of Rouher, mentioned earlier. The circulars of May 1850 introducing assessment for the magistracy date from the period when he was minister for justice, while those instigating it for engineers, conducteurs, and secondary employees in the Ponts et Chaussées in 1856 follows shortly upon his being appointed minister of public works. Since, additionally, the two forms are very similar, we may suppose that having tested assessment with positive results at the ministry of justice, it was then deliberately carried over to the ministry for public works, if not by Eugène Rouher, then at least by a member of his entourage following in his footsteps.

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, ⁽⁶⁴⁾ various indications suggest that innovation did not always flow from the top down. For instance, it was only after having acknowledged that »some conservators« had had the good idea of »drawing up special formulas« about the brigadiers and wardens placed under their authority, that the director-general of the forestry administration decided in 1842 to officialize this measure across all of France. ⁽⁶⁵⁾ Equally, Rouher, in making the case for assessment in his foundational circulars of May 1850, deemed it worth invoking the useful precedent of the assessment of colonial magistrates, a practice attested elsewhere, ⁽⁶⁶⁾ due to which »magistrates in the Indies [… are], in a way, better known than magistrates in the Paris jurisdiction,« as he observed. ⁽⁶⁷⁾ In both cases, the innovation was clearly first tested in the field, sometimes at the initiative of territorial administrators, before the central administration, judging it to have been a success, then decided to ratify and generalize it. Lastly, once a certain stage was reached, the dissemination process was strongly facilitated by the fact that ministerial services could draw on documentary and technical resources, together with experience in assessment. The introduction of assessment for faculty teachers in 1855 shows this in its own way: ⁽⁶⁸⁾ the ministry simply reused the form labeled »confidential information« it had started using some time previously to assess secondary school personnel.

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. ⁽⁶⁹⁾ But in all likelihood such circulation only played a secondary role in the dissemination processes under discussion: at most it accelerated them. We thus need to look to other factors to explain why assessment emerged and spread across all ministries, becoming a universal practice. We hold that the roots of this lie in the common concern in different administrations with effectively managing and monitoring their personnel, even though there was no explicit pooling of practices.

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«. ⁽⁷⁰⁾ This undertaking nevertheless pursued more precise objectives explained in various ways. Chief among these was deciding promotions based on criteria that were, or were deemed to be, reliable. This is confirmed in the regulations. In 1812 the director-general of the Douanes stated he had used the »reports« sent to him as the »rule for promotions« of customs officers. ⁽⁷¹⁾ Equally, in 1841, the minister of the interior noted that the »report cards« on police commissioners were essential to »be able to conduct transfers and correctly appreciate the consequences«. ⁽⁷²⁾

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. ⁽⁷³⁾ However, the main reason is once again the effectiveness of public action for, first and foremost, assessment sought to identify capable and incapable agents, to enable the former’s competence to benefit the administrative organization to the greatest extent, while limiting the harm done by the latter’s incompetence as far as possible. This is evidenced by questions in certain forms directly about changes of job: »does he deserve promotion?«, »desired job?«, »job to which he is best suited?«, and so on. As noted earlier, the stakes were particularly important given that many administrative professions continued to be loosely structured. In prefectural administration, for example, the fact that there was no initial training, entry exam, or rules for promotion made it all the more essential to scrutinize individuals’ daily practice to discern their capacities and ascertain whether they performed their tasks correctly. ⁽⁷⁴⁾ This formalization of skills within hierarchies being progressively put in place illustrates Max Weber’s vast portrait of the emergence and consolidation of bureaucracies in Europe of the period. Assessment was undeniably a discreet yet important tool in this »bureaucratization of the bureaucracy«, to use Waltraud Heindl’s excellent phrase. ⁽⁷⁵⁾ Care must be taken, however, not to adopt too narrowly Weberian a view. We need to retain our capacity to apprehend in context any unexpected elements in a particular movement of administrative professionalization, bearing in mind the specific representations of the societies under observation. To return to the example of the prefectural corps, the assessment sheets used covered skills that could be described as techniques – such as administrative knowledge, character, or authority – but also sought to ascertain the relational capacities of sub-prefects, secretaries general, and prefectural councilors, through items about »running the household and giving receptions«, actions by their spouse, the position and consideration they enjoyed within their jurisdiction, and so on. Being capable of holding balls to help bind together the society of notables irrespective of the latter’s political disputes was clearly one of the skills expected of prefects and sub-prefects, a matter scrupulously detailed in the assessment sheets of the latter. Yet the overall pattern of transfers and promotions to enhance rationalization, typical of a bureaucratization process, nevertheless holds.

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. ⁽⁷⁶⁾ It opens as follows: »Nothing is more indispensable for a minister of justice than being fully cognizant of the various titles, services, and aptitudes of all the magistrates at whose head he is placed«. ⁽⁷⁷⁾ It goes on to call for across-the-board surveillance of subordinates by their superiors in order to ferret out the »serious […] mistakes« the former might seek to hide from the latter. This expected obedience took several forms. The first and most obvious dimension in a century when France was rocked by revolution and rapid institutional change was that of functionaries’ political orthodoxy. Despite this, it is rare to find questions on political attitude in what could be described as official assessment sheets. The few exceptions are those for sub-prefects, political officials par excellence, or for employees at the Ministry of the Interior; in both cases, there are questions on »political antecedents« and the »current direction« of the person concerned. However, such questions do not figure in most of the forms devised by the various ministries, departments, and communes. We must not misinterpret this absence. We possess traces of parallel assessments, defined as of 1850 for the magistracy as »a matter of distinct and confidential work«, ⁽⁷⁸⁾ and which, for its part, did apply to nearly all functionaries. This second approach to assessment, centered on functionaries’ political orthodoxy, is germane to our study in that it fulfils the criteria we have fixed: it seeks to establish the value, or at least a certain value of those working for the state; it is repetitive; and it is based on a certain number of items. This course of action, placed under the authority of the prefect, emerged under the Second Empire, ⁽⁷⁹⁾ before then being visibly generalized under the Third Republic. ⁽⁸⁰⁾ Yet political obedience, though important, remained secondary to that seeking to inculcate a system of behavioral and working norms, which ultimately amounted to an attempt to impose discipline on subordinates by hierarchical superiors.

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; ⁽⁸¹⁾ second, because the introduction of universal (male) suffrage in 1848 augmented the political role of state officials, because successive regimes were tempted to draw on them to influence electoral behavior. It is thus understandable that the phenomenon of assessment, as described above, expanded over these decades. But of course, officials themselves had to assume the roles they were thus assigned: it was only under these conditions that assessment could, as it were, invent them.

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. ⁽⁸²⁾ It thus merits being taken seriously. Here, it suggests we should think as concretely as possible about how functionaries used assessment sheets in nineteenth-century France.

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. ⁽⁸³⁾

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; ⁽⁸⁴⁾ »does no work, could serve as an example for those wishing [prefectural] secretary generals to be abolished«, one finds in a report from the early 1890s in which the prefect thoroughly slates his subordinate. ⁽⁸⁵⁾ One could add many examples of such appreciations which seem subjective to say the least, arbitrary to put it more bluntly. It should be appreciated that the severity of the assessment is sometimes reinforced by the ›immediate superior‹ being keenly aware that his opinion on his subordinate will be read by his own superiors or else by people of the same rank as him. In assessments of teachers, to take but one example, the reports sometimes provide the inspector with an ideal opportunity to exhibit their intellectual superiority to the detriment of the teacher being assessed, going over the lesson point by point and adding any omitted references. ⁽⁸⁶⁾ The idea that assessment was at times arbitrary, for that matter, went on to become a crucial element in its being severely questioned and subsequently altered during the Belle Époque, at a time when subaltern officials, who were by now more numerous and better organized, started demanding greater rights, and that the relationship between them and their superiors be recalibrated in their favor.

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. ⁽⁸⁷⁾ What is at stake in this work of assessment is, clearly, the assessor’s interiorization of his »role« – in sociologist Jacques Lagroye’s meaning of the term ⁽⁸⁸⁾ – as the ›immediate superior‹ in the hierarchy, thus the interiorization of his own position within the administrative organization. This hierarchical position was thus built up through practice and by a certain wielding of authority.

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«, ⁽⁸⁹⁾ while in the forestry office the injunction requiring those assessed to fill out the section on their past services, »their income, […] their family position, and postings they might wish for« dates from 1833. ⁽⁹⁰⁾ Nevertheless, the overall direction is clear, and affected an ever-growing number of administrative professions.

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. ⁽⁹¹⁾ One may even go further and hypothesize that the pressure of being assessed contributed in part to progressive improvements in functionaries’ professional performance. Appraisals of conducteurs for the Ponts et Chaussées and of secondary school teachers indicate that the proportion of agents receiving good assessments increased over the course of the century, hence concomitantly with the expansion in the practice of assessment. ⁽⁹²⁾

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«, ⁽⁹³⁾ those serving the state had first to become functionaries.