Development of public administration

IN FRANCE

Ø 1) Read this text and do task 1 for text 5.3.

(1) A fundamental change in the status of the civil servant came with the French Revolution of 1789. The fall of the ancient regime and the creation of a republic meant that the civil servant was no longer the servant of the king but rather of the state – even though rule by a king or emperor was soon brought back and continued in France for nearly another century. The civil servant became an instrument of public power, not the agent of a person. This led to the growth of public law concerned with the organization, duties, and rights of “the public power,” of which civil servants were the principal component. Thus, administrative law was added to the ordered structure of the Prussian bureaucracy.

(2) This bureaucratization was greatly fostered by Napoleon I, who built up a new civil service marked not only by some of the features of military organization but also by the principles of rationality, logic, and universality that were the inheritance of the Enlightenment. There was a clear chain of command and a firmly established hierarchy of officials, with duties clearly divided between authorities. Authority was depersonalized and went to the office and not to the official – although Napoleon insisted that each official should be responsible for action taken in the name of his office.

(3) France was divided into new territorial units: departements, arrondissements, and communes. In each of these, state civil servants had a general responsibility for maintaining public order, health, and morality. They were all linked in a chain to the national Ministry of the Interior. A special school, the Ecole Polytechnique, was set up to provide the state with technical specialists in both the military and the civil fields – particularly in general administration. In the field of general administration, the Conseil d’Etat (“Council of State”), descended from the old Conseil du Roi (“Council of the King”), imposed an intellectual and judicial authority over the rest of the civil service. As the first major European administrative court, it became the creator of a new type of administrative jurisprudence. The prestige of the new French administrative organization and the logical arrangement of its internal structure prompted many other European countries to copy its principal features. And the expansion of the French Empire spread many of its features across the world.

(4) However, in France under the Third Republic (1870-1940), considerable political interference in some branches of the civil service developed. But the work of the civil services was not always efficient because of difficult bureaucratic practices and because of unenergetic personnel. The system was reformed in 1946. It involved changing the administrative structure of the central government, centralizing personnel selection, creating a special ministry for civil service affairs, and setting up a special school, the Ecole National d’Administration.

Ø 2) Name the paragraphs which give information on:

a) a new division of the country into territorial units

b) the principles of the new civil service system in France

c) the often inefficient work of French civil service

d) a well-known French educational institution for civil servants

e) the change in the role of French civil servants

f) reforms in French civil service

g) the appearance of administrative law in France

h) the input of Napoleon I into the development of French civil service

i) the imitation of many features of French civil service by other European countries.

Ø 3) Write an annotation to the text.

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