The Royal Consultants: The Intendants of France and the Bureaucratic Transition in Pre-modern Europe

Abstract

This article explores the pre-modern French bureaucrats of the intendants as proto-modern bureaucrats. Historical research highlights their role in consolidating the state's authority, but few works provide empirical evidence on the intendants as bureaucrats. My paper fills this gap by constructing a new data set of 430 intendants for the period of their most systematic use from 1640 to 1789. My panel data set comprises the prosopography of nearly universal observations in the period to document evidence on recruitment, promotion, and family backgrounds. My findings indicate that although France relied on the intendants for governance, it did not manage them well as the distribution of service duration and appointment age varies greatly. Dense networks intendants form through kinship and marriage also threaten impersonality. My analysis suggests the difficulty of structuring incentives to follow and implement rules. * I thank seminar participants at Keio University and Kwansei Gakuin University and participants at the 2020 Winter Workshop of the Japan Society for Quantitative Social Science for their constructive feedback to the previous drafts. I also thank Beechan Ohn for his research assistance. Financial support from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (18H05666) is gratefully acknowledged. All errors are mine.