Construire le mérite dans la fonction publique d’État : l’exemple de la Culture (1880–1980)

Abstract

Merit-based procedures for evaluating and grading civil servants in the French central government have often been studied from the angle of circulations of ideas or practices between the public and private sectors or toward foreign organizations. Less attention has been given to the internal origins of procedures for assessing the work of civil servants. This article focuses on the procedures gradually worked out to evaluate civil servants in the French Ministry of Culture. Light is shed on the difficulties of keeping the Republic's promise to base merit only a difference in talent alone. How to measure a civil servant's work? Are qualifications evaluated while seeing to it that as many government employees as possible receive promotions? This focus on procedures, imagined or actually used, for grading, evaluating and promoting the personnel in museums shows that these processes follow a timing and modality that vary depending on the level in the hierarchy. The evaluation process, however, does wield ties between socio-occupational groups that all else separates. Practices for measuring the work done by these civil servants existed before the neomanagerial objection to the bureaucratic system's rules and regulations in the 1960s. The French way of evaluating merit is not simply an importation of Anglo-Saxon managerial methods.