The Bricks and Mortar of Revolutionary Administration

Abstract

This article investigates office space during the French Revolution. It argues that material conditions played an important role in configuring the post-Revolutionary state and its relationship to the ‘public sphere’. In the 1790s, ministry employees moved from Versailles to Paris, from serving individual aristocrats to serving the Nation, from a state of operative obscurity to one of contentious publicity. Although an ideal regulation of space in new unified ministry buildings would invite the public in and make government transparent (preventing a return to the Old Regime), Ministers had to balance this imperative with practical operational and financial concerns. By the Empire, ministries were consciously constructing antechambers to keep petitioners waiting. Meanwhile, employees also engineered their physical environment to protect their jobs, constructing corridors and makeshift walls. The disjuncture between the aims and the outcomes of 1790s administrative reform developed out of the physical impossibility of making ‘transparent’ bureaucracy work.