The politics of authorship
6. It is certain that one of the two of you is a man who seeks to
make trouble {des dégoûtants tracasseries). Is it M.
Costaz? Is it you?®^
In the second year of the dispute, Lansel did not want to hear any more stories of victimisation, of laziness, of exclusion or impugned honour. He had no stomach for fantastic tales of devotion or heroic zeal. Although the whole episode might eventually be put down to a misunderstanding - a silly squabble between two grown men - in the months in which it raged, it had involved two ministers, a Division Chief and a Secretary General as arbiters, and an entire office as spectators. Returning day after day to the same suite of offices where Cochaud first accused his superior of plagiarism, Cochaud and Costaz replayed their enmity again and again in a series of spiteful manoeuvres. Costaz's legendary bellicosity was, in fact, only silenced in 1815, when he was dismissed on full pension and Cochaud replaced him as head of the bureau.
By the end of Cochaud's and Costaz's dispute it was uncertain to at least some of the participants whether it was more about intellectual theft, administrative hierarchy or simply personal vendetta. According to Costaz, his dismissal in 1815 might even have been about politics: he presented himself as the victim of a political purge, and a target of the Restoration Ministry of the Interior.®® Shortly
®® Letter, Cochaud to [Lansel], 29 June 1808, A.N. f/1 bl/11-14 [Cochaud].
®® During the so-called "white terror" at the beginning of the Second Restoration, new ministers, wanting to reward those who had remained faithful to the Bourbon monarchy (or those who purported to have done), tried to purge the offices to
make space for new recruits. On the "reality" of this purge, however, see
after leaving the offices, the Ministry of Interior again accused him of intellectual theft. Unlike Bonnet, Costaz enjoyed the right to appeal against the accusation.
Bringing documents before the Procureur Général of the Royal Court in Paris,
however, he successfully defended himself by arguing that the minutes of the
notices he had drawn up for the Ministerial bulletin in the Moniteur v/ere his own
property. His success in court, however, did not mean he had any'chance of returning to the offices. The paperwork behind his dismissal in 1815 had already calculated his pension: the royal decree, which gave him 3611 francs a year, beginning on the 16 August 1815, blocked him from ever returning to the employ of the Ministry of the Interior. Once his paperwork had been completed, any appeal against either the pension or the calculations which had been made would be fruitless.®^ After the Revolution of 1830, when Costaz tried to return to the offices, he played the political victim: he had published a work on the administration of Agriculture, Commerce, Arts and Manufactures, which was
favourably reviewed across Europe (in particular by the Edinburgh Review) but
ignored by his own government.®® He dismissed the allegations of intellectual theft, claiming that the minutes for the various projects he had drawn up in the
Bureau of Arts and Manufacture would be in his handwriting. Although he
constructed a work history in which he had been a zealous administrator (and his erstwhile colleagues had been political cronies), his petitions - like Bonnet's - were ignored. His personnel file was no longer current: his petitions were filed mutely beside the ministry's final appreciation of his service.
The
état de servicesCochaud’s and Costaz's dispute began as early as 1807, and they continued to work together for another seven years. Costaz’s dismissal might alternatively be
®^ Costaz claimed that he had enjoyed a salary of 12000 fr instead of 10,000, as
recorded in his file. Payments made to the employees. In bonuses, or from
irregular funds, were not included in the pared-down chronicle of their service,
though an essential part of the employees’ yearly salary. Costaz also
complained that his service during the years when the pension levy was not in force was not being counted.
®® Letter, Cochaud to the Minister of Commerce and Public Works, 14 December 1831, A.N. f/1 b1/263/4 [Costaz, Claude Anthelme].
seen, not as an end to his rivalry with Cochaud, but as the beginning of a new battle between him and his old Division Chief, Fauchat (the evidence of which is placed in a different series in the Archives Nationales). Ali that one can take for certain from the stories of Bonnet’s theft and Costaz’s plagiarism is that denunciation and solicitation stoked office anxieties and fed interpersonal uncertainties. One can only imagine the disruption caused in the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs’ Archives or in the Bureau of Arts and Manufactures. In the
former, all members of staff were called to give depositions to the Committee of Inquiry: fear and distrust hung as heavy as the grey, choking dust, when they met
each other among the cartons. Bonnet might have watched his colleagues
huddling in little groups, excluding him; he found no solace in the hollowness of
his famed "republican virtue". Likewise, in the Bureau of Commerce,
expéditionnaires and rédacteurs were caught in the midst of a battle of wills
between their chef and sous-chef. Countermanded orders, torn-up reports,
shouting matches and, eventually, civil action, made life in their office not merely
difficult, but impossible. No one could hold sway. The other sous-chef, D'Epéry,
who might have mediated between his colleagues, had died the year before. Trapped six to eight hours a day in a single suite of rooms, the members of the bureau must surely have been heartily sick of one another. Instead of engaging in solicitation and denunciation as a means of competition, administrators therefore looked for means to demonstrate their zeal and assiduity, exactitude and promptitude, discretion and probity, in written chronicles of their work history, neatly organised and tabulated to avoid the problems caused by telling tales.
While administrators were used to battling uncertainties in their daily tasks, the uncertainties of office politics had a more direct and immediate impact on their lives than the question of pasturage. One might use the same skills to judge
sheep as to judge administrators (if not the same criteria). When the rédacteur
could not choose which sheep were better for which region, he temporised, sending for more information from the provinces to find a categorical basis on which to compare and contrast two breeds. When Costaz and Cochaud were locked in combat, attempts to reconcile them were constantly prejudiced by one
or both men’s twisting the facts of the dispute in their own favour. Lansel’s
denunciation and counter-denunciation, in order to establish, once and for all, the reason behind their dispute. With both men acting the victim, he had instead to
find an more unambiguous means to judge their respective merit. Yet his
categorical questions spawned not one-line answers but an eleven-page memoir: moreover, he had no means to measure their guilt in their reactions, as each man reacted as the victim of the dispute.
The employees themselves suggested imaginative ways to judge their work rate
scientifically. The clerks in enregistrement, for example, devoted their time to
counting the pieces in their register, sending a synopsis to the Minister to legitimise their claims for a bonus. Loiselet, the chief of the registry, declared to DeGérando, the Secretary General, in January 1808, that, if he added the 73,849 letters sent to the Ministry in the previous year to the 39803 responses and decisions dispatched, he and his colleagues had recorded 113,652 different documents in the previous year. The discrepancy between the letters received and the letters sent off, he assured his superior, was not down to an enormous backlog, but due to the work of the ministry in combining information from several documents into a single report. Out of the total, one clerk, Dusieu, Loiselet believed merited particular praise: he had processed 33,582 documents single- handedly. He and his comrade, Pihet, often returned to work in the evenings when their office was running behind.
What worked for the Registry did not work for the Bureau of Agriculture, however,
and a report processed was not always a report processed well. When
necessary, the Secretary-General had little compunction in dealing out punishment on far less "objective" grounds.®^ How could one ever know the
®® Letter, Loiselet to DeGérando, 3 January 1808, A.N. f/1 bl/272/7 [Loiselet, Edouard Ignace Joseph].
Much like historians, who have felt little compunction in judging Bonnet's guilt, or believing Costaz's story of his summary dismissal on grounds of politics, fonctionnaires thought that judging fairly was less important than coming to a conclusion which ended the disruption. When Frédéric Masson criticises Bonnet for his Jacobin fervour, we are told of his crimes in a short few sentences, and
not of his repeated appeals, and of continued efforts to deny them: Le
Département des Affaires Étrangères, pp. 255-256. Masson gives his reader the same information as Talleyrand would have had when sent the Committee of Inquiry’s report. Though Bonnet’s file in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is large, it
"truth" of what happened in the offices? The Ministries needed a way of tracking their employees, a way of aggregating histories of individuals without generating conflict, of writing virtue without the confusion generated by office politics. The Secretary General had no way of preventing the practice of solicitation and denunciation, but he had a means to control it: documents could be hidden away in the archives, "forgotten" by the offices, and hidden from the prying eyes of the public. To let stories tell themselves, "facts" could be re-arranged so that one thing seemed to happened after another.®® While office politics jolted from mini crisis to mini-crisis, work histories, by hiding petitions in personnel files, proceeded slowly and surely towards a definite conclusion.®® The Bureau of Arts and Manufactures’ dispute was finally settled when the Registry drew up
Costaz’s final état de services and when a single piece of paper established his
right to a pension.
Pension legislation, ordered by Napoleon in 1806, and enacted in the offices in December 1807, provided a vehicle for the codification of office chronicles. Until then, the line between pensions and indemnities had never been clear. Under the Old Regime, pensions were awarded to active administrators, as tokens of
contains no concluding report, no neat summation, and no end to his tale. Similarly, when Catherine Kawa writes Costaz’s work history after 1800, noting he was "Chief of bureau... Director of Manufactures in 1812, Secretary of the Society for the Encouragement of National Industry" and that he "claimed to have been "sacrificed on the 15 August 1815, despite his numerous writings on commerce", she lists his achievements in the fashion Costaz himself did, without investigating the rich ambiguity of his claims to be an author: Kawa, "Dictionnaire biographique des employés du ministère de l'intérieur de la première
république", available at ftp://ftp.univ-orleans.fr/pub/kawa. Kawa, surveying
every single employee of the Ministry of Interior between 1792 and 1799, puts herself in the position of a Minister, who needs to know something about everyone, but not too much about any one person.
®® Hayden White, "The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality," in
W.J.T. Mitchell (ed.). On Narrative (Chicago and London: University of Chicago
Press, 1981), p. 3.
®® "The value of narrativity in the representation of real events arises out of a desire to have real events display the coherence, integrity, fullness, and closure of an image of life that is and can only be imaginary": White, "The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality", p. 23.
satisfaction or of esteem, on the word of a particular chief or Minister.^® The revolutionaries judged the amount of these pensions excessive, a contributing factor to the size of the national debt, and one of many symbols of aristocratic
decadence.®^ They re-defined the conditions on which pensions should be
awarded using the same notions of virtue and service to the nation they used to chose their employees. While the first revolutionary decree on pensions in 1790 set down minimum conditions under which pensions would be accorded - an employee had to have served 30 years, to be over 50 years in age, although exceptions would be made for those injured or infirm - those who reached the cut-off point had no guarantee of a cosy retirement. Sufficient funds did not exist to reward all the army officers and administrators who felt justified in making a claim. This state of affairs was a fertile breeding ground for employee petitions. The never-ending stream of hard-luck stories, and shifting definitions of who had served the nation and who had been its enemies, meant that the interpretation of
pension regulations was being constantly re-drafted. After responsibility for
giving such pensions was taken over by the Treasury in Year X (1802), pensions were once again attributed on the basis of the Minister's personal
recommendations. The law of 1806 aimed to put an end to the perceived
injustice of this system, asking for exact information from each employee, and archiving that information for future use. It aimed to establish the virtue of the
Nation's employees in terms of ancienneté, to lay down fixed, uniform, inflexible
criteria to judge those who were worthy of this reward.
The usefulness of new pension regulations for judging employees’ virtue in other circumstances, and for reducing competition within the bureaux, was immediately recognised. The circular dated the 23 September 1807, inviting all Interior- Ministry staff to furnish details of their work history, proceeded:
The desire that I have. Sirs, of knowing all the employees of the ministry, and the necessity of stating their services, whether for promotions, or for retirement pensions to which they might
On Old-Regime pensions see Vida Azimi “Les traitements des agents publics
sous l'Ancien Régime”, Revue historique de droit française et étranger, 67
(1989), pp. 428-468.
have later rights, necessitate these measures ... which I recommend you execute immediately.
In consequence, if you would please forward to me your names and forenames;
The date and place of your birth;
The note of your public services, civil and military, before your admission to the bureaux of the Ministry;
The date of your entry to the bureaux, in what quality, and at what salary;
The indication and the date of your movements in the different grades, and the variations of wages that you will have
experienced {que vous aurez éprouvées).
Please append justificatory documents to support-your deciarations: these wiil be returned to you after verification and
registration. In time, you will receive a certificate stating your
services.
I have the honour of saluting you, Cretet.92
Each member of the administration arrived in the office one morning to find on his desk this same uniform piece of paper. The employee's name written by hand was the oniy sign of his individuality. Otherwise, the same information was
asked of both garçon de bureau and Division chief. Thus this magical piece of
paper seemed to promise an objective system of promotions, on scientific bases, determined by the limited set of criteria for comparison. Merit was to be counted in time, rather than in production. While an employee might dispute whether or not he was responsible for producing a memoir, he could not fabricate years in a
bureau where he had not served. Reference to zeal, to assiduity and to
application were relegated to ancillary remarks on certificates. Some were
pleased with this new state of affairs, others were dismayed, but all were forced
to conform. The Bureau de Comptabilité verified, registered and tabulated the
information given by the empioyees. By the end of December 1807, the
Therefore at the very same time that Costaz was battling with Cochaud, the ministry was drawing up this service record:
Costaz, Claude Anthelme.
Chief of the Bureau for Arts and Manufactures. Born in Champagne (Ain).
He was 36 in October 1807.
Employee at the Direction of military
provisioning, in the Department of Montblanc, from the 21 December 1793 to the 10 October
1794: 9 mths 19 days.
The 13th October of the same year, called to the Commission of Agriculture and the Arts and stayed to the suppression of this Commission in Year IV:
Brumaire Year V, 26 November 1795
Entered the Ministry of the Interior at this time in the quality of sub-chief of the bureau for arts
and manufactures on a salary of ;
increased to 3800f in Year VI, reduced to 3500f in Year VII, increased to 3900f in Pluviôse Year VII, reduced in Year VIII to 2200f. Named on the 1 Germinal Year VIII, the 22 March 1800, Chief of the Bureau for Arts and Manufactures on a salary of 6000f.
On the 31 December 1807, he will have 13 yrs, 2 mths,
served: 18 days.
92