The Bureaucrat as Proconsul: The Restoration Prefect and the Police Générale

Abstract

On December 14, 1821 the rebelliously faithful partisans of Louis XVIII, quand meme, finally assumed the office to which their uncontaminated past and heavenly justice entitled them. The power that had at last been gathered into the hands of an ultra ministry resided most of all in the apparatus of the centralized administrative state so often criticized by its new masters. This paper will examine the role and functions of the prefect as the most important local police official and political agent of the ministry at a time when the national administrative machine was operated with authentic Napoleonic rigor by former advocates of decentralization and local autonomies.