Bureaucracy

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BUREAUCRACY

BY

HONORE DE BALZAC



Translated By
Katharine Prescott Wormeley



DEDICATION

To the Comtesse Seraphina San Severino, with the respectful
homage of sincere and deep admiration
De Balzac




BUREAUCRACY



CHAPTER I

THE RABOURDIN HOUSEHOLD

In Paris, where men of thought and study bear a certain likeness to
one another, living as they do in a common centre, you must have met
with several resembling Monsieur Rabourdin, whose acquaintance we are
about to make at a moment when he is head of a bureau in one of our
most important ministries. At this period he was forty years old, with
gray hair of so pleasing a shade that women might at a pinch fall in
love with it for it softened a somewhat melancholy countenance, blue
eyes full of fire, a skin that was still fair, though rather ruddy and
touched here and there with strong red marks; a forehead and nose a la
Louis XV., a serious mouth, a tall figure, thin, or perhaps wasted,
like that of a man just recovering from illness, and finally, a
bearing that was midway between the indolence of a mere idler and the
thoughtfulness of a busy man. If this portrait serves to depict his
character, a sketch of this man's dress will bring it still further
into relief. Rabourdin wore habitually a blue surcoat, a white cravat,
a waistcoat crossed a la Robespierre, black trousers without straps,
gray silk stockings and low shoes. Well-shaved, and with his stomach
warmed by a cup of coffee, he left home at eight in the morning with
the regularity of clock-work, always passing along the same streets on
his way to the ministry: so neat was he, so formal, so starched that
he might have been taken for an Englishman on the road to his embassy.

From these general signs you will readily discern a family man,
harassed by vexations in his own household, worried by annoyances at
the ministry, yet philosopher enough to take life as he found it; an
honest man, loving his country and serving it, not concealing from
himself the obstacles in the way of those who seek to do right;
prudent, because he knew men; exquisitely courteous with women, of
whom he asked nothing,--a man full of acquirements, affable with his
inferiors, holding his equals at great distance, and dignified towards
his superiors. At the epoch of which we write, you would have noticed
in him the coldly resigned air of one who has buried the illusions of
his youth and renounced every secret ambition; you would have
recognized a discouraged, but not disgusted man, one who still clings
to his first projects,--more perhaps to employ his faculties than in
the hope of a doubtful success. He was not decorated with any order,
and always accused himself of weakness for having worn that of the
Fleur-de-lis in the early days of the Restoration.

The life of this man was marked by certain mysterious peculiarities.
He had never known his father; his mother, a woman to whom luxury was
everything, always elegantly dressed, always on pleasure bent, whose
beauty seemed to him miraculous and whom he very seldom saw, left him
little at her death; but she had given him that too common and
incomplete education which produces so much ambition and so little
ability. A few days before his mother's death, when he was just
sixteen, he left the Lycee Napoleon to enter as supernumerary a
government office, where an unknown protector had provided him with a
place. At twenty-two years of age Rabourdin became under-head-clerk;
at twenty-five, head-clerk, or, as it was termed, head of the bureau.
From that day the hand that assisted the young man to start in life
was never felt again in his career, except as to a single
circumstance; it led him, poor and friendless, to the house of a
Monsieur Leprince, formerly an auctioneer, a widower said to be
extremely rich, and father of an only daughter. Xavier Rabourdin fell
desperately in love with Mademoiselle Celestine Leprince, then
seventeen years of age, who had all the matrimonial claims of a dowry
of two hundred thousand francs. Carefully educated by an artistic
mother, who transmitted her own talents to her daughter, this young
lady was fitted to attract distinguished men. Tall, handsome, and
finely-formed, she was a good musician, drew and painted, spoke
several languages, and even knew something of science,--a dangerous
advantage, which requires a woman to avoid carefully all appearance of
pedantry. Blinded by mistaken tenderness, the mother gave the daughter
false ideas as to her probable future; to the maternal eyes a duke or
an ambassador, a marshal of France or a minister of State, could alone
give her Celestine her due place in society. The young lady had,
moreover, the manners, language, and habits of the great world. Her
dress was richer and more elegant than was suitable for an unmarried
girl; a husband could give her nothing more than she now had, except
happiness. Besides all such indulgences, the foolish spoiling of the
mother, who died a year after the girl's marriage, made a husband's
task all the more difficult. What coolness and composure of mind were
needed to rule such a woman! Commonplace suitors held back in fear.
Xavier Rabourdin, without parents and without fortune other than his
situation under government, was proposed to Celestine by her father.
She resisted for a long time; not that she had any personal objection
to her suitor, who was young, handsome, and much in love, but she
shrank from the plain name of Madame Rabourdin. Monsieur Leprince
assured his daughter that Xavier was of the stock that statesmen came
of. Celestine answered that a man named Rabourdin would never be
anything under the government of the Bourbons, etc. Forced back to his
intrenchments, the father made the serious mistake of telling his
daughter that her future husband was certain of becoming Rabourdin "de
something or other" before he reached the age of admission to the
Chamber. Xavier was soon to be appointed Master of petitions, and
general-secretary at his ministry. From these lower steps of the
ladder the young man would certainly rise to the higher ranks of the
administration, possessed of a fortune and a name bequeathed to him in
a certain will of which he, Monsieur Leprince, was cognizant. On this
the marriage took place.

Rabourdin and his wife believed in the mysterious protector to whom
the auctioneer alluded. Led away by such hopes and by the natural
extravagance of happy love, Monsieur and Madame Rabourdin spent nearly
one hundred thousand francs of their capital in the first five years
of married life. By the end of this time Celestine, alarmed at the
non-advancement of her husband, insisted on investing the remaining
hundred thousand francs of her dowry in landed property, which
returned only a slender income; but her future inheritance from her
father would amply repay all present privations with perfect comfort
and ease of life. When the worthy auctioneer saw his son-in-law
disappointed of the hopes they had placed on the nameless protector,
he tried, for the sake of his daughter, to repair the secret loss by
risking part of his fortune in a speculation which had favourable
chances of success. But the poor man became involved in one of the
liquidations of the house of Nucingen, and died of grief, leaving
nothing behind him but a dozen fine pictures which adorned his
daughter's salon, and a few old-fashioned pieces of furniture, which
she put in the garret.

Eight years of fruitless expectation made Madame Rabourdin at last
understand that the paternal protector of her husband must have died,
and that his will, if it ever existed, was lost or destroyed. Two
years before her father's death the place of chief of division, which
became vacant, was given, over her husband's head, to a certain
Monsieur de la Billardiere, related to a deputy of the Right who was
made minister in 1823. It was enough to drive Rabourdin out of the
service; but how could he give up his salary of eight thousand francs
and perquisites, when they constituted three fourths of his income and
his household was accustomed to spend them? Besides, if he had
patience for a few more years he would then be entitled to a pension.
What a fall was this for a woman whose high expectations at the
opening of her life were more or less warranted, and one who was
admitted on all sides to be a superior woman.

Madame Rabourdin had justified the expectations formed of Mademoiselle
Leprince; she possessed the elements of that apparent superiority
which pleases the world; her liberal education enabled her to speak to
every one in his or her own language; her talents were real; she
showed an independent and elevated mind; her conversation charmed as
much by its variety and ease as by the oddness and originality of her
ideas. Such qualities, useful and appropriate in a sovereign or an
ambassadress, were of little service to a household compelled to jog
in the common round. Those who have the gift of speaking well desire
an audience; they like to talk, even if they sometimes weary others.
To satisfy the requirements of her mind Madame Rabourdin took a weekly
reception-day and went a great deal into society to obtain the
consideration her self-love was accustomed to enjoy. Those who know
Parisian life will readily understand how a woman of her temperament
suffered, and was martyrized at heart by the scantiness of her
pecuniary means. No matter what foolish declarations people make about
money, they one and all, if they live in Paris, must grovel before
accounts, do homage to figures, and kiss the forked hoof of the golden
calf. What a problem was hers! twelve thousand francs a year to defray
the costs of a household consisting of father, mother, two children, a
chambermaid and cook, living on the second floor of a house in the rue
Duphot, in an apartment costing two thousand francs a year. Deduct the
dress and the carriage of Madame before you estimate the gross
expenses of the family, for dress precedes everything; then see what
remains for the education of the children (a girl of eight and a boy
of nine, whose maintenance must cost at least two thousand francs
besides) and you will find that Madame Rabourdin could barely afford
to give her husband thirty francs a month. That is the position of
half the husbands in Paris, under penalty of being thought monsters.

Thus it was that this woman who believed herself destined to shine in
the world was condemned to use her mind and her faculties in a sordid
struggle, fighting hand to hand with an account-book. Already,
terrible sacrifice of pride! she had dismissed her man-servant, not
long after the death of her father. Most women grow weary of this
daily struggle; they complain but they usually end by giving up to
fate and taking what comes to them; Celestine's ambition, far from
lessening, only increased through difficulties, and led her, when she
found she could not conquer them, to sweep them aside. To her mind
this complicated tangle of the affairs of life was a Gordian knot
impossible to untie and which genius ought to cut. Far from accepting
the pettiness of middle-class existence, she was angry at the delay
which kept the great things of life from her grasp,--blaming fate as
deceptive. Celestine sincerely believed herself a superior woman.
Perhaps she was right; perhaps she would have been great under great
circumstances; perhaps she was not in her right place. Let us remember
there are as many varieties of woman as there are of man, all of which
society fashions to meet its needs. Now in the social order, as in
Nature's order, there are more young shoots than there are trees, more
spawn than full-grown fish, and many great capacities (Athanase
Granson, for instance) which die withered for want of moisture, like
seeds on stony ground. There are, unquestionably, household women,
accomplished women, ornamental women, women who are exclusively wives,
or mothers, or sweethearts, women purely spiritual or purely material;
just as there are soldiers, artists, artisans, mathematicians, poets,
merchants, men who understand money, or agriculture, or government,
and nothing else. Besides all this, the eccentricity of events leads
to endless cross-purposes; many are called and few are chosen is the
law of earth as of heaven. Madame Rabourdin conceived herself fully
capable of directing a statesman, inspiring an artist, helping an
inventor and pushing his interests, or of devoting her powers to the
financial politics of a Nucingen, and playing a brilliant part in the
great world. Perhaps she was only endeavouring to excuse to her own
mind a hatred for the laundry lists and the duty of overlooking the
housekeeping bills, together with the petty economies and cares of a
small establishment. She was superior only in those things where it
gave her pleasure to be so. Feeling as keenly as she did the thorns of
a position which can only be likened to that of Saint-Laurence on his
grid-iron, is it any wonder that she sometimes cried out? So, in her
paroxysms of thwarted ambition, in the moments when her wounded vanity
gave her terrible shooting pains, Celestine turned upon Xavier
Rabourdin. Was it not her husband's duty to give her a suitable
position in the world? If she were a man she would have had the energy
to make a rapid fortune for the sake of rendering an adored wife
happy! She reproached him for being too honest a man. In the mouth of
some women this accusation is a charge of imbecility. She sketched out
for him certain brilliant plans in which she took no account of the
hindrances imposed by men and things; then, like all women under the
influence of vehement feeling, she became in thought as Machiavellian
as Gondreville, and more unprincipled than Maxime de Trailles. At such
times Celestine's mind took a wide range, and she imagined herself at
the summit of her ideas.

When these fine visions first began Rabourdin, who saw the practical
side, was cool. Celestine, much grieved, thought her husband
narrow-minded, timid, unsympathetic; and she acquired, insensibly, a
wholly false opinion of the companion of her life. In the first place,
she often extinguished him by the brilliancy of her arguments. Her ideas
came to her in flashes, and she sometimes stopped him short when he
began an explanation, because she did not choose to lose the slightest
sparkle of her own mind. From the earliest days of their marriage
Celestine, feeling herself beloved and admired by her husband, treated
him without ceremony; she put herself above conjugal laws and the
rules of private courtesy by expecting love to pardon all her little
wrong-doings; and, as she never in any way corrected herself, she was
always in the ascendant. In such a situation the man holds to the wife
very much the position of a child to a teacher when the latter cannot
or will not recognize that the mind he has ruled in childhood is
becoming mature. Like Madame de Stael, who exclaimed in a room full of
people, addressing, as we may say, a greater man than herself, "Do you
know you have really said something very profound!" Madame Rabourdin
said of her husband: "He certainly has a good deal of sense at times."
Her disparaging opinion of him gradually appeared in her behavior
through almost imperceptible motions. Her attitude and manners
expressed a want of respect. Without being aware of it she injured her
husband in the eyes of others; for in all countries society, before
making up its mind about a man, listens for what his wife thinks of
him, and obtains from her what the Genevese term "pre-advice."

When Rabourdin became aware of the mistakes which love had led him to
commit it was too late,--the groove had been cut; he suffered and was
silent. Like other men in whom sentiments and ideas are of equal
strength, whose souls are noble and their brains well balanced, he was
the defender of his wife before the tribunal of his own judgment; he
told himself that nature doomed her to a disappointed life through his
fault; HIS; she was like a thoroughbred English horse, a racer
harnessed to a cart full of stones; she it was who suffered; and he
blamed himself. His wife, by dint of constant repetition, had
inoculated him with her own belief in herself. Ideas are contagious in
a household; the ninth thermidor, like so many other portentous
events, was the result of female influence. Thus, goaded by
Celestine's ambition, Rabourdin had long considered the means of
satisfying it, though he hid his hopes, so as to spare her the
tortures of uncertainty. The man was firmly resolved to make his way
in the administration by bringing a strong light to bear upon it. He
intended to bring about one of those revolutions which send a man to
the head of either one party or another in society; but being
incapable of so doing in his own interests, he merely pondered useful
thoughts and dreamed of triumphs won for his country by noble means.
His ideas were both generous and ambitious; few officials have not
conceived the like; but among officials as among artists there are
more miscarriages than births; which is tantamount to Buffon's saying
that "Genius is patience."

Placed in a position where he could study French administration and
observe its mechanism, Rabourdin worked in the circle where his
thought revolved, which, we may remark parenthetically, is the secret
of much human accomplishment; and his labor culminated finally in the
invention of a new system for the Civil Service of government. Knowing
the people with whom he had to do, he maintained the machine as it
then worked, so it still works and will continue to work; for
everybody fears to remodel it, though no one, according to Rabourdin,
ought to be unwilling to simplify it. In his opinion, the problem to
be resolved lay in a better use of the same forces. His plan, in its
simplest form, was to revise taxation and lower it in a way that
should not diminish the revenues of the State, and to obtain, from a
budget equal to the budgets which now excite such rabid discussion,
results that should be two-fold greater than the present results. Long
practical experience had taught Rabourdin that perfection is brought
about in all things by changes in the direction of simplicity. To
economize is to simplify. To simplify means to suppress unnecessary
machinery; removals naturally follow. His system, therefore, depended
on the weeding out of officials and the establishment of a new order
of administrative offices. No doubt the hatred which all reformers
incur takes its rise here. Removals required by this perfecting
process, always ill-understood, threaten the well-being of those on
whom a change in their condition is thus forced. What rendered
Rabourdin really great was that he was able to restrain the enthusiasm
that possesses all reformers, and to patiently seek out a slow
evolving medium for all changes so as to avoid shocks, leaving time
and experience to prove the excellence of each reform. The grandeur of
the result anticipated might make us doubt its possibility if we lose
sight of this essential point in our rapid analysis of his system. It
is, therefore, not unimportant to show through his self-communings,
however incomplete they might be, the point of view from which he
looked at the administrative horizon. This tale, which is evolved from
the very heart of the Civil Service, may also serve to show some of
the evils of our present social customs.

Xavier Rabourdin, deeply impressed by the trials and poverty which he
witnessed in the lives of the government clerks, endeavored to
ascertain the cause of their growing deterioration. He found it in
those petty partial revolutions, the eddies, as it were, of the storm
of 1789, which the historians of great social movements neglect to
inquire into, although as a matter of fact it is they which have made
our manners and customs what they are now.

Formerly, under the monarchy, the bureaucratic armies did not exist.
The clerks, few in number, were under the orders of a prime minister
who communicated with the sovereign; thus they directly served the
king. The superiors of these zealous servants were simply called
head-clerks. In those branches of administration which the king did not
himself direct, such for instance as the "fermes" (the public domains
throughout the country on which a revenue was levied), the clerks were
to their superior what the clerks of a business-house are to their
employer; they learned a science which would one day advance them to
prosperity. Thus, all points of the circumference were fastened to the
centre and derived their life from it. The result was devotion and
confidence. Since 1789 the State, call it the Nation if you like, has
replaced the sovereign. Instead of looking directly to the chief
magistrate of this nation, the clerks have become, in spite of our
fine patriotic ideas, the subsidiaries of the government; their
superiors are blown about by the winds of a power called "the
administration," and do not know from day to day where they may be on
the morrow. As the routine of public business must go on, a certain
number of indispensable clerks are kept in their places, though they
hold these places on sufferance, anxious as they are to retain them.
Bureaucracy, a gigantic power set in motion by dwarfs, was generated
in this way. Though Napoleon, by subordinating all things and all men
to his will, retarded for a time the influence of bureaucracy (that
ponderous curtain hung between the service to be done and the man who
orders it), it was permanently organized under the constitutional
government, which was, inevitably, the friend of all mediocrities, the
lover of authentic documents and accounts, and as meddlesome as an old
tradeswoman. Delighted to see the various ministers constantly
struggling against the four hundred petty minds of the Elected of the
Chamber, with their ten or a dozen ambitious and dishonest leaders,
the Civil Service officials hastened to make themselves essential to
the warfare by adding their quota of assistance under the form of
written action; they created a power of inertia and named it "Report."
Let us explain the Report.

When the kings of France took to themselves ministers, which first
happened under Louis XV., they made them render reports on all
important questions, instead of holding, as formerly, grand councils
of state with the nobles. Under the constitutional government, the
ministers of the various departments were insensibly led by their
bureaus to imitate this practice of kings. Their time being taken up
in defending themselves before the two Chambers and the court, they
let themselves be guided by the leading-strings of the Report. Nothing
important was ever brought before the government that a minister did
not say, even when the case was urgent, "I have called for a report."
The Report thus became, both as to the matter concerned and for the
minister himself, the same as a report to the Chamber of Deputies on a
question of laws,--namely, a disquisition in which the reasons for and
against are stated with more or less partiality. No real result is
attained; the minister, like the Chamber, is fully as well prepared
before as after the report is rendered. A determination, in whatever
matter, is reached in an instant. Do what we will, the moment comes
when the decision must be made. The greater the array of reasons for
and against, the less sound will be the judgment. The finest things of
which France can boast have been accomplished without reports and
where decisions were prompt and spontaneous. The dominant law of a
statesman is to apply precise formula to all cases, after the manner
of judges and physicians.

Rabourdin, who said to himself: "A minister should have decision,
should know public affairs, and direct their course," saw "Report"
rampant throughout France, from the colonel to the marshal, from the
commissary of police to the king, from the prefects to the ministers
of state, from the Chamber to the courts. After 1818 everything was
discussed, compared, and weighed, either in speech or writing; public
business took a literary form. France went to ruin in spite of this
array of documents; dissertations stood in place of action; a million
of reports were written every year; bureaucracy was enthroned!
Records, statistics, documents, failing which France would have been
ruined, circumlocution, without which there could be no advance,
increased, multiplied, and grew majestic. From that day forth
bureaucracy used to its own profit the mistrust that stands between
receipts and expenditures; it degraded the administration for the
benefit of the administrators; in short, it spun those lilliputian
threads which have chained France to Parisian centralization,--as if
from 1500 to 1800 France had undertaken nothing for want of thirty
thousand government clerks! In fastening upon public offices, like a
mistletoe on a pear-tree, these officials indemnified themselves
amply, and in the following manner.