PALGRAVE STUDIES IN POLITICAL HISTORY Prefects and Governors in Nineteenth-century Europe Towards a Comparative History of Provincial Senior Officials Edited by Pierre Karila-Cohen Palgrave Studies in Political History Series Editors Henk te Velde Leiden University Leiden, The Netherlands Maartje Janse Leiden University Leiden, The Netherlands Hagen Schulz-Forberg Aarhus University Aarhus, Denmark The contested nature of legitimacy lies at the heart of modern politics. A continuous tension can be found between the public, demanding to be properly represented, and their representatives, who have their own responsibilities along with their own rules and culture. Political history needs to address this contestation by looking at politics as a broad and yet entangled field rather than as something confined to institutions and poli- ticians only. As political history thus widens into a more integrated study of politics in general, historians are investigating democracy, ideology, civil society, the welfare state, the diverse expressions of opposition, and many other key elements of modern political legitimacy from fresh perspectives. Parliamentary history has begun to study the way rhetoric, culture and media shape representation, while a new social history of politics is uncov- ering the strategies of popular meetings and political organizations to influence the political system. Palgrave Studies in Political History analyzes the changing forms and functions of political institutions, movements and actors, as well as the normative orders within which they navigate. Its ambition is to publish monographs, edited volumes and Pivots exploring both political institu- tions and political life at large, and the interaction between the two. The premise of the series is that the two mutually define each other on local, national, transnational, and even global levels. Pierre Karila-Cohen Editor Prefects and Governors in Nineteenth-century Europe Towards a Comparative History of Provincial Senior Officials Editor Pierre Karila-Cohen Rennes 2 University Rennes, France Palgrave Studies in Political History ISBN 978-3-030-91613-8 ISBN 978-3-030-91614-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91614-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland A cknowledgment This book is the result of a scientific meeting held at the University of Rennes 2 in October 2015. Neither the meeting itself nor the translations of certain texts would have been possible without the funding I received as a member of the Institut Universitaire de France. The IHEMI (Institut des Hautes Etudes du Ministère de l’Intérieur) also made it possible to finance certain translations, for which I am very grateful. I would like to thank all the contributors to this book, without whom this undertaking would not have been possible, as well as the translators who worked on this manuscript, Adrian Morfee, Luncida Byatt, and Christine Knight. I am also very grateful to Henk Te Velde for welcoming this manuscript into the series “Palgrave Studies in Political History”. v c ontents 1 For a European History of Prefects and Governors: Administrative Action and State-Building in the Nineteenth Century 1 Pierre Karila-Cohen 2 Russian Governors, Governors General, and Viceroys (1700–1855) 41 John LeDonne 3 From Gouverneur to Statthalter: The Highest Government Officials in the Lands of the Austrian Monarchy 77 Waltraud Heindl 4 The Positions of Oberpräsident, Regierungspräsident, and Landrat in Nineteenth-Century Prussian Administration: What We know and Current Enquiry 107 Marie-Bénédicte Vincent 5 Prefects, Governors, and Commissioners of the King in the Netherlands, c. 1800–1900 141 Martijn van der Burg vii viii CONTENTS 6 French Prefects and Authority in Nineteenth- Century France: Current Knowledge and Research Perspectives 167 Pierre Karila-Cohen and Gildas Tanguy 7 The Italian Prefect from Napoleon to the Early Twentieth Century 197 Livio Antonielli 8 Civil Governors in Nineteenth-century Spain: Centralisation, Politicisation, and Militarisation 227 Manel Risques Corbella 9 Government Without Prefects. Did the UK Offer an Alternative Model? 255 Joanna Innes 10 General Conclusion 291 Pierre Karila-Cohen Author Index 299 Subject Index 303 n c otes on ontributors Livio Antonielli was a Professor in Early Modern History and History of Political Institutions at the Universities of Milano and Messina (now retired). His areas of research include the study of Italian institutions dur- ing the Napoleonic era in relation to political elites in government and the police force and forms of territorial control between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. He has founded the Centre for studies on police his- tory and territorial control (CEPOC), which to date has overseen the publication of 36 volumes on these themes. He is author of I prefetti dell’Italia napoleonica (Bologna, 1983). Waltraud Heindl (retired) Professor for history at the University of Vienna, former director of the East and Southeast European Institute. She studied history, German literature, and history of arts at the Universities of Vienna and Fribourg/CH. She was Guest professor at the Universities of Innsbruck and Fribourg, fellow of Wilson Center/Washington D.C. and of the Collegium Budapest. She published numerous works on the history of bureaucracy and administration. Her main books are Bürokratie und Beamte in Österreich I: Gehorsame Rebellen 1780–1848 (Böhlau, Wien/ Köln/Weimar, 1991) and II: Josephinische Mandarine 1848–1914 (Böhlau, Wien/Köln/Weimar 2013). Joanna Innes is Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford (now retired). She was a tutorial fellow of Somerville College, Oxford 1982–2018, and is now a senior research fellow. She has written numerous books and articles on English, Scottish, and Irish domestic government during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, most notably a ix x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS monograph, Inferior Politics: Social Problems and Social Policies in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2009). She also leads an international col- laborative project on the process of re-imagining the ancient word “democracy” for modern use, in Europe and both Americas, in the later eighteenth and earlier part of the nineteenth century. Pierre  Karila-Cohen is Professor of Contemporary History at the Rennes 2 University, member of the laboratory TemporA and honorary member of the Institut Universitaire de France (IUF). He chairs the scien- tific committee of the Département d’histoire préfectorale et du ministère de l’Intérieur (IHEMI). His book L’État des esprits (2008), together with several articles, examines the ways in which préfets enquired about “public opinion” at the request of various ministries in order to produce political assessments of the départements placed under their care. His latest book, Monsieur le Préfet. Incarner l’État dans la France du XIXe siècle (2021), looks at what he calls “prefectoral charisma”, that is to say the work these senior government officials performed to represent the state and the efforts they had to conduct to charm the local populations so as to win the affection for the regime they served. All of these may be described as works in the historical ethnology of the state and its servants, considered in the light of their practices and interactions with populations. John LeDonne has been associated for over thirty-five years with Harvard University, where he is now senior research associate. He is known as one of the best specialists in Russian administration in the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century. His major works are Ruling Russia. Politics and Administration in the Age of Absolutism 1762–1796 (1984; reprint 2014); Absolutism and Ruling Class: The Formation of the Russian Political Order, 1700–1825 (1991, winner of the Vucinich Prize, 1992); The Russian Empire and the World 1700–1917. The Geopolitics of Expansion and Containment (1997); The Grand Strategy of the Russian Empire 1650–1831 (2004, Turkish translation, Istanbul, 2016); and Forging a Unitary State. Russia’s Management of the Eurasian Space (2020, recipi- ent of the Marc Raeff Prize 2020 and the prize for best work in World History from the Association of American Publishers, 2021). He is now working on a monograph titled Great River Basins and Strategic Options in Russian Foreign Policy. Manel Risques Corbella was Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Barcelona (UB) and a member of CEDID-Centre for Studies on Dictatorships & Democracies (now retired). He has participated in