Pulling the purse strings

The financial sectors of state employment occupied a curiously intermediate position between the technical ministries and the more politicised branches of the French administration. Professional expertise was essential – as was acknowledged in the high hurdles set for intending inspecteurs des finances (see pp. 108–9), and in the rather more modest concours established for central-office staff in 1885. Yet political factors could not be entirely ignored in recruitment and promotion. To some extent this was an inevitable result of the growing interventionism of modern European governments – and of the increasing expenditure and revenue-raising that it entailed. The activities of all other ministries were bound by what the Ministry of Finance was prepared to allow; and it would have been only too easy for a financial staff, hostile to government policy, to raise endless pecuniary objections to what the government intended. Conversely a sympathetic staff knew which ministerial backpockets could be raided to realise a cherished government project – or at least they knew how to massage the accounts to minimise criticism.

As in all ministries in this period, there was a tendency for ministers of finance to bring in as directeurs men with whom they had worked before, often in other ministries or contexts – political cronies, whose views and judgement they considered reliable, but with sufficient financial ability to be able to challenge and override the traditional obstructive habits of an arthritic administration, set in its ways and unable to muster enthusiasm for short cuts to short-term political objectives.