A Prosopographical Survey of the High Civil Service Corps of the Ministries in the Hungarian Part of the Dual Monarchy

Abstract

Cet article est une étude de fond d’un point abordé dans ma thèse, à savoir les modalités de reconversion des élites administratives hongroises au tournant du XIX e siècle – élites traditionnelles par excellence – en élite méritocratique battant le fer de la modernité. Le rapport entre professionnalisation et embourgeoisement est à cette occasion interrogé, de façon à apporter un éclairage quantitatif à ces questions. Ainsi, la carrière des 709 hauts fonctionnaires en poste dans les neufs ministères hongrois est mise en regard de leur parcours académique et de leur statut social hérité, de façon à mesurer l’influence du titre universitaire et du titre de noblesse sur la rapidité de l’avancement. On constate alors d’une part la persistance des mécanismes traditionnels dans le recrutement et le système de promotion, qui continue dans une certaine mesure à favoriser l’élite historique au détriment des bourgeois non-titrés, mais aussi d’autre part un investissement croissant de ces mêmes fonctionnaires nobles dans le diplôme universitaire. Avec une mesure fine de ces deux seules variables, la complexité de la reconversion des élites administratives apparaît donc dans toute son ambiguïté. Ce This essay offers some preliminary results of an on-going prosopographic study of the High Civil Service Corps in the central ministries of Budapest 1 in the period 1890–1910, with special interest in the ambivalent change in the Hungarian governing elite. At this time, ministerial Konzeptsbeamte, judicially trained civil servants, are at the head of an expanding central administration, which is gradually overtaking the duties of the counties and municipalities, by active centralization politics and homogenization of the different levels of administration. A modern and efficient central bureaucracy, far from being backward, 2 is emerging in Budapest, based on a more than hundred-year-old tradition of Josephinism perpetuated through the dicasteria … and yet, nobility is still ruling the state administration. Thereby the High Civil Service Corps embodies par excellence the general trend that is reshaping Hungarian society, the conversion of a traditional feudal elite into a modern one based on the Leistungsprinzip and on competency is certified by a diploma. But it illustrates as well the limits of this conversion taking place. This paper proposes a quantitative approach to try to measure to what extent social status nevertheless remained critical to constituting this new modern elite, even as it is defined somewhat differently than the older one. Indeed, the older estates society, where birth and rank were decisive, evolves into a meritocratic Leistungsgesellschaft but with interesting remnants of feudal forms in the emerging social order, that can be apprehended through the ministry personnel. Konzeptsbeamte of the ministries may have no direct interaction with the civil society, contrary to judges (see Klečacký in this volume), provincial or regional administrators (see Pál, Pokludová, and Wullschleger in this volume), and of course local civil officials (teachers, postal or railway personnel, etc.); still, as Gary B. Cohen phrased it, 3 they constitute the “public face of the state” and as such, deserve a special attention. Together with the dynasty and the army, state bureaucracy represents the very pillar of the monarchy. High civil servants illustrate this portion of the population that, apart from civil society,