Table Of ContentPALGRAVE 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
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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
