A fundamental change in the status of the civil servant came about as a result of the French Revolution of 1789. The fall of the ancien régime and the creation of a republic meant that the civil servant was seen as the servant no longer of the king but rather of the state—even though rule by a king or emperor was soon brought back and continued in France for nearly another century. The civil servant became an instrument of public power, not the agent of a person. This depersonalization of the state encouraged a rapid growth in the field of public law concerned with the organization, duties, and rights of “the public power,” of which civil servants were the principal component. To the ordered structure of the Prussian bureaucracy there began to be added the logical development of administrative law.

This bureaucratization was greatly fostered by Napoleon I, who built up a new civil service marked not only by some of the features of military organization but also by the principles of rationality, logic, and universality that were the inheritance of the Enlightenment. There was a clear chain of command and a firmly established hierarchy of officials, with duties clearly apportioned between authorities. Authority was depersonalized and went to the office and not the official—although Napoleon insisted that each official should be responsible for action taken in the name of his office. France was divided into new territorial units: départements, arrondissements, and communes. In each of these, state civil servants had a general responsibility for maintaining public order, health, and morality. They were all linked in a chain to the national Ministry of the Interior. A special school, the École Polytechnique, was set up to provide the state with technical specialists in both the military and the civil fields—particularly in general administration. In the field of general administration, the Conseil d’État (“Council of State”), descended from the old Conseil du Roi (“Council of the King”), imposed an intellectual as well as a judicial authority over the rest of the civil service; as the first major European administrative court, it became the creator of a new type of administrative jurisprudence. The prestige of the new French administrative organization and the logical arrangement of its internal structure prompted many other European countries to copy its principal features. And the expansion of the French Empire spread many of its features across the world.

In France under the Third Republic (1870–1940) there developed, however, considerable political interference in some branches of the civil service; and much of its vitality was diminished as its bureaucratic practices tended to become unwieldy and its personnel lethargic. Not until 1946 was the system reformed—which involved overhauling the administrative structure of the central government, centralizing personnel selection, creating a special ministry for civil service affairs, and setting up a special school, the École National d’Administration, for the training of senior civil servants. This school in particular has attracted worldwide attention for its ability to instill in its graduates both specialist and generalist skills.

The British Empire

The first attempts by Great Britain to create efficient administrative machinery arose from its commitment to govern India and to avoid in that country the periodic scandals that marked some of the rule of the East India Company. Robert Clive, appointed governor of Bengal for the second time in 1764, introduced a code of practice that prohibited servants of the company from trading on their own account or accepting gifts from native traders. Subsequent governors strengthened the ban, compensating for the loss of benefits by substantially increasing salaries, introducing promotion by seniority, and reorganizing the higher echelons of administration. Recruitment was carried on by the company in London, and after 1813 entrants to the civil service had to study the history, language, and laws of India for a period of four terms at Haileybury College, England, and to obtain a certificate of good conduct before taking up their posts. As a result of advocacy by Thomas Macaulay, secretary to the board of control, examination rather than patronage was adopted as a recruitment method. New rules from 1833 stipulated that four candidates had to be nominated for each vacancy and that they were to compete with one another in “an examination in such branches of knowledge and by such examinations as the Board of the Company shall direct.”

There was further criticism of the way India was run, however, and in 1853 another legislative reform of the administration was proposed. The experience of the Indian Civil Service influenced the foundation of the modern civil service in the United Kingdom. A report was published in 1854 on the organization of the Permanent Civil Service in Britain. Its principal author, Sir Charles Trevelyan, had acquired a reputation for searching out corruption in the Indian Civil Service during 14 years of service there. The report of 1854 recommended the abolition of patronage and recruitment by open competitive examination. It further recommended (1) the establishment of an autonomous semijudicial body of civil service commissioners to ensure the proper administration of recruitment to official posts, (2) the division of the work of the civil service into intellectual and routine work, the two sets of offices to have separate forms of recruitment, and (3) the selection of higher civil servants more decidedly on the basis of general intellectual attainment than specialized knowledge. The Civil Service Commission was established in 1855, and during the next 30 years patronage was gradually eliminated. The two original classes were increased to four, and some specialized branches were amalgamated to become the Scientific Civil Service. The new civil service managed to attract to its senior levels highly capable, discreet, and self-effacing university graduates. Graduates of Oxford and Cambridge became—and remain to the present—especially prominent in the ranks of senior civil servants in Britain.

The United States

In the United States patronage remained the norm for considerably longer than in Britain. From the early days of the federation two principles were firmly held. First, there was antipathy to the notion of a cadre of permanent civil servants; President Jackson clearly dismissed this notion of a highly professional caste when he said, in 1829, that “the duties of all public officers are . . . so plain and simple that men of intelligence may readily qualify themselves for their performance.” As a consequence, he said, “I can not but believe that more is lost by the long continuance of men in office than is generally to be gained by their experience. No one man has any more intrinsic right to official station than another.” The second principle—that as far as possible public office should be elective—followed more or less automatically. But because this principle could not be practically applied to the subordinate levels of administration, there developed the “spoils system,” in which public office became a perquisite of political victory, being widely used to reward political support. This system was susceptible to persistent, blatant, and ultimately unacceptable degrees of inefficiency, corruption, and partisanship. These particular faults were strongly felt after the Civil War (1861–65), during the period of rapid economic and social development. Under considerable pressure, the federal government accepted a restricted principle of entry by competitive open examination, and in 1883 the U.S. Civil Service Commission was established to control entry to office in the federal service. The work of the commission was mainly restricted to the lower grades of employment, and it was not until the first 20 years of the 20th century that the merit system of recruitment was expanded to cover half the posts in the federal service. After that period the commission’s control gradually increased, mainly over the lower, middle, and managerial offices in the federal service. After 1978 the functions of the commission were divided between the Office of Personnel Management and the Merit Systems Protection Board. Principal policy-making posts remain outside the jurisdiction of these two bodies, being filled instead by presidential nomination.

The development of civil service in U.S. local government varied among states, counties, and cities. The adoption of a merit system can usually be dated from the early 20th century, during the reform period of the muckrakers. In some states the merit system became well established, with a central personnel office that included a civil service commission or board similar to the federal model. At the other extreme there was simply a central personnel office headed by a single personnel director with no advisory board. At the municipal level, by the mid-20th century, most large cities in the United States had developed some sort of merit system; in smaller cities, however, merit systems were correspondingly less common. In the counties, the majority of which were rural and had relatively few public employees, formally established merit systems were rare.