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XXIX-2 | 2014
Réintégrer les fonctionnaires. L’« après-épuration » en Europe, XIXe-XXe siècles

Reinstating Civil Servants. The "Post-Purge" in Europe, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
186 pages
ISBN 978-2-7132-2437-9

This thematic issue relates to the reinstatement of the civil servant after a political purge in Europe at the 19th and the 20th century. Crossing the political, institutional and social history, the analysis of this phenomenon helps the historian to penetrate at the heart of the functioning and the internal specificity of the administrations. It puts in perspective the various experiences of reinstatements of civil servant, which are occurred after a consecutive purge at a political change at 19th and the 20th century. The measurement of this phenomenon, still little treated by historiography, carries all at the same time on the history of the normative and legislative devices active in these processes (what procedures make it possible to the civil servant to be reinstated in a post and to remake a career after a strong political rupture?) and on the quantification of their effects: how and with which tools can we estimate the width of these phenomena of rehabilitations and the rhythm of the returns of the civil servant, in a chronology shifted compared to the aforementioned rupture? If the wish to attach to the power incipient a new and devoted staff seems to be the expected administrative translation of the new political course, the analyzed experiments show that purges often moderate, are even neutralized in their effects by pragmatic considerations linked with shortage of the formed agents, with the need for the new leaders to have competences acquired by the administration, and if necessary, to cope with the challenges of a reconstruction after a war.

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