Excerpt from The Intendant as a Political Agent Under Louis XIV
As one turns the leaves of the voluminous administrative correspondence of the old regime and reads here and there, his first impression is that of prodigious activity amid bewildering diversity and complexity. The pages are crowded with obscure allusions to peculiar local customs; dignitaries of more or less importance appear and disappear; titles and offices multiply to distraction. The student is tempted to believe the old regime a chaos. It is not long, however, before the figure of one administrative officer emerges with tolerable clearness; the intendant seems omnipresent. And yet, when one attempts to give definiteness to his duties, chaos threatens to reign again. There is something vexingly elusive about the intendant. Viewed from one point, he is the submissive creature of the controleur; viewed in another light, he seems to rule as absolutely as the great monarch himself. Whether he is overwhelmed with popular applause in Pau or cursed with virulent fury in Poitou, the old regime is inseparably associated with his name.
The difficulty of putting the intendant"s duties into precise form arises largely from the habit of regarding him as an administrative officer, pure and simple, when it should be borne in mind that the intendant was peculiarly hors de loi. He was bound by no established administrative statutes or regulations; not even his commission was registered in Parlement. To the local authorities he owed no obedience, since local laws and coutumes had crystalized centuries before the intendant became a part of the administrative organism. He received frequent instructions from the king in council and from the ministers, it is true, but in general he was left singularly free to exercise his discretion. Given the ends in view, he was nearly always permitted to choose the means best suited to reach them.
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