Resumen de Citizens, Subjects and Recruits: Changing Perceptions of State, Administration and Individual in the City of Mainz, 1790–1814
This chapter looks at aspects of the military administration in the city of Mainz between 1790 and 1814. During these years, the city of Mainz oscillated between the Ancien Régime, republicanism and French Napoleonic administration. By looking at administrative practices in the military of the city it can be shown that republican language and symbolism became part of administrative practices after 1797. Civil servants as well as supplicants addressed each other with a vocabulary of equals, thus changing the perception of the state and the individual in everyday political interactions. At the same time other administrative practices, such as listing of recruits and military supplies continued to evolve slowly and kept organizing knowledge about individual soldiers in the tradition of the administrative reforms of the second half of the eighteenth century. These findings are described in Tocquevillian terms: The impact of the French republican communication and revolutionary ideals on Mainz was not sudden, but part of a longer evolution within the administrative practices as places of political communications: Subjects turned into citizens, but nothing prevented the state from going on counting and classifying them as military resources.
