Abstract EN:

1800-1815. The commissariat was living the last fifteen years of a four-century long existence. This institution on the verge of the Consulat was then rich in the old regime reforms and had been given a text which synthetized all the past experiences by the Directoire. But this legislative and statutory masterpiece didnté thwart embezzlement whatsoever. To attend to what was most urgent, the Premier Consul created what was and is still called "Inspection aux Revues" and thus deprived the Commissariat Officers of the most important historic part of their functions (responsabilities). But what might have seemed to be dismantling of the commissariat yielded rather disappointing results. A close inspection of the Ordonnateurs' personal individual files and the study of the intendants' roles in the Consulat as well as in the military campaigns from the Empire era, let us foresee the real world the administrateurs used to live in. The fictious attractiveness of the commissaire's profession fails in hiding the misery caused by their living conditions and in making people forget their long living execrable reputation of inefficiency and dishonesty. Such a situation had been partly inherited from the former regimes but had been highly maintained by the patent fiasco of the imperial military administration together with the high command duplicity, thus easing their responsability for the soldiers' deprivation and transferring it onto these civil servants.