Intendant


An intendant was, and sometimes still is, a public official, especially in France, Spain, Portugal, and Latin America. The intendancy system was a centralizing administrative system developed in France. In the War of the Spanish Succession of 1701 to 1714 the French royal House of Bourbon secured its hold on the throne of Spain; it extended a French-style intendancy system to Spain and Portugal - and subsequently worldwide through the Spanish Empire and Portuguese Empire. Regions were divided into districts, each administered by an intendant.
The title continues in use in Spain and in parts of Spanish America for particular government officials.

Development of the system in France

Intendants were royal civil servants in France under the Old Regime. A product of the centralization policies of the French crown, intendants were appointed "commissions," and not purchasable hereditary "offices," which thus prevented the abuse of sales of royal offices and made them more tractable and subservient emissaries of the king. Intendants were sent to supervise and enforce the king's will in the provinces and had jurisdiction over three areas: finances, policing and justice.
Their missions were always temporary, which helped reduce favorable bias toward a province, and were focused on royal inspection. Article 54 of the Code Michau described their functions as "to learn about all crimes, misdemeanors and financial misdealings committed by our officials and of other things concerning our service and the tranquility of our people".
In the 17th and 18th centuries, the intendants were chosen from the noblesse de robe or the upper-bourgeoisie. Generally, they were masters of requests in the Conseil des parties. They were chosen by the Controller-General of Finances who asked the advice of the Secretary of State for War for those who were to be sent in border provinces. They were often young: Charles Alexandre de Calonne became an intendant at the age of 32, Turgot and Louis Bénigne François Berthier de Sauvigny at the age of 34, and Louis-Urbain-Aubert de Tourny at the age of 40.
A symbol of royal centralization and absolutism, the intendant had numerous adversaries. Those nostalgic for an administration based on noble lineage saw intendants as parvenus and usurpers of noble power. Partisans of a less absolute monarchy called for them to be abolished. Jacques Necker, the only Minister of Finances since 1720 who had not himself been an intendant, accused them of incompetence because of their youth and social aspirations. The cahiers de doléances of 1789 depicted them as over zealous agents of fiscal policies which weighed heavily on the people.
The term intendant was also used for certain positions close to the Controller-General of Finances :
  • intendants of finance
  • intendants of commerce
  • intendants of the sovereign council
In the same way, the term intendant général was used for certain commissioned positions close to the State Secretaries of War and of the Navy.

History

As early as the 15th century, the French kings sent commissioners to the provinces to report on royal and administrative issues and to undertake any necessary action. These agents of the king were recruited from among the masters of requests, the Councillors of State and members of the Parlements or the Court of Accounts. Their mission was always for a specific mandate and lasted for a limited period. Along with these, there were also commissioners sent to the army, in charge of provisioning the army, policing and finances; they would supervise accountants, providers, merchants, and generals, and attend war councils and tribunals for military crimes. Such commissioners are found in Corsica as early as 1553, in Bourges in 1592, in Troyes in 1594, and in Limoges in 1596.
When Henry IV ascended the throne in 1589, one of his prime focuses was to reduce the privileges of the provincial governors who, in theory, represented "the presence of the king in his province" but had, during the civil wars of the early modern period, proven themselves to be highly intractable; these positions had long been held by only the highest ranked noble families in the realm. The Intendants to the provinces —- the term "Intendant" appears around 1620 during the reign of Louis XIII – became an effective tool of regional control.
Under Louis XIII's minister Cardinal Richelieu, with France's entry into the Thirty Years' War in 1635, the Intendants became a permanent institution in France. No longer mere inspectors, their role became one of government administrators. During the Fronde in 1648, the members of Parlement of the Chambre Saint-Louis demanded that the Intendants be suppressed; Mazarin and Anne of Austria gave in to these demands except in the case of border provinces threatened by Spanish or Imperial attack. At the end of the Fronde, the Intendants were reinstated.
When Louis XIV was in power, the Marquis of Louvois, War Secretary between 1677 and 1691, further expanded the power of the provincial intendants. They monitored Louis's refinements of the French military, including the institution of a merit promotion system and a policy of enlistment limited to single men for periods of four years. After 1680, Intendants in France had a permanent position in a fixed region ; their official titles being intendant de justice, police et finances, commissaires départis dans les généralités du royaume pour l'exécution des ordres du roi.
The position of Intendant remained in existence until the French Revolution. The title was maintained thereafter for military officers with responsibility for financial auditing at regimental level and above.
A 2021 study, which used a dataset of 430 intendants from 1640 to 1789, found that less than half of these officials went through the legally-specified training path. The study raised questions about the impersonal nature of these bureaucrats, with evidence indicating that familial and marital ties were factors in appointments, and that appointment duration had wide variability.

Functions

Appointed and revoked by the king and reporting to the Controller-General of Finances, the Intendant in his "généralité" had at his service a small team of secretaries. In the 18th century, the "généralité" was subdivided into "subdelegations" at the head of which was placed a "subdelegate" chosen by the Intendant. In this way, the Intendant was relatively understaffed given his large jurisdiction.

Notable intendants

The French North American colony of New France, which later became the Canadian province of Quebec, also had a senior official called an intendant, who was responsible to the French King. New France's first intendant was Jean Talon, comte d'Orsainville in 1665, and the last one, at the time of the British conquest of Quebec was François Bigot.

Spain and Spanish Empire

Intendants were introduced into Spain and the Spanish Empire during the eighteenth-century Bourbon Reforms. The reforms were designed by the new dynasty to make political administration more efficient and to promote economic, commercial, and fiscal development of their new realms. An intendente was in charge of a Spanish administrative unit, called an intendencia, which could include one or more provinces. The intendente was appointed directly by the Crown and had responsibility to oversee the treasury, the collection of taxes, and corruption practices and to promote agriculture and economic growth in general. With fiscal powers that gave them a say in almost all administrative, ecclesiastical and military matters, intendentes were conceived by the Bourbon kings to be a check on other local officials, just as the intendants had been in France a century earlier. Throughout the 18th century the Bourbons experimented with the powers and duties of the intendants, both in Spain and overseas, so what follows is only a general description of the Spanish intendancy. In any given area at any given time, the duties of the intendant would have been specified by the laws that established that particular intendancy.
The first intendencias were established in Spain after 1711, during the War of the Spanish Succession on the advice of Jean Orry, who had been sent by Louis XIV of France to help his young grandson Philip V set up his new government. The first intendants oversaw the finances of the army and of the territories conquered by the Bourbons, and after the war, they were made permanent. In 1749 an intendancy was established in every province, with the intendant also holding the office of corregidor of the capital city. . District alcaldes mayores or coregidores were subordinated to the provincial intendente-corregidor and assisted him in managing the province and implementing reforms.
As a result of the Seven Years' War an intendancy was set up in Cuba in 1764. The Cuban intendant had oversight of the army's and the royal treasury's finances. After a two years of experimentation with the new office, an intendancy was introduced in Louisiana.
That same year Visitador General José de Gálvez created a plan to set up intendancies in New Spain. The first one was set up in central Mexico in 1786, followed in 1787 by Veracruz, Puebla, Valladolid in Michoacan, Guadalajara, Oaxaca, Guanajuato, Zacatecas, San Luis Potosí, Durango, Sonora, and in 1789 Mérida, the main city in Yucatán. These administrative changes codified existing regional divisions of Center, South, and North.
In 1776 Gálvez, now Minister of the Indies, established an intendancy for all of Venezuela in 1776, and several in the Río de la Plata in 1783. Most of the overseas intendants were assisted by officials who replaced the old corregidores or alcaldes mayores. Initially intendancies were held by a separate person from the viceroy or the governor, but eventually in many places the offices were granted to one person due to conflicts that emerged between these two.
More intendancies were established in Quito, Peru, Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guatemala, more areas of New Spain, Chile and Cuenca. The Revolt of the Comuneros prevented their installation in New Granada.