Maximillian Diemer

A Meritocracy Before Meritocracy? Professionalisation and the Practice of Merit in Eighteenth-Century France 

How was merit first defined, measured, and rewarded before “meritocracy” existed as a concept? This project locates the origins of meritocratic practice in eighteenth-century state and royal service, beginning with a transnational collective biography of military officers in French service (c. 1693-1789). At its core lies a prosopographical database of all 492 Grands-Croix and Commandeurs of the ordre royal et militaire de Saint-Louis, founded in 1693 as the first chivalric order to admit officers on the basis of merit alone, compiled from manuscripts at the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Service Historique de la Défense. With CDH support, the project will transform this dataset into a relational database, apply network analysis to reconstruct the familial and patronage ties linking the order’s members, and produce visualisations mapping promotions against war periods and pension expenditure. The resulting dataset, the first of its kind for the Saint-Louis, will test whether patronage or political conjuncture shaped admissions across the full sample and provide a methodological prototype for investigating the ascendancy of meritocratic practices in the eighteenth century.