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In the early nineteenth century, the Habsburg Empire had to reinvent itself in the face of substantial challenges, including a profound transformation of its social base and a massive territorial consolidation. This article focuses on the development of the Empire’s central administration around a corpus of bourgeois civil servants that replaced the ramified and diverse administrative heritage of the Ancien Régime, and whose authority was based notably on its statistical prowess. This article seeks to retrace the development of this new administrative body that expanded massively over a century, while highlighting the obstacles to a statistical approach.