Fifteen years ago this spring, students at France’s elite postgraduate civil-service college were preparing to celebrate their graduation. Behind them lay the Alsatian city of Strasbourg, its beer halls, and two years of intense study at the Ecole Nationale d’Administration (ena). Ahead stood fast-track jobs in the parquet-floored corridors of power in Paris, and the guarantee of brilliant careers. As the top-ranked graduating student stepped towards the front of the amphitheatre, however, she handed the astonished director a 20-page report, written by pupils and entitled “ena: the urgency of reform”. Among its signatories was a fellow graduating student with a shock of unkempt hair, Emmanuel Macron.
The student rebel, it seems, has turned into the presidential revolutionary. On April 25th, in response to the gilets jaunes (yellow jackets) protesters and their rage against the out-of-touch elite, Mr Macron announced the abolition of ena. “Makeshift repairs”, the president declared, would not do: “If you keep the same structures, habits are just too strong.” It was the most controversial and spectacular of all the announcements made to mark the end of his months-long “great national debate”. At a stroke, Mr Macron gave in to a populist demand, and sent both his own alma mater and a symbol of modern France to the guillotine.
All countries select a governing elite. Six of the 13 post-war American presidents attended either Harvard or Yale. Ten of the 14 post-war British prime ministers graduated from Oxford. But France takes the principle to extremes. Though its annual intake is a minute 80 postgraduate students (compared with around 2,000 undergraduates for Harvard and around 3,000 for Oxford), ena has supplied the country with four of its eight Fifth-Republic presidents, including Mr Macron, and eight of its 22 prime ministers, including the current one, Edouard Philippe. Today énarques, as its graduates are known, run the French central bank, the finance ministry, the presidential office, the Republican party, the external intelligence service, the constitutional council, the state railways and a raft of top French private-sector companies.
1. Ivy League payments and entitlements cost taxpayers $41.59 billion over a six-year period (FY2010-FY2015). This is equivalent to $120,000 in government monies, subsidies, & special tax treatment per undergraduate student, or $6.93 billion per year.