How France’s academic elites keep their grip on the reins of power
Almost three decades ago, when John Major was Britain’s prime minister, I was struggling with the introduction to my first book The Oxbridge Conspiracy, which, as its name suggests, was an aggressive study of the power and reach of England’s two ancient universities. Feeling the need to show that things were different in the world beyond, I noted that no other country, not even France, with its its École nationale d’administration (ENA) and its grandes écoles, had so unyielding an elitist base.
I was wrong. My attention was drawn recently to an opinion piece in Le Figaro by François-Xavier Bellamy, a conservative member of the European Parliament, whose life and achievements had somehow passed me by. I looked him up on Wikipedia to discover that, having been prepared by the Lycée-Henry IV, one of the two most prestigious sixth-form colleges in France, Bellamy went on to study at l’École normale-supérieure, from which he emerged as an agrégé in philosophy in 2008.
Yes, I hear you cry, we have heard of énarques (graduates of ENA), but what exactly is an agrégé? To be honest, I had only vaguely heard of them, imagining them to be like masons, perhaps, or recipients of the academic equivalent of the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award. As it turns out, I should have paid more attention.
An agrégé, I have since learned, is one who has earned the equivalent of a master’s degree in teaching his or her subject from a top-flight university following years of intensive study. But it is so much more than that. Those who have been awarded their agrégation – the majority of them, it so happens, from “good family,” with extensive social and professional connections – are set up for life. Having enjoyed one of the finest educations that France can provide, they are then offered the most sought-after teaching jobs in the country as well as the right to moonlight at élite grandes-écoles without having to engage in the grubby business of research.
The revolving door that allows top people to move seamlessly from one role to another, from teaching, to government, to the board room, never stops turning. Énarques and agrégés, between them, exist wherever power and influence are to be found in France. Not only do the latter dominate the upper levels of French education, which at least has a certain logic to it, they are also prominent in the highest echelons of the civil service and have held ministerial positions in every government since the formation of the Fifth Republic. In addition, many of the têtes-qui-parlent (as my wife refers to those who serve up the debate in French television’s many talking shops) are agrégés, as are a good proportion of those who opine daily on the editorial pages of the national press.
Playing god’s advocate for a moment, I should acknowledge the argument used to justify the veneration in which agrégés and their ilk are held, which is that they are demonstrably hard-working and bright. They may have attended the best schools in the country and been taught by the best teachers, but the competition to get into the various programmes is stiff and at no stage does the pace slacken.
That said, those who manage to enroll and stay the course generally find that few obstacles are subsequently placed in their path. The French, at all levels of society, readily defer to those they presume to be intellectuals. The fact that most of those to whom they doff their caps merely hold the fort, rarely venturing out to attempt anything new or radical, is apparently not the point. Jean-Paul Sartre was an agrégé, so was Simone de Beauvoir, so was President Georges Pompidou, and so, today, are the finance minister, Bruno Le Maire, and Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics. So we’re lucky to have them – right? Wrong.
The plain truth is, élites have not served France well over the last thirty years. Just as in the UK the products of Eton and Oxbridge have presided over a confused and confusing Britain, so the grand alumni of France, educated to within an inch of their lives, have turned out, overall, to be no more than they first appear: gifted talkers, well read, good for nothing in particular.
Where my wife and I live, outside a village in central Brittany, there are no agrégés. The local secondary school is staffed by teachers who, for the most part, were born locally and earned their qualifications at regional universities. Very few of their pupils would dare aspire to a grande école, still less an école normale supérieure, most of whose students come from families (to borrow a French real estate term) de standing, possessing both an intimate knowledge of how the system works and the means to exploit it.
An indication of how hard it is – and how rare – to be admitted to one of France’s topmost seats of learning is the fact that those who sit the entrance exams, or concours, do so only after two or more years of special tuition in schools that offer classes préparatoire aux grandes écoles. Try telling that to a farmer’s son or the daughter of a supermarket worker.
Which brings me to the third strand of France’s educational élite: the normaliens. There is a brutal irony in the description of those who attend the grandest of grande écoles as “normal,” when what in fact is normal is to attend the local secondary school until the age of 16 and then to either find a job or enter an apprenticeship. Of those, some two-and-a-half million in number, who attend what in America would be termed “state” universities (or in Britain a generation ago, “redbricks”) most go on to be everyday teachers, engineers, technicians, civil servants, office managers, bank clerks, tax inspectors and estate agents.
If it all worked as planned, so that at every level of activity France was to the fore, it would be difficult to come up with more than a quasi-marxist critique of the system. But the French these days are running hard to stand still. Only a small number of what I would call state-school graduates ever reach the highest rungs of their professional ladder, and of these – fortunately for the economy – many are in start-ups, where ladders are not part of the structure. Those at the top are sure they are right, yet nervous; those in the middle are kicking down at the ones below; at the bottom, there is a mix of anger, fear and distrust.
President Macron, the product of not one, but two grandes écoles (ENA and Sciences Po), appeared to have embarked on much-needed change when last April he announced what he said was “the most important reform of the senior civil service” since 1945. ENA, he revealed, was to be closed, replaced by a new foundation, the Public Service Institute, with a broader, more democratic mandate. Only later was it disclosed that the ENA “brand” would be retained and that the campus would remain in the same place – Strasbourg – with the same teachers in charge. The only real difference, as far as can be judged, is that more places will be offered in future to applicants from ethnic minorities and other disadvantaged backgrounds.
Supporters of Éric Zemmour, the firebrand right-winger slated to stand against Macron in this year’s presidential elections, might suppose that their hero – a North African Jew raised in the working-class suburbs north of Paris – would have no time for élites. In fact, Zemmour – upwardly mobile from the age of seven – graduated, like Macron, at Sciences Po and, having twice, to his chagrin, failed to gain admission to ENA, ended up, years later, as a member of its admissions committee. He is also, almost needless to say, agrégé.