If you thought the gilets jaunes were tough, try taking on France’s educated élite

It was as if Boris Johnson (Eton and Balliol) had announced that his old school was to become a comprehensive and Oxford was to be merged with a revived North London Polytechnic.

France’s prime minister Edouard Philippe confirmed this week that, as previously promised by his boss, Emmanuel Macron, higher education in France is to be “democratised,” with a far-reaching “agenda for all” and more places at the top universities and colleges for students from disadvantaged and minority backgrounds.

In particular, l’École Nationale d’Administration (ENA), which since 1945 has trained France’s élite to run the country along lines which only its staff and students (known as the Énarques) fully understand, is to be abolished. It will be replaced by an École Nationale Publique, the purpose of which will be to train administrators representing the full range of French society.

Much water will flow under the bridges of the Seine before any of this happens, and the possibility exists that what emerges will be little different from what we have today – a reform in name only that would be entirely consistent with regular French practice.

But if the Government is serious, the shift which has been previewed in a report by Frédéric Thiriez, a top lawyer and himself an Énarque, will be groundbreaking. No longer will the privately-educated sons (and, more recently, daughters) of the French Establishment simply divide out the country’s top jobs in proportion to those who attended this grande école or that one.

Instead, gallic versions of Sir Humphrey will in future be chosen from the ranks of those young people who properly reflect French society, including, one imagines, the progeny of gilets-jaunes and striking railway workers. This will be particularly significant in the forcing house that is ENA.

The irony, of course, is that Macron is the ultimate product of the present system. He was quite the swot as a young man. Educated first at a Jesuit college in his native Amiens (where he was taught drama by the woman who later became his wife), he was later sent by his ambitious parents to the ultra-exclusive Lycée Henri-IV, next to the Panthéon in Paris. Here, he passed his baccalaureate exams with one of the highest aggregate scores in France.

Later, having read philosophy at the rigorously academic University of Nanterre, part of the Académie de Versailles (where he completed a thesis on Machiavelli and Hegel), he took his masters at the legendary Sciences-Po, the Paris Institute of Political Studies, majoring in “Public Guidance and the Economy”.

Finally – the icing on a cake of which Boris could only dream –  he won a place at ENA, going on in rapid succession to be a top fonctionnaire at the Finance ministry, an investment banker with Rothchild’s, a government minister and, at the age of 39, President of France.

For such a man to pull up the ladder behind him is either a statement of principle or an admission that, in the twenty-first century, France needs to draw on a much wider range of talent if it is to remain competitive in an increasingly global economy. Probably it is both. All of the institutions listed above, along with other such bodies governing the legal profession, regional government, the police and the armed forces, are highly selective in nature, demanding evidence of keen intelligence and the ability to learn. But they also cater overwhelmingly to the professional and upper middle class echelons of society, who, having sent their children to the best schools from the age of seven, can afford the high fees (as much as £26,000 a year) and associated living costs.

The dilemma for Macron and his advisers will be to not throw out the baby with the bath water. If young men and women prove themselves to be highly intelligent, with the necessary knowledge and skills to ensure the smooth running of the state (and, to a considerable degree, its business and finance sectors), why waste time worrying about who they are and where they came from? Just be glad they exist.

The problem is that 90 per cent of the French population have little or no access to the corridors of power and, in addition to a general dislike of the rich, blame the grandes écoles and bloated institutions like ENA for the fact they are being left behind. There are, needless to say, scholarships that are open to even the poorest. Every year, students enter ENA who have grown up in the banlieues of Paris and Marseille or the former mining towns of the Far North or immigrant communities of the Deep South.

But they are few and far between. Most Énarques, like Macron, or Edouard Philippe, or, indeed, Frédéric Thiriez (the son of an industrialist married to a composer), are the progeny of “good families”. They are often the children of lawyers, teachers or businessmen, who have risen smoothly through the system and acquired the bright, if sometimes brittle, patina of leadership. They will not give up their power and influence without a fight.

Macron, who is often characterised as the President for the Rich, knows this. But he is also aware that he has to do something to assuage the simmering anger and resentment of the working class, both metropolitan and provincial, who between them have done much to undermine his intended programme of far-reaching economic reform.

Will he follow through on the rhetoric and actually make it significantly easier for the sons and daughters of ordinary citizens to attend top schools and universities? Or will he merely tinker with the words on the front gates, expanding the intake so that, for example, 80 per cent of the places at ENA no longer go to those with parents who are either alumni or in other ways pillars of the Establishment?

It is too early to say. A revolutionary approach to the historically indulged educational sector could do much to repair the President’s damaged reputation as a champion for all of France. But it would also mean taking on one of Europe’s most entrenched élites.

Machiavelli, whose father was a leading lawyer, and Hegel, the son of a high government official, would have much to say on the subject. Unfortunately, neither man is currently available.