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GILLES LEIMDORFER/RAPHO for TIME
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ALMA MATTER: Former students — among them President Jacques Chirac — have criticized ENA for its élitism |
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The End of the Line for ENA? |
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The Ecole Nationale d'Administration once produced France's élite. Not any more. A look at ENA's future — and at those who've taken a different path to power |
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By
NICHOLAS LA QUESNE |
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Posted Sunday, April 14, 2002; 15.05GMT
Here's a little quiz to test your knowledge of French society. What do both front-runners in this year's presidential campaign have in common with the CEOs of many of France's biggest companies? What attribute is shared by the leader of the Socialist Party and the head of the employers' organization? What's the link between two Presidents of the Fifth Republic, six of its last eight Prime Ministers, half the ministers in the current government and the overwhelming majority of France's top civil servants?
The answer: they all went to the same school — France's
Ecole Nationale d'Administration
, or ENA. Ever since it was set up by General de Gaulle in 1945, ENA has been the magic portal through which the country's élite have passed into France's corridors of political and corporate power.
But in recent years, the old ENA magic has been wearing thin. When standing for election in 1995, Jacques Chirac railed repeatedly against "the dictatorship of a technocratic élite" — a thinly-disguised dig at the school he attended from 1957 to 1959. During legislative elections two years later, Chirac's Prime Minister Alain Juppé and current Socialist Finance Minister Laurent Fabius both called for the school's abolition. Needless to say, the two men are ex-students themselves. Between 1995 and 1999, applications for ENA's prestigious external entrance exam declined by 30%. Though the school's administrators insist that's simply a return to the levels of 10 years ago, it's hard not to detect an element of wishful thinking. At the Institute of Political Studies — the elite Paris university known as Sciences-Po that supplies 90% of the external exam's successful candidates — the number of students opting for the program preparing for it has dwindled from 1,000 a decade ago to just 200 today.
ENA has always been much more than just a school to train civil servants. It was the symbol of a system that forged and then governed post-war France. Today — as the country grudgingly comes to terms with the European Union, globalization and the rigors of worldwide economic competition — that system looks like a thing of the past. Is it the end of the line for ENA too?
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