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GILLES LEIMDORFER/RAPHO for TIME
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FRINGE BENEFITS: Graduates of ENA often leave the civil service early for the private sector with its higher salaries and brighter career prospects |
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Posted Sunday, April 14, 2002; 15.05GMT
Back in 1945 when the college was founded, France was still a predominantly rural society that was physically shattered by war and morally crippled by the alacrity with which its state apparatus had collaborated with the Nazi occupiers. ENA was the keystone of the Gaullist renaissance. The school would provide a new administrative backbone, capable of putting the country back on its feet. "After the war, the state modernized the economy in an authoritarian and unilateral way," says Luc Rouban, research director at the Center for the Study of French Politics in Paris. "The Gaullist idea was that the state should be above political parties. Top civil servants used to believe they were in charge of society, because the political class was weak and private entrepreneurs were insignificant."
That belief was reinforced by the French state's dominant role in the economy. By the end of 1948, the SNCF, EDF, Renault, Air France and the main banks and insurance companies were all nationalized. The job prospects for a bright civil servant seemed unlimited. "The importance of public companies in the French economy encouraged civil servants to move into business," explains an ENA graduate who is director of a multi-national investment bank in Paris. "Typically, after 10 or 15 years in public administration they were 'helicoptered' into a top management post at a publicly-owned company before moving on to the private sector."
But the successive privatizations that began in the late 1980s have transformed France's economic landscape. Now the private sector is where the action is. Though ENA graduates remain prominent in French business — look at Louis Schweitzer at Renault, Jean-Marie Messier at Vivendi Universal or Michel Pébereau at BNP Paribas — modern-day alumni are abandoning the civil service ever earlier to head directly for the private sector. "People used to go to ENA for a career, hoping they'd later be made an ambassador and then chairman of a nationalized bank," says Jacques Attali, an economist and ex-president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. "But today, if you stay in the civil service beyond the age of 35, you're a loser. The number of [civil service] jobs available for the over-35s has declined enormously because of privatization and the diminished role of the state."
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