Emmanuel Macron has announced the closure of the École Nationale d’Administration, the elite French finishing school for the country’s leaders, where he himself studied, reports The Guardian.
Known as ENA, the grande école has been the hothouse for France’s top civil service and a pathway to power in the public and private sectors. Four French presidents, including Macron, have passed through its doors as have dozens of ministers and business leaders.
Founded by General Charles de Gaulle in October 1945 with the idea of breaking the upper-class hold over France’s higher echelons, ending nepotism and making the civil service more democratic, it has instead become a byword for an establishment elite and been accused by critics of encouraging groupthink.
Macron told a gathering of state officials, including ambassadors, prefects – and a number of énarques, as graduates of the school are called – that it would be replaced by a new establishment called the Institute for Public Service (ISP). However, potential students would still be required to pass a tough entrance exam and follow a specific study syllabus.
Another change will mean that the top-ranking graduates will no longer have automatic access to the best administrative jobs until they have shown their worth in other official roles.
“The field is the first skill expected of state administrators,” an Elysée source said. “This decision puts an end to the job-for-life that has been the case until now.“Civil servants will not be permanently assigned to a function, a body or a sector.”
Another objective, the Elysée source said, is to make the senior civil service more attractive. “The state must continue to attract the best,” the source said.
The school was originally located in Paris but moved to Strasbourg, though it keeps a campus in the capital.
While the number of students from privileged families was 45% in the 1950s and 60s, this had risen to about 70% between 2005 and 2014, while those from working-class families fell to about 6%.
Macron’s decision to shut ENA was reportedly prompted by the gilets jaunes protest movement that began in 2018 and was sparked by a sense that the country’s leaders were out of touch with ordinary French people, especially those living outside the cities.