France's new minister for foreign affairs Catherine Colonna will have found some pressing issues in her in-tray after her appointment to the new government last Friday May 20th. One, of course, is the dreadful war in Ukraine. But another is the almost unprecedented internal revolt that is taking place among the ministry's own diplomats from whose ranks Catherine Colonna herself comes, having most recently been French ambassador in London.
The revolt began to take shape on April 17th when the state publication, the Journal Officiel, published decrees implementing a reform of the senior civil service which includes the “extinction” of the bodies at the ministry that contain 'ministers plenipotentiary' – heads of mission - and foreign affairs advisors. This sparked a discreet but very real anger that has shaken the ministry and many of France's diplomatic missions around the world.
As one might expect in a department that is not given to outbursts, the rebellion has been a low-key one. But that has not stopped it plunging the ministry into an atmosphere of doubt, opposition and worry that even a veteran diplomat such as Catherine Colonna will find it tough to dissipate. As evidence of this, six trade unions and a collective of young diplomats are calling for strike action at the ministry on June 2nd.
The publication of these explosive decrees between the two rounds of voting in the French presidential election was judged so unwelcome at the Élysée that it reportedly provoked one of those eruptions of anger from Emmanuel Macron to which his staff have become accustomed. “Please thank the moron who found nothing better to do than abolish this thing six days from the second round. This kind of nonsense drives me nuts,” said the president, according to Le Figaro newspaper.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
On this occasion the head of state was guilty of bad faith as well as bad temper. Or perhaps of a severe case of amnesia. For while the president probably did not himself choose the date when the decree was signed into effect by the prime minister, it was he, Emmanuel Macron, who was the “moron who found nothing better to do than abolish this thing”. The “thing” being the top of the hierarchical pyramid structure at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
It was indeed at the president's own demand that reform of the senior civil service began after his election in 2017. And it was in response to his desire to bring about “extra mobility” and an “opening” at the highest levels of the state for people from civil society or business that the authors of these reforms chose to target the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. These reformers also clearly share the head of state's animosity towards the ministry, which is often referred to by the name of its location in Paris, the Quai d'Orsay.
This animosity grew in 2018 when the president's personal nomination of the writer Philippe Besson to be France's consul general in Los Angeles was thwarted by the ministry. Diplomats had fought a concerted battle to reject a candidate whom in their eyes had just one credential for the post – that of being a friend of the president.
Moreover, the president himself cannot have been that surprised at the contents of the decrees published in April, given that the foreign minister at the time, Jean-Yves Le Drian, had not hidden his own reservations - and those of his ministry – over the reforms.
In fact, complaints about the likely impact of the plans had been doing the rounds of both the ministry itself and its embassies and consulates abroad for months. Since last autumn to be precise, when it became clear that the two most prestigious bodies in the French diplomatic corps – the ministers plenipotentiary and the foreign affairs advisers – were to be abolished in 2023.
There are currently around 900 members of these two bodies out of a total staff of 13,700 at the ministry, and up to this point only they can become ambassadors abroad. They have either been educated at the elite institution the École Nationale d’Administration (ENA), or have passed the very competitive 'cadres d'Orient' public examination whose successful candidates go on to become experts in various languages and cultures, from Arabic to Chinese and Japanese, and from Swahili to Hindi or Urdu.
A diplomat: 'Bureaucrat, mediator and hero'
From January 1st 2023 all these top officials will gradually have to join the new central pool of 'state administrators' that will be home to all officials that have come via the ENA. Under another Macron reform the ENA is itself being abolished, to be replaced by the new Institut National de la Fonction Publique (INFP).
This new civil service central pool will contain prefects, sub-prefects, tax inspectors and other senior administrator officials who work in various ministries. The president's idea is that these senior officials are able to pass from one department to another as required, or move from the state bureaucracy into the private sector or vice versa.
After an intervention by Colonna's predecessor Jean-Yves Le Drian, who opposed the changes without being able to stop them, the 'Orient' competition examination - which provides candidates for a handful of posts each year - will be kept and will still be organised by the ministry itself. Catherine Colonna looks likely to push to keep this concession. It also seems that the ministry will still be able to propose officials for ambassadorships – these appointments will then have to be approved by the Élysée - and will continue to oversee diplomats' career development.
France will thus be the only great Western country without professional diplomats.
But current diplomats wonder how – and by whom – the new “super inter-ministerial HR director” will be chosen. For this is the person whose job it will be to direct and manage the flow of staff “resources” towards any given ministry. And the diplomats also wonder what criteria will be used to make these staffing decisions.
“France will thus be the only great Western country without professional diplomats. A story going back several centuries thus comes to an end. The door is now open to American-style nominations,” tweeted the former permanent representative for France at the United Nations and ex-ambassador to the United States, Gérard Araud, a message re-tweeted by the current French ambassador to Ukraine, Étienne de Poncins.
Around 50 diplomats and senior Quai d'Orsay officials also penned an anonymous article in Le Monde to attack the reform. “By proposing to merge the professions of public service management into one sole body of state administrators, the government is putting at risk the knowledge and talent which make up the richness of public service in our country,” they stated, writing under the collective name 'Théophile Delcassé Group', after the French minister of foreign affairs who was the architect of the Entente Cordiale accord with Britain.
“Civil servants, no more than employees in the private sector, are not interchangeable,” they continued. “Prefects, diplomats, Treasury economists, specialists in civil security, the environment, social security benefits ... we all have capabilities that we cultivate through a passion for our profession and which we put at the service of the community. To deny this reality means compromising the quality of our public service, creating a threat for each of our fellow citizens.”
The Norwegian political scientist and anthropologist Iver Neumann identified three key traits in a diplomat: “Bureaucrat, mediator and hero.” Christian Lequesne, a professor at Sciences Po university, cites the Norwegian at length in his own work 'The Ethnography of Quai d'Orsay' about the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which was published in 2016. “Even if you can debate this complex and ambitious triple identity, it's obvious that you can't just become a diplomat on a whim,” notes one close observer of the ministry. “That's what Delcassé understood a century ago when he imposed the competitive exam as a condition of entering a diplomatic career to put an end to the privilege that the nobility had benefited from up to that point. It's the combined experience of finding things out, of interaction, negotiation, and of confronting crises that makes a diplomat.”
A raft of books published in the last few years by recently-retired diplomats such as Denis Bauchard, Bernard Bajolet, Yves Aubin de la Messuzière, Gérard Araud and Daniel Jouanneau point to a profession where, they all concede, the main learning takes place on the ground, even though most of them were themselves ENA-educated or came through the Orient competitive exam.
They also confirm that a degree of mobility from ministry to ministry already existed before Macron's reform. Denis Bauchard switched from the Treasury to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Bernard Bajolet moved from the Quai d'Orsay to the Ministry of Defence as head of the overseas intelligence agency the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (DGSE). Several other diplomats to whom Mediapart spoke as part of this investigation also said they had worked for two or even three different ministries during their career.
Bad relations with the Foreign Ministry
“Let's be serious,” says an ambassador currently serving abroad and who himself has worked in three different ministries. “This reform hasn't been imposed just to introduce an inter-ministerial mobility which already exists. More than anything it reveals the bad relations between the Élysée and Quai d'Orsay, which is nothing new, and in terms of recruitment it aims to favour free and full competition with, in theory, unlimited recourse to the private sector. It has to be said that in essence this reform is clearly liberal in nature. In the sense of liberal economics.”
“It contains two risks,” said the ambassador. “That of seeing a Unilever executive or a senior civil servant specializing in social affairs heading off tomorrow for an embassy. In other words, losing the competences associated with the profession. And also the risk of a French version of the 'spoils system' with the handing out of posts to political friends, to funders of political campaigns, and like-for-like exchanges between the public and private sectors.”
The diplomat noted: “It's not new for senior civil servants to find a new job in the private sector. The danger is that it becomes systematic, and in both directions. That's already what's been happening for a long time at the Ministry of Finance. Which has led to this dubious, odious cosiness between the political and the industrial worlds. The flexibility that is often invoked to justify the reform can also have dangerous consequences for the working of democracy.”
The ambassador continued: “As for the accusation of corporatism that's been put forward by promoters of the reform and their supporters, that doesn't survive a broader look at the administration as a whole. Yes, the anger shown by diplomats is something of a storm in a teacup. Yes, the few hundred people affected by these abolitions are not the most ill-treated people in the civil service. Yes, we belong to a body where the logic of career and professional progress involves a constant acquisition of different skills, a gaining of experience, which creates a form of de facto corporatism. That's undeniable. But this corporatism is nothing compared to what exists inside, for example, the Treasury management whose members are, however, also civil service administrators. No, you have to look elsewhere to find the reasons for the vindictiveness being shown towards the Quai d'Orsay.”
Another serving diplomat made a similar point. “It is undeniable that a French version of the 'spoils system' is being put in place. Several important or interesting diplomatic posts whose incumbents should have retired or been moved in the last few months have been frozen at the Élysée's orders. The ambassadors or diplomats due to leave have been asked to stay in place or have left without being replaced, because they had to leave some posts vacant until just after the Parliamentary elections [editor's note, in June] to recompense deserving members of ministerial offices or political friends who are suddenly without work. The list of posts that have been frozen has been doing the rounds for months at the Quai.”
Score settling
Some diplomats to whom Mediapart spoke also see the reform as Emmanuel Macron settling scores against the two major corps of diplomats inside the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Inside the Quai d'Orsay no one has forgotten the violent diatribe from the head of state during the traditional ambassadors conference at the Élysée on August 27th 2019, when he attacked what he called the “deep state”, which he said prevented him from carrying our foreign policy his way.
It seems that the notion of a “deep state”, which apparently originated in Turkey and which Donald Trump has used to describe those he says plotted against him, is also one favoured by Macron. He had already used it twice before, in front of a group of journalists from the diplomatic press who had been invited to the Élysée.
“What made it even more unwelcome was that the Quai d'Orsay is, without doubt, along with the prefects, one of the most disciplined administrative departments, you could even say it is subservient to government orders,” said a former ambassador. “But that [comment] probably reflected the president's disappointment or unhappiness in the face of his failures. And everyone knows that when you have difficulties it's never a bad idea from a populist point of view to have a pop at civil servants.”
Faced with a series of failures or poor outcomes in Algeria, Lebanon, Iraq, Libya and Syria, where he had undertaken a series of clumsy and hasty initiatives that were unwisely publicised in the media, it is apparently a senior official at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs who has been discreetly made to carry the can for these setbacks by the head of state.
On October 13th 2021 Christophe Farnaud, the director of the North Africa-Middle East (ANMO) department at the ministry, the unit in charge of these cases, was relieved of his duties overnight and without explanation. This came as a great surprise to his colleagues who considered him – and still do – to be an excellent diplomat. They also felt he was being made a scapegoat.
An all-powerful diplomatic unit at the Élysée
“Up to the presidency of Jacques Chirac [editor's note, who served two terms from 1995 to 2007] there was real respect for diplomats at the Élysée,” says one former senior figure at the ministry who is now retired. “While their point of view wasn't always endorsed, their competence and expertise was acknowledged. And their opinion contributed, along with other sources of information, to clarify political decisions. Nicolas Sarkozy, on the other hand, harboured a mistrust – sometimes even scorn - of diplomats. And he only trusted a very close circle of advisors who were not always politically disinterested.”
Veterans of the North Africa-Middle East (ANMO) department still recall the humiliation and anger that gripped them in 2011 when they learnt via the media that representatives of Libya's National Transitional Council had been received by President Sarkozy at the Élysée with their “friend” the philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy. ANMO's officials had not even been informed of the CNT's presence in Paris.
Former diplomat Yves Aubin de la Messuzière has described the diplomatic unit or cell that is based at the Élysée as “even more powerful when the ministers are weak”. Originally, the purpose of this unit was to prepare for major meetings and help inform the head of state's decisions. But over the last 15 years or so it has in fact come to represent a shift in foreign policy initiative away from the Quai d'Orsay and towards the Élysée. That has helped crystallise the animosity that has grown up between the institutions, which happen to be located on opposite sides of the River Seine.
Ever at the whim of surges of enthusiasm, sudden impulses, insults, and PR stunts from a president grappling with changing priorities and, sometimes, an oversized ego, the Élysée's diplomatic cell has seen its staffing number grow at the same time as its room for independent decision-making has increased, along with a hubris which has prompted some departures from within its own ranks.
The world's third-biggest diplomatic network is at risk
The unit had around 15 diplomats under Sarkozy and a dozen or so under his successor François Hollande but in the last five years numbers have risen quickly to a staff of around 30, all hand-picked by the president. “The paradox is that the increase in power of this presidential diplomatic tool has not been accompanied by a growth in historical and geopolitical culture on the part of the president's entourage and the president himself,” says one former diplomat. “Emmanuel Macron would never have tackled the Lebanese affair as he did had he possessed serious knowledge of the history of Lebanon or had listened to those within the [Ministry] who did,” he added, referring to the French president's intervention in Lebanese politics in 2020.
“That is undeniable,” said Yves Aubin de la Messuzière, a former director of the ANMO, an Arab expert and someone with excellent first-hand knowledge of the Middle East having had half-a-dozen postings in Arab capitals during his career. “His fit of anger [editor's note, with the Lebanese political establishment] shows that he didn't understand Lebanon at all. Beirut is not a capital in Françafrique [editor's note, i.e. in one of France's former colonies in Africa] where Paris can impose its will with a few phone calls. Lebanese politics is much more complicated, especially when you have fewer means of applying pressure on the protagonists. The country has a specific history, and geopolitics has been at the heart of its identity since its creation. Being unaware of this reality can only lead to serious disappointments.”
So is another reason for Emmanuel Macron's desire to abolish a section of the diplomatic corps a wish to limit the power of a body which has declined to indulge his decisions, methods, verbal blunders and failures on the international scene? After all, this is a man who has rarely shown an excess of modesty. Is this why he is despatching its staff into a larger pond of interchangeable “state administrators” who include officials from other ministries, people from the world of politics, his vast circle of friends, those he feels an obligation to and senior figures from the world of business?
With 179 embassies and permanent missions, 112 consular sections and 90 consulates, France can boast the third biggest diplomatic network in the world after the United States and China. Having lost 10% of staff in five years and 50% in 25 years, in 2020 the Quai d'Orsay received a slight increase in its budget and its staffing levels were kept stable. What will remain of this weakened presence in the future, both in its ability to act and its international influence, if Emmanuel Macron continues with the implementation of his reform?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter