Update (April 8th 2021): President Emmanuel Macron of France today announced the abolition of the Ecole Nationale d’Administration (ENA), the country’s elite postgraduate civil-service college. In this column we explain the factors that led to his decision.

FIFTEEN YEARS ago this spring, students at France’s elite postgraduate civil-service college were preparing to celebrate their graduation. Behind them lay the Alsatian city of Strasbourg, its beer halls, and two years of intense study at the Ecole Nationale d’Administration (ENA). Ahead stood fast-track jobs in the parquet-floored corridors of power in Paris, and the guarantee of brilliant careers. As the top-ranked graduating student stepped towards the front of the amphitheatre, however, she handed the astonished director a 20-page report, written by pupils and entitled “ENA: the urgency of reform”. Among its signatories was a fellow graduating student with a shock of unkempt hair, Emmanuel Macron.

The student rebel, it seems, has turned into the presidential revolutionary. On April 25th, in response to the gilets jaunes (yellow jackets) protesters and their rage against the out-of-touch elite, Mr Macron announced the abolition of ENA. “Makeshift repairs”, the president declared, would not do: “If you keep the same structures, habits are just too strong.” It was the most controversial and spectacular of all the announcements made to mark the end of his months-long “great national debate”. At a stroke, Mr Macron gave in to a populist demand, and sent both his own alma mater and a symbol of modern France to the guillotine.

All countries select a governing elite. Six of the 13 post-war American presidents attended either Harvard or Yale. Ten of the 14 post-war British prime ministers graduated from Oxford. But France takes the principle to extremes. Though its annual intake is a minute 80 postgraduate students (compared with around 2,000 undergraduates for Harvard and around 3,000 for Oxford), ENA has supplied the country with four of its eight Fifth-Republic presidents, including Mr Macron, and eight of its 22 prime ministers, including the current one, Edouard Philippe. Today énarques, as its graduates are known, run the French central bank, the finance ministry, the presidential office, the Republican party, the external intelligence service, the constitutional council, the state railways and a raft of top French private-sector companies.

When Charles de Gaulle founded ENA in 1945, from the ashes of Nazi occupation and the second world war, the Resistance leader explicitly sought a meritocratic antidote to the chronic cronyism of the pre-war era. In his memoirs, le général wrote that his ambition then was “to make rational and homogeneous the recruitment and training of the main servants of the state”. ENA was to turn out an impartial, unified army of administrators, motivated by the “noble” calling of public service, in order to rebuild a powerful, stable France. It supplied the overseers of the trente glorieuses, or 30 post-war years of prosperity and planned industrial growth. Those who were to serve the country, said De Gaulle unapologetically, had to form “an elite in all respects”.

Amid today’s angry, ruthless populism, however, the very concept of an elite is denounced on the streets and roundabouts of France. Far from admired as a dedicated public servant, the énarque has come to embody the perceived arrogance and disconnection of the governing class, skilled at devising technocratic policies and blind to their effect on ordinary people. It was in car-dependent France profonde, after all, far from the bike-sharing quarters of Paris, that the government’s planned raising of the carbon tax first provoked the gilets jaunes. The solution, one of them said, was to “get rid of the énarques” and put some “real people” in government instead. With their calculators and spreadsheets, graduates of ENA have replaced the silk-stockinged nobility of pre-revolutionary France as the public enemy of choice.

The reality of course is more complex, and more nuanced, than Mr Macron is letting on. The president knows full well that France will still want a top administration college, even if he closes the one with the now-damaged acronym. He also knows that the problem is not the concept of a high-flying school itself, but recruitment to and from it. Over the years, partly because applicants from bookish families better survive the marathon years of preparation required to get in, ENA has admitted fewer, not more, pupils from poorer backgrounds. In the quarter-century after 1985, the share of pupils at the school whose fathers were blue-collar workers fell from 10% to 6%. Broadening access cannot be ENA’s problem alone. It also means ensuring that more school pupils from modest backgrounds apply to classes préparatoires, which train applicants to France’s grandes écoles. This is the baffling parallel world of elite higher education that leads (among other things) to ENA, confuses the uninitiated, and crowns the university system.

This privileged perch also gives ENA a monopoly on jobs in France’s elite “grand corps”, a sort of top civil-service officer class, the most prestigious of which is the inspection des finances (which Mr Macron joined). Graduating pupils are guaranteed a spot in one or other, according to their exit ranking, rather as in Imperial China. Indeed, this turns time spent there into a race for position rather than a chance for reflection or creativity. And the school’s tiny intake forges an exceptionally tight network of alumni, which fuels suspicions of caste-like behaviour by its members. Enarques trust, recruit and even marry each other.

ENAthing else but this

With his own satchel of diplomas, Mr Macron knows all these arguments by heart. But he is treading a perilous path. That ENA has flaws, few contest—not least its tiny size. Yet it has done its bit to help create in France a deep culture of public service. And the country itself, with its much less entrenched private-school system, is in many ways better placed than Britain or America to achieve merit-based education. Mr Macron’s real challenge is to give a meaningful nod to the ambient distrust of elite institutions, while making sure that any reincarnation preserves what ENA gets right, and fixes what it gets wrong. Otherwise, its abolition will be a self-defeating populist gesture.