The French elite. In ENA we trust

The long reach of the class of 1980

EVERY student of France is familiar with the enarques, graduates of the Ecole Nationale d'Administration. They account for seven of the past ten prime ministers, including Dominique de Villepin, the current one, as well as President Jacques Chirac. From time to time, ENA's grip tightens. Consider the class of 1980, known as the promotion Voltaire. This crop, mostly in their early 50s, from a class of just over 100, is now running the country.

On the centre-right, the year included not only Mr de Villepin (and his sister, Veronique), but also Pierre Mongin, his directeur du cabinet, and Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, a cabinet minister. On the left, it numbered Francois Hollande, the Socialist leader, and Segolene Royal, his partner and popular Socialist regional boss: the two met at ENA. In business, the year of 1980 counts Henri de Castries, head of AXA, an insurance giant, and Jean-Pierre Jouyet, ex-head of the French Treasury and now head of Barclays France. Among several other top executives appears the figure of Marie-Francoise Bechtel, who was until recently director of, well, ENA.

All countries train an elite. And enarques are usually brilliant and serious. So why, lament ENA's defenders, the disdain? There are two answers, says Ghislaine Ottenheimer, author of a study of ENA's top caste - the inspecteurs des finances. The school is too selective, training barely 100 a year next to thousands turned out by Oxbridge or America's Ivy League universities, creating a sect-like system of mutual self-protection. And it produces technocrats soaked in a theoretical, statist thinking ill-adapted to a world of global capitalism: “an immense machine”, she writes, “for manufacturing clones”.

Could these weaknesses be connected with France's crisis of confidence in its elite? Disillusion with a group that has lost touch with ordinary folk lay behind the rejection of the European Union constitution in May. Mr Chirac, in his Bastille Day television appearance, blithely insisted that the vote was “not the message of a morose France”, confirming that loss of touch. ENA has no monopoly on training the French establishment: Nicolas Sarkozy, a front-runner for the presidency after Mr Chirac, is no enarque, one reason why he is readier than many to criticise the French model. But the reach of just one year's class raises questions about ENA's influence, for good or ill.