Elite French school in crisis

IT IS the pinnacle of France’s educational establishment, the grandest of its “grandes écoles”, but the elite finishing school for future presidents, ministers and civil service mandarins is suffering an existential crisis.

Emmanuel Macron, the president, and his predecessor François Hollande, are graduates of the École Nationale d’Administration, but applications are falling and it has resorted to advertising for students for the first time.

More top students are instead choosing business schools, preferring the lure of the private sector to the prestige of top civil service positions that are re- served each year for “énarques”, as alumni are known. Calls are increasing for the academy to be scrapped. Bruno Le Maire, the finance minister who is himself a graduate, argues that it has outlived its usefulness as “we enter a new world of entrepreneurs, creativity and innovation.”

Applications for about 110 places each year have plunged from about 20,000 to 13,000 over the past decade.

The appeal of the civil service, long seen as controlling France, is diminishing in favour of riskier careers in business, according to Vincent Jauvert, author of a book about the “caste” of top civil servants, Les Intouchables de l’État (The Untouchables of the State).