France is Turning Against its Republican Nobility
France’s historical distrust of its government is amplified by its peculiar post-secondary education system.
France’s historical distrust of its government is amplified by the abysmal gap between elites and the general population. This rift has its source in a unique education system that produces irreconcilable social experiences that are bound to collide with one another.
2020 has been another tumultuous year in Emmanuel Macron’s presidency — a reign that has seen France move from one crisis to the next. Since his election in 2017, the second-biggest economy in the Eurozone repeatedly witnessed massive demonstrations directed against his government. With only a third of French people approving his governance, Macron’s presidency is sinking deeper into illegitimacy, and even among the people who voted for him in 2017, many have become disillusioned with his government and the country’s political class in general.
Macron’s initial youth appeal has faded as many French citizens have come to realize he represents continuity within change rather than a rupture from the old model of governance. Despite the country’s propensity for unrest, rallies such as the recent healthcare protest, turned remarkably violent, even by French standards. The gap between the country’s traditional ruling class and the general population is widening and proposals put forth by Macron’s government have not been able to quell the current unrest.
If the traditional parties have been quick to criticize Macron’s handling of the Covid-19 crisis, in their rush to advance their own agendas, leaders from opposition parties have failed to grasp how protesters are not only rejecting the Macron administration but also the entire ruling class. Along those lines, many segments of the French population have come to perceive the government, not just as incompetent but entirely illegitimate.
The Incestuous World of French Elite
The problem of political illegitimacy is the direct result of elite calcification. Resentment is mounting against an establishment whose latest iteration is incarnated by a president/former investment banker ruling from the Elysée Palace located in the heart of a heavily gentrified capital crowned as the world’s fifth city with the most ultra-rich residents. With its traditional architecture packed with old-school brasseries, trendy boutiques, cool coffee shops, downtown Paris still defines what is cool and trendy in the country. It is also in the city of lights’ pleasant environment that one can find ministries, prestigious institutions, the headquarters of France’s largest companies, its most famous museums, and exposition halls as well as the country’s most prestigious schools.
In practice, the city serves as the political, economic, and cultural hub of a shockingly centralized ecosystem. This peculiar arrangement has been referred to as Macrocéphalie Urbaine (urban macrocephaly), a condition in which a person’s head is abnormally large compared to its body. This spatial concentration of power forms a microcosm with its own horizon, one very much disconnected from the social reality experienced by much of the French population. The bubble that is downtown Paris represents the perfect breeding ground for a self-replicating ruling class.
For nearly three decades following World War II, this ruling class presided over solid economic growth, hence avoiding scrutiny. However, with the economic slowdown of the 1970s, observers started to take a closer look at the composition of the top of the pyramid. In the 1980s, French Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu proposed the concept of Noblesse d’État (State Nobility). Bourdieu realized that wrapped in the cloak of republicanism, French elites had been able to hold onto their privilege and position through an intricate system of codes, networking, and filtering mechanisms. Even more, he described how incestuous the world of French elites really is. Due to the assortative nature inherent in ruling classes, they move in the same circles and their children attend the same schools. They then pass on those advantages to their children, cementing the system and rendering social mobility near impossible.
France has a Unique Post-Secondary Education System Among Developed Nations.
Although all countries practice some form of elitism, the French version is unique due to a peculiar education system. Post-secondary education in France is articulated around two parallel tracks. First is public universities, which offer Bachelor’s, Master’s, and Ph.D. degrees. Tuition fees are very low (less than 250 Euros per year) and universities are accessible to any person holding a high school (known in France as lycée) diploma. Although the democratization of higher education is a laudable goal, the quasi-absence of selection and the lack of funding mean that, in practice, the quality of teaching in French public universities is often average at best.
At the other extreme of the educational spectrum are the Grandes Ecoles (GEs), elite schools with competitive entrance exams which produce most of France’s political figures, scientists, executives, and intellectuals. The entrance exam is so competitive that most GEs require prospective students to join a classe préparatoire aux grandes écoles (CPGE), commonly called prépas, where students undergo an intensive year-long training in preparation for the exams. Due to their selectivity, GEs are indicative of status.
However, GEs could not be more different from regular universities as they offer higher teaching quality, and better facilities, and extra-curricular activities. GEs are closed communities with their own codes and culture. They provide their students with the possibility to study abroad, pursue wide-ranging academic interests or develop art projects, in a way that schools with less funding are not able to do.
Theoretically, the selection is supposed to ensure equal opportunities, the antithesis of the aristocratic privileged-based system of the Ancien Régime. But behind the veneer of meritocracy, the overwhelming majority of those who attend GEs are from privileged backgrounds, while the working and lower-middle classes are largely underrepresented. Only a handful of elite high schools account for 50% of students admitted to GEs each year.
The Remarkably Similar Academic Backgrounds of French Presidents
There is one field where the harmful effects of this educational elitism are most evident: politics. All the presidents of the French Fifth Republic have been Sciences Po, Paris alumni. The school, which is located in the well-to-do 7th arrondissement of Paris, is an intriguing sociological experience for anyone unfamiliar with its specific academic culture. The prestigious institution, especially its school of public affairs, reeks of social conformity and group thinking. The students who often graduate before turning 23, display behavioral features more reminiscent of middle-aged executives than people in their early twenties. One year of preparatory class combined with five years of Sciences Po can potentially turn even the most creative and eccentric individual into another brick in the wall.
After graduating from Sciences Po, those who aspire to a career in the higher echelons of the French State apparatus will prepare for yet another exam, this time to join the École Normale d’Administration (ENA), an institution tasked to train the country’s future top bureaucrats. Ironically, ENA jury members complained recently about the prevailing conformity and group thinking among candidates.
Thus, before reaching the highest position, a French president has been through many years of rigid molding at the same time being sheltered from the daily challenges experienced by the general population. This system produces an isolated upper-class falling victim to group thinking bias. In turn, conformity undermines a country’s ability to adapt to changing conditions. Many French citizens complain about politicians sounding the same, and that is because they literally share the same background.
The lack of diversity within France’s ruling class is an endemic problem. Under pressure to restore equal opportunities, reforms enacted in the 2000s set new preparatory classes in high schools located in marginalized areas. In the same vein, admissions procedures were reviewed in an attempt to better reflect the diversity of society. However, these kinds of downstream measures do not address the issue of conflicting realities. The newly admitted students might be hailing from more popular backgrounds than your average Sciences Po student, yet, their life experience remains limited. Most of these “alternative” students hail from the Paris Metropolitan Area. They never worked a day in their life, never worked in the fields, never served in the military like the previous generations did until conscription was abolished in the late 1990s. In practice, their disconnection from the social reality experienced by most French citizens is as equally distorted as the young bourgeois living the 16th arrondissement of Paris.
The French Education System Creates Alternate Realities
In his book France’s Got Talent: The Woeful Consequences of French Elitism, British journalist Peter Gumbel explores how the French education system produces social experiences so radically different in nature they can hardly be reconciled, which in the long-term, affect every dimension of French society. Through their time at GEs, future establishment figures build a common experience that shapes their worldview, hence they react to events in a similar fashion. Whether they enter public service or join a corporation or an NGO, these people cannot shed their heritage.
Even when GE alumni and university graduates converge in public or commercial life, the cultural gap derived from different educational experiences is too wide to bridge. Good leaders need the kind of life experience that allows them to relate to the rest of society, but while GEs equip students with the knowledge, theory, and case studies, their curricula do not adequately prepare them for the challenges of governing.
While studying, most university students hold part-time jobs. They work in restaurants, retail stores, warehouses, the kind of odd jobs that are formative experiences, allowing young adults to build empathy and a better appreciation of the responsibilities associated with adulthood. Although they might seem unrelated, odd jobs make better engineers, managers, surgeons, etc. By contrast, due to selection criteria valuing extra-curricula activities, GE graduates have no other experience but of the internships, they complete as part of their schools’ curricula. Later on, those graduates will oversee employees coming from public universities and vocational training.
President Macron’s background is characteristic of this disconnection. His only professional experience prior to embracing a public career consisted of serving as an investment banker at Rothschild & Cie Bank, hardly a formative working-class experience. Macron’s speech and body language remind many people of the very hatred they feel towards their own managers. While in a corporate environment unpopular managers can simply fire discontented subordinates, in real life, citizens cannot be fired.
Throughout the Covid-19 crisis, Macron and his government displayed an astonishing disconnection from the grim reality experienced by millions of French citizens. In a much-awaited response to nearly four months of economic slump, Macron invited French people “to work more and produce more” — an address that was poorly received by the population. Unfortunately for France, a leopard cannot change its spots, and confronted by protest movements, French elites seem to respond to people’s grievances by resorting to technocratic measures.
Revolution is in the Air
There is a growing sense of civil unrest in France. Recently, police forces equipped with heavy gear were seen beating down healthcare workers in Paris while AK-47 wielding gangsters are fighting each other in the streets of Dijon. Each passing year, the protests are getting more radical and more violent. Among the protesters, many no longer want to reform the system, they want to destroy it altogether.
The current status quo is unsustainable and can only lead France into the abyss. If French democracy is to survive, it will need to undergo profound structural changes. Given the prevalence of homogeneity and group thinking among political and economic classes alike, the ruling class is in dire need of rejuvenation. Divergent experiences need to be reconciled so that constructive debates and exchanges of ideas can take place without descending into personal attacks. As exemplified by the current state of American politics, divergent experiences can result in a situation where citizens of a nation can no longer agree on what constitutes a fact, and thus on reality in general. Eventually, the resulting atomization of the social fabric weakens democratic institutions, paving the way for the rise of populism. There is no quick-fix to polarization but reforming the French education system would constitute a step in the right direction by bringing elites closer to the rest of the population. Along those lines, the two-track post-secondary education system should be scrapped. Future French elites should attend the same universities as normal citizens. Rather than through separate institutions, elite tracks should be integrated into public universities’ curricula.
In the 19th century, as he was researching the causes of the 1789 and 1848 revolutions, Alexis de Tocqueville identified a common trend. A static upper class insulated from the population cannot grasp the internal transformations taking place in society; it is unable to perceive change on the ground. Eventually, frustration leads to an uprising and the following chaos paves the way for the rise of an autocrat, thus bringing down the democratic regime. So far, post-revolution France has lived through four republics, each of them being brought down by episodes of large-scale violence. Tocqueville himself hoped that French social and political structures could gradually transform themselves from within, without succumbing to violent revolutionary fervor. If he was alive today, he would certainly warn current political and economic elites against the same decay that carried off the Ancien Régime. Once again, French ruling elites are “sleeping over a volcano”. It is in this context that France’s current ruling elites might be well advised to realize how fragile and tenuous their hold on power really is.
France might not be on the verge of another revolution but the multiplication of spontaneous, nationwide movements should serve as a clear reminder that turmoil is brewing in one of the most important members of the European Union, and given its importance in the Eurozone, social upheaval in France could have global consequences.