Hidden away on an unremarkable side street on the Left Bank in Paris is a university that fancies itself “the French Harvard.” One morning in March, the director of Sciences Po, Mathias Vicherat, who had taken office promising to combat sexual violence, resigned months after he and his ex-girlfriend went to the police accusing each other of domestic abuse. Vicherat became the school’s third consecutive director to leave (one in a coffin) in the shadow of personal or professional transgressions.
His departure was only Sciences Po’s second-biggest controversy of the week, behind a dispute between students over the war in Gaza. That row prompted French prime minister Gabriel Attal to make the 700-yard journey from his official residence to his old school’s council meeting to underline “the absolute necessity that the university remains a place of…healthy debates that respect the values of the republic.” Along with a spate of other recent scandals, the turmoil amounts to the most significant upheaval on Sciences Po’s campus in its 152-year history.
Meanwhile, President Emmanuel Macron, an alum, is busy committing patricide against his other alma mater, the tiny Ecole Nationale d’Administration, or ENA, where he went after Sciences Po. ENA has produced four of the last six occupants of the Elysée Palace, but it has become so widely despised as an elite nest that Macron pledged to abolish it. It turns out by abolish he just meant rename.
The French campus wars, like the American ones, are about much more than education. The French elite is fighting for survival, caught in a kind of civil war between generations, as well as the anger of the excluded 99 percent. The one percent, as in the U.S., has long been prepared in exclusive schools, which like the elite itself now face a choice: reform or die.
X Marks the Spot
France’s selective grandes écoles have their roots in the 18th century. The idea from the start was to groom a meritocratic élite d’etat, an “elite of state.” Its members would be chosen by concours (competitions), and they would spend their careers serving the nation. A state career traditionally carries more prestige in France than almost any business success.
The 15-year-old Napoleon passed the test to attend military school in Paris, and after the Revolution, with the aristocrats beheaded, new grandes écoles furnished a new elite. Sciences Po was a relative latecomer, founded in 1872 as the Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques to create “the elite that will, step by step, set the tone for the whole nation.” The school remains less well known abroad than its 800-year-old neighbor the Sorbonne, which retains a reputation in the United States as an upscale junior-year-abroad destination for the likes of Jackie Kennedy. But the Sorbonne, to be clear, is not a grande école.
An ambitious French 18-year-old graduating from lycée will aim to go to either Sciences Po or a Parisian prépa, a sort of intellectual boot camp where students spend what should be two prime partying years working 70 hours a week, delving into philosophy and math while being yelled at by teachers who reputedly demand PhD-level work. After prépa, those who ace their concours make it into one of the grandest of the grandes écoles: the Ecole Polytechnique for scientists and mathematicians, the Ecole Normale Supérieure (“Normale Sup”) for all-purpose intellectuals, and the Ecole Nationale d’Administration (ENA) for those who want to run the country. Some who fail the concours never get over it. Eric Zemmour, a far-right politician, was reputedly radicalized by his two rejections by ENA.
Those who do enter a grande école tend to develop a permanent sense of solidarity with their companions. Together they won the system, and most feel they deserve it. Haven’t they proven themselves brainier and harder-working than all other French people? A key word of praise among members of the elite is brillant. Brilliance is seen as an innate quality and more important than, say, integrity or social skills.
Since the status of the elite’s members is based on totally objective meritocratic brilliance, they are quick to tell you they are elite members. It’s quite normal for a sixtysomething Parisian to introduce himself as, say, “Jean-Pierre Dupont, X, 1985”. You’re meant to know that “X” is the nickname for the Ecole Polytechnique and that 1985 was the year he entered. If he refers to someone else as a cher camarade, you know that person too went to X. Even a brief death notice in Le Monde might mention the key fact of his life: “…at the age of 93. Former pupil of…”
For a case study of the elite route, take Macron. A brillant boy from the town of Amiens, he “rose to Paris,” in the French phrase, and studied at Sciences Po while simultaneously doing a philosophy degree at Nanterre University. (His thesis, perhaps inevitably, was on Machiavelli.) He fancied himself a creative intellectual, but his novel Babylone Babylone has yet to be published, and the intellos of Normale Sup rejected him, so he settled for ENA, “the school of presidents.”
ENA, founded by Charles de Gaulle in 1945 to train the state’s post-Vichy elite, started out on the Left Bank, but it later decamped to provincial Strasbourg, where it occupies the surprisingly charming grounds of a former prison dating back to the 14th century. Each year it admits only about 80 students. Most come from the Parisian elite, so out in the boonies in Strasbourg they are thrown together to forge friendships that are meant to last through their careers in the highest reaches of the French state.
Those careers can be made or broken in a day by graduation rankings. Traditionally, each class at ENA was ranked, from top student to last. The most prestigious state jobs were reserved for those in the top 15 or so spots, known as la botte. First prize for those in “the boot” was joining the state’s most elite corps, the Inspection Générale des Finances. Macron became an inspecteur, and he remains an énarque (an ENA grad), because that is an indelible identity. Whereas an American might say, “He went to Harvard,” the French say, “Il est énarque,” in the present tense.
Et Tu, Emmanuel?
Almost everyone who graduates from a grande école gets a de facto lifetime elite membership card. Though typically in their early twenties, these lucky few are done with proving themselves. They have won the race, and there is no need to compete with the defeated 99 percent of the population ever again. The winners return to Paris, ideally the Left Bank, where they spend the rest of their lives surrounded by pals from grande école, and often shacked up with one. France has the smallest, most unified elite of any major country. It’s as if the power brokers of Silicon Valley, Washington, Harvard, Manhattan, and Hollywood were all squeezed into a few neighborhoods in the center of the same town.
Elite members content themselves with the state’s relatively modest salaries (admittedly followed by the longest pensions in human history). Their status resides in the books on their shelves, the philosophy in their heads, and the people they know. They solidify their networks in personal rather than work settings: at Left Bank dinner tables, in their regular corner cafés or summer villages, or while picking up their children at the gates of the Ecole Alsacienne private school (where Attal went).
Their children inherit their privileges. Your chance of attending a grande école is 83 times the average if your father went to a highly prestigious one, the economist Stéphane Benveniste calculated in 2021. It was just as the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu warned decades earlier: The supposedly meritocratic French elite had begun to reproduce itself. (Nobody mastered elite self-reproduction better than Bourdieu himself. His three sons all followed him to Normale Sup.)
For decades most French people accepted and even took pride in their elite. Rule by exam-passers seemed to work. The French elite had modernized the country during the Trente Glorieuses, the 30 glorious years of economic growth from the Liberation through the mid-1970s. They installed Europe’s fastest trains, the TGVs. They co-created the world’s fastest passenger plane, the Concorde. They made France an independent geopolitical actor that regularly defied Washington. In the 1980s they led the world in launching a sort of French-only ur-internet called Minitel, which seems to have been used mostly for reserving tennis courts and having phone sex.
But after the financial crisis of 2008, the global anti-elitist mood reached France, too. In 2018 the country experienced a sort of parallel shock to Trump’s victory in the U.S.: the uprising of the gilets jaunes, the “yellow vests,” mostly working-class protesters from small towns and exurbs who marched on Paris every Saturday for months. The gilets jaunes despised, among other things, the supposedly out-of-touch énarques, whose embodiment was Macron. In 2021 he said he would abolish ENA, calling it no longer “meritocratic.”
In fact he only reinvented it, but that was enough to outrage elite Paris, much of which now regards him as a class traitor. ENA has been renamed the Institut National du Service Public (INSP), and it is charged with training a whole range of budding administrators, not just 80 énarques. INSP’s curriculum has been updated, its admissions supposedly diversified, and the career-defining exit ranking abolished.
Trouble at the Po
Sciences Po has been on its own turbulent journey. Its transformational director, the énarque Richard Descoings, who expanded the school, tripling its intake, and spoke of turning it into a French Harvard, was found dead of a heart attack in a hotel room in Manhattan in 2012. He was naked, and it was reported that he might have been visited earlier by two male sex workers, despite being married to a woman. NBC News reported that his laptop and phone had been thrown out the window of his seventh-floor room and found on a third-floor landing.
Descoings’s successor, Frédéric Mion, was popular with students until he was felled by a colleague’s incest scandal. A best-selling book accused Olivier Duhamel (president of the National Foundation of Political Science, which oversees Sciences Po) of having sexually abused his stepson. Duhamel resigned. Mion, it turned out, had known about the incest allegations but kept them secret. Then came the ill-fated Vicherat.
These flare-ups aren’t isolated incidents. They are the results of #MeToo à la française: The French population has stopped tolerating the elite’s traditional sexual license to take pleasure without always bothering to get consent.
Now, at the leaderless Sciences Po, the students remain in uproar, over Gaza and sexual violence. There’s nothing new about student protests in Paris; every French generation tries to recreate the glamour of the 1968 “revolution.” But Macron and Attal are watching their old school warily, and not only because the French elite is obsessed with the French elite. They assume that this generation of Sciences Po grads will get their turn to run France.
The adult elite would be happier if the country’s future leaders were marching for traditional French causes, like more sex or earlier pensions. The grownups worry that today’s young are more left-wing and anti-colonialist than they themselves were. And in a long-standing French tradition, the shift is being blamed on American influence: Commentators are lamenting that le wokisme has crossed the Atlantic. Attal has warned against “a North American ideology, which, under the cover of a certain modernity, extols intolerance.” Sciences Po, significantly, is the most international grande école. About half its students are foreigners, chiefly from English-speaking countries, the Arab world, Germany, and Italy. Many classes are taught in English. How can such a school remain true to French values?
A mile from Sciences Po, across the river, is the Place de la Concorde, the square where the members of the ancien régime had their heads chopped off during the Revolution. The specter of that time hangs over their modern counterparts. Their collective nightmare is the far-right leader Marine Le Pen becoming president in 2027, and now that their incubators of power are under attack, they are at last moving toward reform. It’s just that, like so many things in France, they are doing so at their leisure. Meanwhile, the distant whoosh of the guillotine gets closer and closer.
This story appears in the Summer 2024 issue of Town & Country, with the headline "Ecole! Elysée! Scandale!" SUBSCRIBE NOW
