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Removal of the ENA: 5 minutes to understand a symbolic measure

2021-04-08T12:01:31.093Z


After several reversals, Emmanuel Macron finally decided to abolish the National School of Administration. At least she won't exist


It is a totem pole of the High State Civil Service which is about to disappear.

Emmanuel Macron will announce this Thursday the abolition of the National School of Administration, commonly called the ENA, during a videoconference meeting with several hundred senior executives of the State.

An audience familiar with this school, which every year sees the country's highest officials emerge from its ranks, and some of its future political leaders.

Four presidents of the Fifth Republic, including Emmanuel Macron, and nine Prime Ministers, including Édouard Philippe and Jean Castex, are from its ranks.

The President of the Republic thus signs the end of a long series, made of reversals, which has accompanied him since his entry into the campaign in 2017. But the ENA did not wait for the eighth President of the Fifth Republic to be the target of criticism.

Why is the ENA criticized?

In recent weeks, Emmanuel Macron has made the issue of diversity in the major schools of the administration a priority.

This is the meaning he wishes to give to the reform announced today.

On a trip to Nantes on February 11, he expressed his ambition: that "no kid in our Republic will say to himself:

it's not for me 

".

He then deplored a broken down social elevator in the country, which “works less well than 50 years ago” because mobility “is very low”.

Of the 82 students in the 2019-2020 class, only one was the son of a worker.

This is a constant at the ENA, while the average has not exceeded 5.5% since its creation in 1945. The children of farmers, craftsmen, workers and employees represent only 15%. of the workforce of each promotion.

Conversely, 72% of its former students are executive children.

From April 25, 2019, in response to the yellow vests crisis, Emmanuel Macron had commissioned an information mission on the High Civil Service from the former president of the Professional Football League, Frédéric Thiriez.

In his conclusions made in February 2020, the latter already advocated the abolition of the ENA, to replace it with a "School of Public Administration" (EAP).

An establishment responsible for training all senior civil servants in the country, on the basis of a revised competitive examination, notably applying positive discrimination upon entry.

An old debate

The ENA has been challenged in its functioning since the 1960s. In 1964, the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu wrote

Les Héritiers

in collaboration with Jean-Claude Passeron.

Both felt that the ENA, like other French schools, was monopolized by the "heirs of the dominant culture".

Years later, he enshrined the phrase “state nobility”.

He is far from being the only critic.

In the political sphere, many people have attacked schools in recent years.

Among them, former students of the ENA.

One of the first was Jean-Pierre Chevènement.

With his acolytes Dider Gomez and Didier Motchane, they invented the concept of enarchy in 1967. A term that the former minister did not assume immediately, since he did so initially under a pseudonym.

Others have succeeded them.

Presidential candidate François Bayrou was publicly in favor of closing the school in 2007. He has not changed his position.

Four years earlier, Jacques Chirac's Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin commissioned a report on the subject from former European Commissioner Yves-Thibault de Silguy.

The latter wrote then that within the school, "conformism tends to prevail, the development of skills is not encouraged, knowledge of citizens and businesses is hardly stimulated and openness to the world. remains cautious ”.

In 2016, it was Bruno Le Maire, then a candidate for the right-wing primary and from the ENA, who defended the idea of ​​closing the school.

He was then strongly criticized by his colleague Annick Girardin, now Minister of the Sea, who at the time officiated at the Ministry of the Public Service under the five-year term of François Hollande.

"The criticism of the ENA is easy, she declared to the press, it is a classic foil for all populists".

Emmanuel Macron's turnarounds

The least we can say is that the position of the President of the Republic has varied on this issue.

In 2017, the candidate Emmanuel Macron was against the closure.

"Do I have the head of a mold?"

You find ?

Do I give you the feeling of being made in a mold?

Ben, the ENA is not a mold, it is a mold for those who want to become one, ”he said during a trip to Clermont-Ferrand.

"Before it was ENA, what was it?"

It was recruitment by cronyism, by competition for good manners, because we had a relative or cousin who was already in the public service.

Me, I prefer the competitions of the Republic, they are meritocratic ”, he continued, calling not for the abolition of the school but for the reform of the school system.

“The real scandal is not the ENA.

It is because there are fewer children of peasants or workers who arrive at the ENA.

"

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The crisis of yellow vests is there.

Emmanuel Macron changes his position.

The abolition of the ENA comes back regularly in the Great debate initiated by the Head of State.

The track is on the table.

On April 26, questioned by journalists, he launched himself.

"I wish that we put an end to the large corps (...) To carry out the reform that I mentioned, it is necessary to abolish among other things the ENA (...) to build something that works better", he defended then.

But a year later, while the Thiriez report rather hypothesizes a refoundation of the training of senior officials, Emmanuel Macron puts water in his wine.

The Elysee Palace, last February, no longer speaks of suppression.

The objective is to "fight against the lack of openness - social reproduction, lack of social, economic, territorial, cultural diversity - and the lack of attractiveness" of the senior civil service, we commented soberly at the castle to LCI .

The presidential services then evoked the idea of ​​creating a so-called “talents” competition, specific and in addition to the classic external recruitment.

What will become of ENA?

The school, as it was created by way of an ordinance signed by the hand of General de Gaulle in 1945, will no longer exist.

The National School of Administration now supplies the major state administrations.

Officials who come to fill the ranks of the Court of Accounts, the Council of State or the General Inspectorate of Finance.

And which, for many of its detractors, operates in a vacuum.

As an engine of social reproduction, which the Head of State aims to put an end to.

READ ALSO>

When the ENA wanted to "change the world"

To do this, a new school should see the light of day.

Emmanuel Macron wants to attract more varied profiles, for example from French universities, too little represented for his taste.

Beyond the only symbolic considerations, the Head of State promises to break the logic of the great bodies of state.

Source: leparis

All news articles on 2021-04-08

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