2021 was to be a year of commemoration of Napoleon's death.
Not only will this commemoration be done shamefully, on the sly, by wanting to “deconstruct” and illuminate the dark side of the character, but a few days later, the Prime Minister announced the abolition of part of his noblest heritage: the prefectural body.
It is not a question of suppressing the prefects as such, they who are the representatives of the State in the department, but of suppressing their specific status to transform the “profession” into a simple function, and thus promote diversity. profiles.
Any deconstruction is preceded by its cohort of arguments steeped in morale and good feelings: it is about "adapting" to a time when the public service prides itself on borrowing its plasticity and openness from the private sector.
Rather than drawing from a group largely drawn from the future ex-ENA, governed by rules of seniority and career, the government will therefore be able to drop in profiles from other parts of the administration, or even from of civil society.
The naive will applaud with both hands this slow dissolution of the high civil service, hated for its privileges and arrogance.
They will not see that the real problem, that of the "revolving door", which consists for a high official of going to work in the private sector, as the current President of the Republic has done, will not be resolved.
They will see this dissolution only as great progress.
Now is the time for “managers”.
The prefect is not a “job” like the others within the administration: he does not only represent the State, he is the State, the keystone of all public action in a department.
It is a mistake.
To see progress in this would indeed be to deny three realities.
The first is that the job of prefect requires availability 24/24, 7/7, in the service of the State. It is a function which supposes to accept one Wednesday morning to be transferred to the other end of the country, with the instability that this can create for its close relations, and in particular its children. It is an exposed function - some prefects left their lives there, like Claude Érignac. It is not a profession, it is a vocation, because the remuneration and the related benefits are much lower than what the private sector can offer to comparable profiles.
The second is that the prefect is not a “job” like the others within the administration: he does not only represent the State, he
is
the State, the keystone of all public action in the area. a department. Loyalty, the duty of reserve, neutrality are essential qualities to allow the State to advance files of general interest in a context where local interests, not to say the baronies, constantly clash and where the lobbying of private actors is intense. The prefect can neither be an interim of the public service intended to join the commercial sector, nor an activist of the presidential party.
The third is that the state is in deep crisis.
The French complain about the bureaucracy, the decline in the rule of law, the disappearance of public services.
These evils come on the one hand from a lack of responsibility, drowned in reunion, the thirst for horizontality and citizen participation, and fear of the judge;
on the other hand, the desire to manage the State with a purely accounting, falsely modern and managerial vision.
This is why this suppression of the prefectural body is not trivial.
It is a new step towards the liquefaction of the State, in the service of politicization and the deprivation of public action.
That is why we must clearly oppose it.
Signatories:
Julien Aubert, deputy for Vaucluse
Bérengère Poletti, deputy for the Ardennes
Valérie Boyer, Senator of Bouches-du-Rhône
Bernard Brochand, deputy for Alpes-Maritimes
Philippe Gosselin, deputy for Manche
Else Joseph, Senator of the Ardennes
Sébastien Meurant, Senator for Val-d'Oise
René-Paul Savary, Senator from Marne
Guy Teissier, deputy of Bouches-du-Rhône
Stéphane Viry, deputy of the Vosges