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France's murky mix of school and scandal
By Katrin Bennhold International Herald Tribune
MONDAY, MAY 15, 2006
International Herald Tribune

PARIS - There at least 160,000 living alumni of Oxford University, and more than 320,000 people with degrees from Harvard. So exclusive, in contrast, is France's elite �cole Nationale d'Administration that fewer than 6,000 of its graduates are alive today.

A postgraduate college for civil servants, this school, known as ENA, is key to the way power is concentrated in France, with a small elite controlling large swaths of politics, business, and the country's powerful bureaucracy.

The intimate ties forged among its graduates have frequently been linked to insider machinations; now, in the scandal currently engulfing President Jacques Chirac and the French government - which has unfolded in a bewildering sequence of revelations implicating the top figures of the land in dirty tricks - the "old boy" connections of the principal figures appear to have played a crucial role.

Take the case of Jean-Louis Gergorin, 60, suspected of being the mysterious informer who anonymously sent judges a list of false bank accounts in a smear campaign targeting several high-level politicians, among them Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, who is both leader of the governing center-right party and the chief political rival of Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin.

Gergorin was at ENA in the 1970s, where he rubbed shoulders with at two future prime ministers and several future business and media leaders. By the early 1980s, he was a senior and well- connected official at the Foreign Ministry - and hired Villepin, eight years his junior and also an ENA alumnus, with whom he developed what he has called "a close friendship," according to the newspaper Le Figaro.

Gergorin left the ministry in 1984 when he was asked by the late Jean-Luc Lagard�re to join his defense imperium, Matra, which has since become part of the French-German-Spanish aerospace consortium EADS. Last week, when allegations about his involvement in the current scandal mounted, he took a leave from his post as executive vice president of EADS.

Gergorin's r�sum� gives an indication of the kind of relationships at the helm of French politics and industry - relationships so tight that some commentators have compared ENA's old- boy network to less palatable organizations reputed for the loyalty - and secretiveness - of their members.

As Alain Madelin, a center-right lawmaker, famously remarked a few years ago: "Ireland has the IRA, Spain has ETA, Italy the mafia, but France has ENA."

The cliquishness of the school's graduates has fed a lack of transparency about government business in France, and contributed to the murkiness of this latest scandal, which involves current and former cabinet ministers, intelligence officers, judges, business executives, and even Chirac, all in one way or another connected.

According to Ghislaine Ottenheimer, a journalist and author who has extensively written on the subject, the "incestuous nature" of the French elites disables checks and balances and creates a fertile breeding ground for under-the- table dealings.

"These very exclusive networks have created a sense of opacity and impunity," said Ottenheimer, who two years ago published "The Untouchables," a volume about one powerful roster of ENA graduates: state auditors. "You move in your circle and easily forget about the law. If there is a problem, you just call up one of your former classmates."

Checks and balances have failed elsewhere as well. The United States had Watergate and Germany suffered through a drawn-out campaign financing scandal in the 1990s. And then there is Italy, where the legal travails of former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, a billionaire and media mogul, periodically make headlines.

But what stands out in France is that its elite is smaller and more exclusive than in many other Western countries; the state is more present in the economy, further blurring the lines between business and politics; and the elite is concentrated in one city: Paris.

In a country where one's degree is often the single most important factor in being hired, the school one attends matters hugely.

Most of France's top decision makers have gone to a "grande �cole," and the two most influential ones are ENA and Polytechnique, the country's top engineering school.

ENA produces just over 100 graduates every year. The school was established by Charles de Gaulle in 1945 with the aim of creating a meritocratic postgraduate program for top civil servants and rebuilding a bureaucracy decimated by war and collaboration, and its graduates still fill the most influential posts in France's sprawling administrative machine. But many ENA alumni have also gone into business, the media and most importantly, politics.

Seven of the last 10 prime ministers and two of the last three presidents, including Chirac, studied at ENA. From a quarter to a half of ministerial posts tend to go to ENA alumni, even though incoming governments routinely pledge to diversify; in the current Villepin cabinet, 8 of the 31 ministers went to ENA.

A single graduating class can have vast influence. The class of 1980, for example, produced Villepin; his cabinet director, Pierre Mongin; Segol�ne Royal, the frontrunner for next year's presidential elections in the opposition Socialist Party; her partner Fran�ois Hollande, the Socialist Party leader; Henri de Castries, the head of the insurer Axa; and Jean-Pierre Jouyet, a former Treasury director and head of Barclays France who is now one of the most senior officials in the Finance Ministry.

In French business, Polytechnique and its annual pool of about 500 graduates is increasingly present. Fifteen of the 40 chief executives heading France's largest listed companies are Polytechnique graduates. Between ENA and "X", as Polytechnique is enigmatically known, that figure climbs to 21.

"It's a very closed club and if you're not part of it, it's very hard to break into it," said Philippe Le Corre, an adviser to Defense Minister Mich�le-Alliot Marie and former journalist who spent 16 years working abroad.

Nowhere are these links more obvious than in the defense industry-media- politics triangle. By some estimates, more than 70 percent of the French press is in the hands of defense companies.

Consider Serge Dassault, Owner of the defense giant Groupe Dassault, which In turn owns Socpresse, publisher of 70 titles, including the flagship daily Le Figaro. He is also mayor of Corbeil-Essonnes, a town southeast of Paris, and a center-right lawmaker in the Senate. His son Olivier is the chief executive of Dassault Communications, another media subsidiary, and a lawmaker in the National Assembly, while his late father was a Chirac supporter in the Corr�ze region.

"Neither judges nor journalists play their role completely in France," said Philippe Mani�re, director of the Montaigne Institute, a Paris-based research organization.

The problem of an exclusive pool of elites is amplified by the fact that the state remains very present in an economy in which until 1986 the government still controlled some prices. Almost every fourth employee works in the public sector in France, and a penchant for state intervention that dates back to Napoleon's days has left the government with much influence over companies.

As a result, Ottenheimer says, when senior positions become vacant in business, "People aren't chosen because of their capacity or profile, but because of who they know. You want to have people who are wired on the right and on the left of the political spectrum. It's a culture of lobbying that doesn't speak its name."

All this is compounded by the fact that in France, everything takes place in Paris.

"In the United States you have elites in Chicago, you have your L.A. elite and your New York elite," Mani�re said. "In France there is only one elite and that elite is in Paris."

Just how small that Paris world is becomes clear when one considers the Young Leader program of the French- American Foundation which nominates some 15 American and 15 French young professionals every year. Le Corre, who was chosen as one in 2004, said it was striking how none of the American nominees knew each other and virtually all of the French ones did.

"It was astonishing: Everyone knew each other, had friends in common and had gone to the same schools," he said.

Things are slowly evolving. When the Young Leader program was founded in 1981, over 90 percent of participants were graduates of ENA. Today that proportion has fallen to 24 percent - although many still have graduated from a grande �cole and over 80 percent come from Paris.

"Luckily the elites are in the process of diversifying a bit," Mani�re said. "But we have some way to go. The mythology in France is that we live in a meritocracy, when in fact we are a plutocracy-a wealthy "elite" that controls the government."

[rapier]

And every country is similar.

PS don't tell the racaille about it.

[Wangja]

But as le canard enchaine reminds us, ENA, spelled backwards, is ANE.

Which means ASS