It took an énarque to abolish Ena

When president Charles de Gaulle founded l’École nationale d’administration (Ena) in 1945, he wanted it to become an institution of “decision, action and ambition”. Its purpose was to instruct a civil service elite how to rebuild France after the ravages of the second world war. Meritocratic by intent and near-militaristic by mission, Ena trained a disciplined cadre of state officials dedicated to the service of the nation. The school taught civil servants to be pragmatic, efficient and intellectually rigorous, capable of resisting the “feeble compromises” of the political process. But the general insisted Ena must also be flexible enough to adjust permanently to the needs of the time.

Such a supple, ambitious, technocratic training school is perhaps exactly what is needed today to help manage one of Europe’s most expansive welfare states, which is why it is striking that President Emmanuel Macron has chosen to close Ena. Reacting to the anti-elite mood of France fanned by the protesting gilets jaunes, Macron has gone ahead with his promise to shut his alma mater. Facing a mounting political threat from Marine Le Pen from the populist right in next year’s presidential elections, Macron is trying to reposition himself as a champion of the downtrodden and to distance himself from the elite of which he is so conspicuous a member. As one commentator observed, it took a president with the intellectual self-confidence of an énarque to abolish Ena.

A certain cynicism about the motives behind Macron’s move is only heightened by his decision to reopen the school under a new nameplate. He is creating a new institute of public service that appears to bear an uncanny resemblance to the old Ena in Strasbourg and will come into operation from the beginning of next year. But before it reopens, the institution should be substantially reformed, as should France’s traditional grandes écoles. Many of the criticisms levelled at Ena were valid.

Whereas de Gaulle had envisaged that Ena should be open to the best and the brightest no matter what their background, the school had evolved into something of a caste for a narrow and self-regarding elite. Graduating near the top of any year’s promotion at Ena would guarantee an énarque a lucrative career for life, whether in the public or the private sector, almost regardless of subsequent achievement. Far from being civil servants, France’s énarques became their civil masters.

The new institute must be truly accessible to the most talented from all classes and all regions of France. It must blow away old ways of doing things and learn from more modern methods of public administration from around the world. As has become evident during the Covid-19 pandemic, governments need their civil servants to be bold, imaginative and tech-savvy. The public administrations of countries as varied as Singapore, Taiwan, Estonia and Israel have shown that they can on occasion be as dynamic as the private sector. Just as entrepreneurs talk about software as a service, Singaporean officials talk about government as a service.

France is not alone among European countries in needing to modernise its public administration. In spite of the success of the UK’s vaccination drive, the pandemic has exposed serious flaws in the British civil service, too. Its pioneering attempt to create a world-beating Government Digital Service in the 2010s subsequently slipped into reverse. The most important of de Gaulle’s strictures in founding Ena — that civil servants must permanently adapt to changing times — should endure.