A question of power
Why are political blogs so popular in France? How is it that they have become a real force in politics, whereas in Britain they are not? The difference is the distribution of power. In France, power is concentrated at the top, in an elite. The French have become used to being governed by a restricted number of highly-trained specialists – yes, I know in Britain people complain about Oxbridge graduates getting the best jobs and in the States you have Harvard, MIT and the Ivy League. But the graduates of those schools are not what the French would call an elite: there are far too many of them. How many graduates are there each year from Oxbridge – perhaps ten thousand? There are only one hundred graduates a year from the most prestigious Ecole Normale d’Administration (and to get in there every applicant must have a minimum of two university degrees plus at least a year’s special preparation course, and since even then only 7% will pass the entrance exam, you start to understand what elite means). The specifically French aspect of ENA graduation is its ranking system: the top graduate goes automatically to the best job, posted by prime ministerial decree: number one is in the Conseil d’Etat, number two in the Cour des Comptes and so on through the ministries with, at the bottom, the Min of Ag and Fish. Personal choice is not an issue – another aspect of the definition of elite.
Certainly, there are more grandes écoles than just the ENA – but not for running the country, and in politics there’s just the Sciences Po. The others, excellent in their own fields, are focussed on commerce, engineering, humanities etc.
A consequence of politicians and administrators coming from just one or two grandes écoles is la pensée unique, which again overrides personal opinion: they have been taught by the same teachers and they have written their essays and exams to please the same people.
Most graduates go straight into the civil service, and from there they can move into parliament: most députés are on secondment from the civil service, and their jobs are kept for them if they are not re-elected. Some civil servants become government ministers without being elected to parliament – like the current prime minister and minister of economics. Certainly the députés represent the people, but they are not representative of their people: there are too few women, almost no one from les classes populaires, or ouvrières and notoriously no one of north or west African origin from the urban ghettoes which surround France’s main towns. Which is not to say that the députés from those areas are not totally committed to their charges, but their electorate wouldn’t feel they were “one of us”.
In such a situation rebellion is inevitable. The other day I quoted De Gaulle’s statement about the impossibility of governing a country proud of possessing 370 different cheeses: in fact he was wrong, it’s perfectly possible, but not the way he saw government. That way insurrection lies. Particularly since the press and media are perceived as being controlled by the same elite. The battle to save Libération is not just about the closure of a national newspaper: Libé is renowned for expressing opinions closer to intelligent, thinking “ordinary” French people. Being taken over by a member of the Rothschild family was seen as the beginning of the slide to conformity.
Blogs, citizen’s newspapers like AgoraVox, perfectly answer the need felt by many French people to contribute to the running of their lives. Etienne Chouard, for example, who takes much of the credit for sinking the European Constitution, was one of the first to use the internet constructively. A teacher of law in a Marseille lycée, he saw legal errors in the proposed constitution and simply posted them on the net. He received some 12,000 questions as a result. That means there were hundreds of thousands out there hungrily waiting, without knowing quite what for.
Now it’s not unusual to see four or five hundred comments after a political posting, with perhaps ten times more reading the piece.
Like many bloggers, M. Chouard says he is not attracted by any one particular party: “Whoever is elected, nothing will change, unless one changes les règles superieures,” he says. And I would guess that he shares that sentiment with many of his compatriots. Ségolène Royal has made huge efforts in the direction of participative democracy, but being an enarque herself, I am not convinced she would go as far as changing les règles superieures. Sarkozy didn’t go to any grande école but I think he is too well encrusted in the system to want to change it. So blogs will continue to be hugely popular in France, read as were Voltaire, Rousseau and Montesquieu, until that mythic person in whom the whole of France believes – l’homme providential – appears.
January 20th, 2007 at 11:05 am
You exagerate the power of the Great schools , as well as the diversity of France. The Great schools have been influential for two centuries, but what is left of them is small ( see the recent crisis at Ecole Normale Supérieure) . The ENS is still poweful, and Sciences Po, which used to be, and still is, its antichamber, too. But there is a shrinking of their influence. So in large part, the idea that France is pyramidal is a myth, which still exists in the imaginary, but it’s not conform ot reality. Reality is different. The truth is that there are more centers of power, and the French are moving faster towards the kind of “liberal” society in the British or American style than they think. In a sense Sarkozy is a representative of this, and his conflict with the traditional establishment ( De Villepin , Chirac) is in large part due to this.
If only the French had something like Oxbridge !
Concerning the 368 cheese De Gaulle quote. 1) there are not as many as that, 2) cheese have a hard time, and there is a lot of uniformisation. And life in the French provinces is much more uniformised than it used ot be. Of course Brittons might feel that, in comparison to the uniformisation of their country, France has still some leeway before it gets into everyone’s mould. But the particularisms disappear, even at the level of food and restaurants. Bad news for British tourists who look for “couleur locale”.
My advice: let the French take up Guy Mollet’s ( a professor of English) advice: let us join the Commonwwealth. The Black Prince will , at last, win.
January 20th, 2007 at 11:27 am
I agree that the grandes écoles have less influence in reality than they have in people’s minds - but with power it’s people’s minds that matter. I’ve watched grown men of distinction wither and wish to die as HM Queen walked slowly but inevitably to shake their hand, yet text books say she has no power at all. The gobbledeegook which sometimes issues from these men’s mouths is proof of the contrary. The sense of rebellion within the French political blogosphere is due to how those particular French people see power, not to reality.
January 20th, 2007 at 11:54 am
Pardon me, but I rank higher HM Queen than ENA among myths which have influence on people’s minds.
Agreed fictions in politics have often a bigger role than realities, and power is in large part a matter of make believe.
The blog is a place where reality is into parentheses: you can say, virtually, what you want. When it comes to putting your vote in the box, or paying your taxes ( one issue that was raised about Sego) what is outside the mind comes to it.