The Bayrou moment may be over. With less than three weeks to go before the first round of elections, the candidate of the extreme centre is dropping in the polls, while Le Pen inexorably rises. If that fall continues it will be a shame, for although it is hard to see quite how he would manage with only a small party behind him, Bayrou is a better alternative than either the divisive Sarkozy or the irresolute Royal. In my view he is the only one who can lead France out of its present doldrums. But even if he does not make it into the second round, he has sown terror in the camps of the other two principal candidates and forced both of them back from their extreme views to a more consensual centre.
Perhaps to put himself back into the public eye Bayrou said over the weekend that if elected he would close the Ecole Nationale d’Administration. That doesn’t mean much, if anything, to most English observers, but since I am making a film about the school, it fascinates me. My film is also critical of the school, using an enarque of distinction, Charles de Courson, now one of France’s main experts in public finance, to balance the naturally gung-ho views of ENA’s director. The bright and entertaining De Courson is also one of Bayrou’s chief advisors.
The school forms administrators, which sounds terminally grey, but since the top 10% go into what the French call the Grands Corps, those bodies like the Diplomatic Service or the Prefectural Service which in turn dominate government ministries, a small percentage become very powerful in the country. Some of them, so close to the seat of power, become seduced into a career in politics, like Chirac, Jospin, Royal, Juppé. And they start at the top, parachuted into a constituency of choice, quickly becoming ministers and higher. Others leave the public domain and move into France’s largest companies, both nationalised, like Gaz de France or SNCF, and private. Like the political, they are parachuted in at the top with no real idea of how to manage, and certainly no idea how to manage a large, often multinational company. The appalling mess made by the aptly-named Jean-Marie Messier at Vivendi is the prime example of what happens when an enarque runs a private company.
But in a sense that’s not the main problem, it’s more the other end, the selection. To get into ENA you need two university degrees or a degree from a Grande Ecole like Science Po. Then a year’s preparation course for the entrance exam. Six out of seven will fail the written exam, and the few who pass go on to sit three orals. Two are technical, one, the mythical Grand Oral, is general: candidates have to talk to 15 minutes on a given subject (and not 15 minutes 5 seconds, they have to wind up their argument and conclude exactly as the bell rings) before being faced with half an hour of cross questioning from a panel of illustrious sadists. Less than 100 students are accepted each year, and in 60 years there have been just 5,600 graduates, la crème de la crème. In the same period Oxbridge has churned out well over a million.
As a school, it’s not hard to fault: very few people can afford to study for so many years, so the intake perpetuates a monoculture of a certain class of person: most students’ parents are either in the Grand Corps or teachers in higher education. Over the 60 years of the school’s existence they have created a Parisian caste, inter-marrying like the ancien régime and, according to De Courson, like the ancien régime they are turning their backs on the problems of their co-citizens, not necessarily consciously but because they don’t hear, perhaps cannot understand the cries from the street. “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche.”
Bayrou sees clearly this “rupture profonde entre le pouvoir et les citoyens” and proposes a school for public service, like ENA, but taking students from mixed backgrounds, and without such high academic qualifications. He would make it impossible for the graduates to leak into the private sector.
The director of the school, in our film, accepts these criticisms but says they are no longer relevant: he was appointed 5 years ago precisely to put these things right, and although his reforms are not complete, he feels they are well on the way. And of course it will take a decade for his first graduates to percolate into the system, let alone make a mark on the public mind, so it may be that Bayrou is too late. The other thing the current director says is that whereas for years ENA generated great national pride, it has recently become fashionable to make the school scapegoat for France’s ills. Indeed many graduates now hide their diplomas in public.
Two things fascinate me from my brief experience with ENA and its students: one is their dedication to l’intérêt général, la chose publique. They call it a vocation, a noble calling, and the director confirms that public administration in France is seen as one of the nation’s highest careers. He too, like his students, often uses the word noblesse, which makes me think that (le comte) Charles de Courson is right when he compares them to the ancien régime. My impression is that in Britain the Civil Service is not seen as a noble career, fit only for the very highest minds and greatest souls. Rather the reverse. The other, non-related thing that struck me was that before the filming I contacted a recent graduate who had spent a weekend telling a mutual friend how irrelevant ENA is, how bad the teaching and inadequate the preparation for the real world. When I asked him whether he would say this on our film, he replied he was willing to tell me all his criticisms, but anonymously and not on camera. Clearly he is afraid of reprisals in his career. Which goes to show how tentacularly powerful ENA is.
As a solidly established member of the nobility, le comte Charles de Courson (his family is from Bayeux, his ancestors came over with the Conqueror) is not afraid to criticize, albeit with circumspection. He told me that unlike many of his class, his family have always shifted with the times, often as precursors. On his mother’s side, for example, one of his aristocratic forebears had voted for the execution of Louis XVI. Was that in the l’intérêt général or merely self-interest ?

Yesterday Chris Maddock asked me the following question, referring to a blog I had written on the 12th January entitled “Chirac’s Endgame?”

“Is this piece in today’s New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/01/world/europe/01france.html?th&emc=th

relevant and how seriously it should be taken?”

Because I think it merits more than a few lines of comment from me in reply, I’ve decided to do today’s blog on it.

Certainly the piece in the New York Times is relevant. Less, I think, for the content of the interview, which is somehow so grotesque it is hard to take very seriously, than for the different ways the interview has been handled by the American and French press. The Elysée has so far issued two statements, the first is more interesting: Chirac’s people go straight into an attack on the newspapers for publishing the “off-the-record” remarks, particularly since they were rectified later. They claim the manner in which the remarks were reported is “shameful”, a deliberate attempt to “let loose a shameful debate on a subject where France’s commitment has always been constant and determined. It does not surprise us,” the statement continues, “on the part of certain media on the other side of the Atlantic which seizes any opportunity where France is concerned.” Perhaps seeing that this did not raise a flicker of anti-American braying from their compatriots, the Elysée issued a second statement, this time trying to rectify the damage done by Chirac’s first interview.

Staying on the French side of the Atlantic, both the Nouvel Observateur, one of the parties to the interviews, and Le Monde in its editorial this morning, comment only on the content. Le Monde takes at face value Chirac’s first interview statements about Israel being Iran’s target and Tehran being “razed before any missile has gone more than 200 metres”. Le Monde agonises over whether this is a change of direction in French foreign policy, wondering how can this be since it flies in the face of what Chirac has said before etc. It assumes that everything the president said, even in the first interview, is gospel. Certainly if you take that view and you haven’t read the New York Times’ version, the interviews are confusing.

The strength of the NYT piece is that it sets the controversial remarks in their context:

“The purpose of the initial interview was for Mr. Chirac to talk about climate change…..In the first interview, which took place in the late morning, he appeared distracted at times, grasping for names and dates and relying on advisers to fill in the blanks. His hands shook slightly. When he spoke about climate change, he read from prepared talking points printed in large letters and highlighted in yellow and pink.”

None of this is mentioned in the French press. They may consider it demeaning to talk of their president in these terms, but it is a far better and more compassionate explanation.

“Mr. Chirac,” the NYT goes one, “who is 74 and months away from ending his second term as president, suffered a neurological episode in 2005 and is said by French officials to have become much less precise in conversation…… In the midst of his initial remarks on Iran, Mr. Chirac’s spokesman passed him a handwritten note, which Mr. Chirac read aloud. “Yes, he’s telling me that we have to go back to the environment,” Mr. Chirac said. He then continued a discussion of Shiite Muslims……..

“On Tuesday, Mr. Chirac summoned the same journalists back to Élysée Palace to retract many of his remarks.

“The president had a different demeanour during the two encounters………. in the second, which came just after lunch, he appeared both confident and comfortable with the subject matter.

“Mr. Chirac said repeatedly during the second interview that he had spoken casually and quickly the day before because he believed he had been talking about Iran off the record.

“ “I should rather have paid attention to what I was saying and understood that perhaps I was on the record,” he said……Mr. Chirac spent much of the second interview refining his remarks of the previous day.” The NYT quotes the various comments from the first interview which he retracted in the second.

“It was unclear whether Mr. Chirac’s initial remarks reflected what he truly believes,” says the American newspaper. “In fact, Élysée Palace prepared a heavily edited 19-page transcript of the Monday interview that excluded Mr. Chirac’s assessment of a nuclear-armed Iran.

“The transcript even inserted a line that Mr. Chirac had not said that read, “I do not see what type of scenario could justify Iran’s recourse to an atomic bomb.”

Finally the New York Times says: “The attempt by Élysée Palace to change the president’s remarks in a formal text is not unusual. It is a long-held tradition in French journalism for interview subjects — from the president to business and cultural figures — to be given the opportunity to edit the texts of question-and-answer interviews before publication.”

Anyone reading the NYT piece can see that the man was ill, or distracted, unless of course I am being naively duped and the NYT’s journalist is interpreting the moment very creatively. If so, I am not aware her version has been contradicted by either of the other two journalists present. In this particular interview those details are crucial and cast an entirely different light on the words spoken.

Le Monde this morning does not try to duck the issue, it compares the text of the two interviews, so the differences can be plainly seen, and M. Chirac’s retractions are fully expressed as such. Le Nouvel Observateur publishes verbatim extracts of the two interviews, but the first, the contentious one, is restricted to two answers from what was clearly something much longer. In the “verbatim” account of the second interview there’s a touchingly naive moment when we read; “end of the 1^st side of the Nouvel Observateur’s cassette”. Even when interviewing the head of state, the Nouvel Obs’ journalist can’t run to digital. But despite all this, the article in the Nouvel Obs omits all the details given by the NYT, for example the journalist does not mention the 19 page re-edited transcript of the interview, nor refer to Chirac’s dependence on spokesmen.

It would be interesting to know whether the French weekly magazine would have published the controversial comments at all had it been alone in the venture. Knowing the two American papers were going to tell all, the French editor had no choice.

This mini-event is interesting in that it highlights the two different approaches to journalism. Many people have said that French journalists are too meek before their mighty elite: the various income tax allowances and hefty state subsidies are invoked as part of the reason for this, or the notorious pensée unique, meaning in effect that editors and those in power are in cahoots. It’s not entirely true, there are some very good investigative journalists in France, and some, admittedly independent like Denis Robert, are extremely courageous. What French editors don’t seem to have grasped is that their readers are mostly intelligent, perceptive adults, getting their information from all sorts of sources, some reliable, some less so. You can no longer get away with half-truths. If you know that the person you are interviewing is in some way indisposed, or even is simply being fed notes from advisers, giving the impression that the person has no opinion of his/her own, it’s irresponsible not to say so. Because someone else will.

But to answer Chris Maddock’s question: I think it puts Chirac’s endgame in tatters.

Many people say People’s Democracy is bound to fail, and of course if they keep saying that, it will. So here’s something to make waverers think and the rule-by-experts school see red: an experiment in using participative democracy to decide whether public money should be spent on research for a subject which experts assure us is so deeply specialised and abstract that no ordinary person can possibly understand it: nanotechnology. Well, the Regional Council of the Ile de France (the large area surrounding and including Paris) decided to see whether ordinary people can take decisions usually monopolised by politicians. It chose a random jury of 16 ordinary folk to find out about nanotechnology, discuss its implications and then decide whether, in their view, research into it is worth funding. Gender equality was respected, ages ranged from 21 to 70 years, there were members from black and north Africa as well as whites on the jury and professions ranged from a forklift truck operator to managing director, with at least one member of the jury on the dole.

The idea of allowing a group of citizens to express themselves on issues considered taboo for the general public, either because of their complexity or because they have been monopolised by strong lobbies, seems quite current in Denmark. The Danish Board of Technology site says it’s a method developed in the US and Britain, so if any readers have direct experience of a citizen’s jury, it would be interesting to know. But as far as I can see it has not been used much, if at all, in France. This particular project on nanotechnology was in fact part of a deal: the Region agreed to put 4.7 million euro towards research if, in return, the researchers agreed to explain their work to a citizen’s jury and accept that their findings would influence the Regional Council’s ultimate decision. You can’t say fairer than that. The jury spent three weekends brushing up their molecular manipulation techniques and then, on the 20^th January, they held a day of auditions to interview not only the researchers but industrialists who use nanotechnology. This calling of experts to public account is a first in France. Most, Lefarge, Oréal, STMicroelectronics, agreed to come and be grilled. Some, like Michelin, refused, as did some parliamentarians.

Broadly speaking, the jury were impressed by the possibilities of nanotechnology, but worried by a few possible consequences, particularly the risk that some of its techniques, such as therapeutic implants, could be/will be hijacked by the unscrupulous or simply mad. The majority verdict was that the Regional Council should “support nanotechnology, because of its openings for medicine, energy and job creation.” At the same time the jury noted the “marked lack of information about the risks involved”, for example the dissemination of nanoparticles when not enough is known about their impact on health and the environment, so their conclusion is that public finance for nanotechnology research should be contingent on a “correct” sum of money being allocated to research the possible dangers, and that would include a permanent supervisory body, passing on information to the public.

This blog is not the place to analyse their findings, nor am I the person to do it. But from the point of view of people’s democracy the 6 page downloadable .pdf file written by the jury as a summing-up is a very good example of how the ordinarily educated person, given responsibility (and that is the key), is far more perceptive than his stereotype allows. It is also a rather beautiful document, with, from the very first sentence, echoes of 1789 : “Nous, citoyens hommes et femmes d’Ile de France, avec nos différences, nos particularités et notre diversité, avons débattu des enjeux liés au développement des nanotechnologies…..”. Throughout there runs a cri de coeur that they want to be informed, they are taken aback that so much has been done without their knowledge, as if behind their backs and certainly as though those in authority (politicians more than the people doing the research) believe that ordinary people have nothing useful to say. Yet they show their awareness of the problems and pressures, commercial, political, international, and they are not Luddites, indeed they want to be properly informed and they want to be involved.

Although it’s only just getting under way, it’s fascinating to see how the campaign is shaping. At the moment it has practically nothing to do with traditional left against traditional right, but with a conflict between two different approaches to democracy.

The writer of le blog politique says that Ségolène Royal will not make it into the 2^nd round because she has not got what it takes. France, the writer says, is not Sweden or Denmark, it needs a real head of state, a boss. A lot of people, not only French, would agree: leaders need to be strong managers, looking after everything so you, the citizen, can get on with your life.

But others say that system of top-down government no longer works, because it inherently breeds disillusion with the leader. Messrs Blair, Bush and Chirac are current examples of voter disillusion. Consequently, people vote less and less (even for last Sunday’s election of the UMP candidate, open only to committed, paid-up party members, nearly a third of the members didn’t vote). These critics of the command-and-control system claim that it would be better to move power outwards, decentralising it, giving responsibility to everyone. That idea is certainly catching on in France, and partly explains why Ségolène Royal has done so extraordinarily well over the past 12 months, defeating her “strong manager” rivals who were, 12 months ago, far better placed than she. The problem, or the question, of course is, what has this “soft” idea of taking power away from managers and giving it to everyone, got to do with the “hard” business of running a major country? Conventional wisdom says one is reality, the other for the birds.

Advocates of the second, decentralised approach point to one major, international company that works in this amorphous, let-each-unit-decide-for-itself way. It’s a big company, most readers not only know it, they carry its calling-card on them at all times. It’s called Visa. Visa, by conservative estimates, is one of the most successful companies ever created – in fact it is the biggest commercial structure in the world. Since Dee Hock set it up 30 years ago, Visa has grown an estimated 10,000% and still grows at 20% a year. Yet Visa is not owned by anyone, nor can you buy shares in it. It is a network of 22,000 banks across 200 countries, each bank respecting its own rules and the rules of its country, yet it also fitting into the trans-frontier Visa package.

How Visa evolved as a disorganised, deliberately chaotic organisation is a fascinating story in itself, a precursor of the internet and Open Source. To find out more, go to Wikipedia – another example of a highly successful open system. It’s that sort of system which some French voters are beginning to think may work for politics too. Thierry Crouzet, an influential French blogger, with some 3,000 visits a day, has much on his site well worth reading, and his new book Le Cinquième Pouvoir, deserves to be translated. Have a look too at his recent blog on Wikinomics. But Thierry does not imagine that open source democracy, or the 5^th power, will overnight replace the present system of government, any more than Open Source will replace Microsoft. But in the same way that Open Source was born as a reaction to Microsoft, and simply by existing has an enormous and beneficial influence on that company, so an open source democracy might breathe fresh life into the frankly unappealing politics dominated by Messrs Bush, Blair and Chirac.

“The real work of the 5^th power is done by little imperceptible touches, a slow accumulation of grains of sand, which will be capable of creating monstrous avalanches.”

Naturally, there are plenty of voters who see that as utopist twaddle, who feel a strong boss is the only workable answer. Perhaps next time they delve for their plastic card they should wonder who is the boss of Visa.