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Eulogy for the École nationale d'administration: Or, How the West Forgot That Leaders Need to Be Forged and Not Merely Sorted
Just so we don’t all get bored with Iran war and its fallout I thought I’d write up something I’ve been meaning to do for a while but kept putting off:
Macron killed the École nationale d'administration (ENA), France's legendary civil service finishing school, in 2021. This from the man who is himself an énarque, married his teacher, and governs France with the populist credibility of Marie Antoinette at a soup kitchen (long may he continue). The irony of course wasn't lost on anyone except himself.
He replaced it with something called the INSP, which is the institutional equivalent of renaming Blackwater to Academi and hoping the Iraqis don't notice. The same people from the same arrondissements now attend the new thing and get the same jobs afterwards. The nameplate changed. Little else has changed, except that France lost something it didn't know it had until it was gone.
I want to argue that what died with the ENA matters far beyond France, because its death represents the final victory of a particular model of elite formation, the American model, over a rival continental model that was straightforwardly better. And since I seem to have developed a reputation for critiquing the Americans here, you know the drill…
I.
There are two kinds of elite institution. The first kind is hard to get into. The second kind is hard to get through. Today almost nobody distinguishes between them, and I would submit that the failure to do so is one of the great undiagnosed pathologies of modern Western governance.
Harvard is the archetype of the first type. Three to four percent acceptance rate. You get in, you are among the Chosen. Your parents update the Christmas letter. Mazel tov. But what happens once you're inside? The median grade is an A-. You could sleepwalk through a Harvard undergraduate degree and emerge with honours, which is precisely what a lot of people do, and we all know which people I mean, even after Affirmative Action has technically been banned.
The degree doesn't certify that Harvard made you better. It certifies that you were smart at 18 and your parents had the resources, or the connections, or the correct demographic profile, or all three, to package you correctly for the admissions committee. The brand does the heavy lifting for the rest of your natural life. The institution is simply a filter and not a forge.
The SCOTUS clerkship is the same logic at its apex. Thirty six slots a year, drawn from a pool already prefiltered through Yale Law and a "feeder" circuit judge. The most prestigious legal position in America. Sure the actual work isn’t easy and you’re grappling on a daily basis with some of the biggest constitutional questions of the year but we all know the real prize is what comes afterwards, the $400k signing bonus with a BigLaw firm to do Associate level disclosure work and template drafting which any competent lawyer could do just as well, isn’t given to them because of what they learned in those 12 months. The prestige is entirely in the selection.
Nobody emerges from a SCOTUS clerkship significantly transformed as a lawyer; they emerge networked and credentialled. The credential then entitles them to a $400,000+ signing bonus at a BigLaw firm, because the American legal market has decided that having been chosen by a Supreme Court Justice is worth half a million dollars in pure signal value. You were chosen, therefore you are saved. The Calvinism would be amusing if the people it produces weren't currently standing on the sidelines pretending everything is fine while a bunch of charlatans are running the most powerful country on earth into a ditch at speed while congratulating themselves on their own brilliance.
I'll call this the Filter Model. The institution's purpose is to identify pre-existing talent, sort it into tiers, stamp it with a brand, and release it into the wild. The actual content of what happens inside is secondary. The selection is the product.
II.
ENS Ulm does things differently. For the Americans in the audience: the École normale superieure is the institution that produced Sartre, Foucault (Michel, not Leon) , roughly a third of France's Fields Medallists and an absurd proportion of the country's serious intellectuals. The entrance exam, the concours, is savage. Harder in raw mathematical terms than anything the Ivy League administers, and I say this as someone who knows what hard mathematics examinations look like. But the concours is the door, not the room. What happens after you walk through it is the point.
The programme is designed to take talented people and remake them. Normaliens produce original research almost immediately. The agrégation preparation is an intellectual ordeal with no real Anglosphere equivalent. Imagine spending two years preparing for a single examination so difficult that the pass rate among some of the smartest people in France is routinely under 10%. People who survive the ENS think differently at 25 than they did at 21, not because they accumulated more facts but because the institution reshaped the machinery they think with.
The ENA worked the same way, but for governance instead of scholarship. "Formation" in French means both education and shaping, as in the shaping of metal. That's not an accident of language. Two years of intensive work in law, economics, public administration, and actual governance: stages in prefectures and embassies where you had to run things and not merely study them. The people who came out were a specific product: technocratic, institutionally minded, arrogant (let's not pretend otherwise) but genuinely formed for the task of operating a complex modern state. You can argue all day about whether the thing they were shaped into was good. Plenty of the yellow vests would tell you it wasn't. But you cannot argue that the shaping didn't happen. An énarque at 27 was a categorically different animal from the one who entered at 25. Harvard College cannot say this about the majority of its graduates, and the truly contemptible thing is that it isn't even embarrassed by the fact. I'll call this the Formation Model. The institution's purpose is not to sort but to shape the raw steel that comes through into a sharp blade.
III.
The connection to American civilisational failure is, I'm afraid, not subtle. But then again I've never been accused of subtlety around here and I'm not about to start cultivating it now.
The Filter Model is characteristically American (but now spreading throughout the world). America's founding myth is about breaking free of inherited structures, not building new ones. The whole premise of the American experiment is that you don't need to be formed by an institution to lead. You just need to be talented, survive the right selection process, and your innate qualities will carry you. This is, at bottom, a Calvinist proposition in Enlightenment clothing: the elect are chosen, their election is its own proof of grace, and no further formation is required. Predestination with a diploma.
In the early Republic this worked, because the Founders were themselves men of extraordinary formation. Classical education, deep reading in philosophy and history, practical experience in governance. Formation Model products who built a Filter Model system. It functioned as long as enough formed people were still coming through the pipeline to actually run things. The moment the pipeline dried up, the moment the system started producing people who had been filtered at every stage of their lives and never once forged by anything, the rot set in. And rot, once it starts, moves faster than you expect.
A Filter Model system, left to its own devices, selects for people who are good at being selected. Not people who are good at governing or thinking or leading under pressure. People who package themselves brilliantly for admissions committees, who say the right things at the right dinner parties, who land the right internships and clerkships, who optimise every life decision for the next credential on the CV. They have been sorted relentlessly since age 14 and shaped by absolutely nothing, regardless of how much Mummy and Daddy may like to pretend the non-profit they funded for their precious darling helped. Perfect résumés, zero formation. And when the moment comes that requires genuine judgment, the kind that can only come from having been put through something that actually changed how your mind works, the poor tempering shows through and the blade shatters.
I've made this argument before about American institutional depth and I'll compress it here because I don't want to repeat my entire screed from two weeks ago: the speed at which American institutions are being hollowed out right now is itself diagnostic. If the cultural root system had the depth that Americans believe it has, what's happening would be much harder to do. Instead a single administration has done more institutional damage in a year and a half than most people thought possible, and the Supreme Court, staffed entirely by Harvard and Yale alumni, the crème de la crème of the Filter Model, has folded on every serious test of courage like the invertebrates they are. These are the people the Filter Model selected as the finest legal minds in America. These are the people who were chosen, and chosen, and chosen again at every stage. And they have the institutional spine of a jellyfish.
Meanwhile here in the UK we don't have a written constitution. Parliament is sovereign and a majority can do literally anything it wants up to and including reinstating slavery (modulo certain comments the judiciary has made about the Rule of Law, lets hope they never need to be tested out). And yet Boris Johnson, with a massive majority and real public support, couldn't bulldoze the norms he wanted even with a massive public referendum backing what he was gunning for because the institutional immune system fought back at every level.
The difference? Britain still retains traces of the Formation Model in its governing culture. The civil service Fast Stream. The Bar, where pupillage is genuinely a formation: twelve months of being broken down and rebuilt as an advocate before you are trusted with taking real cases for real clients before a real judge. These institutions still carry some residual memory of the idea that you must be shaped before you are trusted. The US has replaced formation with filtration almost entirely, and is now discovering in real time that filtered people with no formation are extremely good at performing competence and catastrophically bad at exercising it.
IV.
So what actually died when Macron signed the decree?
Not a school. The French state can produce schools. What died was the proposition that governing a country is a métier, a craft, a trade requiring apprenticeship, and that the people who presume to practise it should be subjected to an intellectual and practical ordeal before being handed the keys. The counter-proposition, the American one, is that anyone sufficiently clever and well-credentialled can govern, that selection is sufficient (either by the elite or the people), that being chosen is identical to being prepared. I invite you to contemplate the current state of American governance with its parade of Filter Model all-stars and tell me with a straight face that this proposition is working.
The social mobility critique of ENA was real. The intake had become too narrow, too bourgeois, too 16ème arrondissement. But this was a problem of admissions, not of the institution. You fix a school whose intake is too narrow by widening the intake. You open the concours preparation to the provinces, you fund bursaries, you recruit actively from backgrounds that don't traditionally produce énarques. What you emphatically do not do is destroy the forge and replace it with something deliberately less rigorous and less prestigious, because that sends a specific message: that formation doesn't matter, that the forge was the problem and not the queue outside it.
Destroying the ENA because its intake was too Parisian is like burning down a hospital because the waiting list is too long. It's a specific kind of stupid that only makes sense if you've already internalised the Filter Model assumption that the institution's only function is selection. If you think the institution actually transforms people, if you take seriously the idea that an énarque at 27 is better at governing than the same person would have been without ENA, and not merely better credentialled, then destroying the institution over an admissions problem is an act of civilisational vandalism. Which is exactly what it was.
Every time a Formation Model institution is diluted, streamlined, or abolished in the name of accessibility or modernisation or equity, the Filter Model wins by default. And every time the Filter Model wins, we get more leaders who were brilliantly selected and never once forged. More people with credentials and no character. More people who can navigate a selection process with preternatural skill and cannot navigate a genuine crisis to save their lives because no institution ever demanded anything of them beyond showing up and being impressive.
The people currently dismantling American institutions either have impeccable credentials themselves or are assisted by teams full of such people. Harvard, Yale, Stanford, everything in the works. They were filtered, and filtered, and filtered again. They were never once formed. They emerged from the most elaborate sorting mechanism in human history without having been changed by it in any meaningful way, and they are now busy proving, with considerable energy and to the great horror of people who confused selection for preparation, that being chosen is not the same as being ready. MENE MENE TEKEL UPHARSIM, if only they could understand what was being said.
The cages are still hanging from St. Lambert's Church in Münster, 490 years later. Empty now, but everyone who visits the city knows the story. A permanent public record of what happens when people who are supremely confident in their own election turn out to have no formation whatsoever. An interesting factoid about the Münster Rebellion is that Jan van Leiden, the self-proclaimed King of the Anabaptists whose bones ended up in those cages, was a failed tailor's apprentice. He didn't finish his formation either.
Rest in peace, ENA. You deserved better critics and a better death.
A major purpose of the Iran War is formation of combat leaders. I haven't seen anyone else mention this elsewhere. But it is quite explicit within the military officer hierarchy that one of the main reasons we invade for "funsies" is to keep us in practice for when we actually "need" to invade someone for real.
How do you know this? Do you have personal experience with that hierarchy?
Yes. I was a naval academy graduate, but am now a pacifist.
The Atlantic wasn't good enough for you, huh?
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