France’s “énarques” weren’t trained to succeed in the world but in central Paris
For decades, the elite delivered. From 1946 through 1973, France experienced its trente glorieuses, (nearly) 30 years of economic success. Even in 1990, the elite could still make great claims. It had built the first proto-internet, Minitel; installed Europe’s fastest trains; co-created the world’s fastest passenger plane, Concorde; pushed Germany into creating the euro (which the French elite then thought was the start of European unity, not the end of it); established its own independent military option that many people still took seriously; and continued to imagine it spoke an international language. Rule by brain-workers seemed to work.
Since then, things have gone horribly wrong. The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in the 1960s began pointing out the elite’s flaw: the ruling class claimed to be a meritocracy open to bright people from anywhere but had, in fact, become a self-reproducing caste.
