A French chairman demean himself by doing hands-on work for a day? Pas possible!
Despite French scoffing at the British class system, which school you went to is infinitely more important in France than in the UK. How many of Britain’s top business people went to Eton or Oxford? Hardly any. In France, on the other hand, both the private and public sector are basically run by graduates of the ENA (Ecole Nationale d’Administration), the school that turns out the country’s top civil servants.
I have heard countless people moaning that their department has just been handed over to a young Enarque (ENA graduate) who knows absolutely nothing about the business and who immediately sets about sabotaging perfectly good working practices by applying the outdated theory he has just learned at school. The most important subject in the French curriculum is mathematics, so in general the ability to do complicated calculations and produce pretty graphs is considered much more useful than a true knack for business.
Most recent presidents of France have come from the ENA, which explains why they seem to know nothing about running a country – a lot like monarchs, in fact. The French recognize this. I have heard a joke variously aimed at the ENA, the HEC (Haute Ecole de Commerce), France’s most prestigious, incredibly expensive business school, and the Ecole Polytechnique, the top engineering school. For the sake of argument I’ll aim it at the ENA. The joke goes something like this:
There’s a rowing race between ENA graduates and a team of ordinary workers, ten rowers to each boat. The first time they race, the workers win by half a length. The ENA does a study, decides that its team lacked leadership and replaces two of the rowers in the boat with a Rowing Director and a Rowing Coach.
In the second race, the ENA loses by three lengths. The ENA does another study and concludes that the eight rowers were not motivated enough. Three of them are replaced by a Team Leader, a Team Liaison Manager and a Rowing Quality Control Manager. There are now only five rowers left, with five managers.
In the third race, the ENA loses by twenty lengths, and decides that its whole rowing system needs a fundamental review. All the remaining rowers are replaced by auditors.
In the last race, the ENA boat does not even move. The auditors declare that rowing is not a worthwhile activity and should be stopped immediately. The ENA graduates don’t care – they are given fat bonuses and sent to improve efficiency somewhere else.
Fortunately, after a few years of trying to reform things, these ENA types seem to settle down to a life of endless meetings and even more endless lunches, and leave the lower ranks to get on with running the business.
Grown-up Schoolboys
It’s not only graduates of the elite schools who like to put the ‘Education’ section at the top of their CV.
The reason so many young people leave France is that they can’t get a job unless they have a certificate – diplôme – proving they can do it.
At the magazine I worked for in Paris, only one of six English-language journalists had a degree in journalism. This was because we Anglos were outside the French system. It was well known in the company that no French candidates for a magazine job would even get an interview if they didn’t have the name of a journalism school on their CV.
New recruits to all departments were announced in a note bleue – a memo printed on blue paper. One note bleue, announcing the arrival of a thirty-eight-year-old marketing director, began with the words ‘Olivier Whatsisnom has a diploma in international marketing from the Ecole de . . .’ I could hardly believe it – at thirty-eight, his business-school degree was still more important than the actual business he’d done since.
In the eyes of a French human-resources officer, even if someone has set up their own company, made a small fortune and sold out to a multinational, their experience will not count for as much as a two-year course at a business school.
10 With typical Anglo-Saxon ingratitude, this was when I decided to start writing books poking fun at the French.
11 When I explain this to French people, they think it is very funny that we English outsourced our national stadium to our arch sporting rivals, the Australians. I have trouble convincing them that it is not an English joke.
12 For the Stade de France, the deadline was imposed by someone else – FIFA. It wasn’t self-imposed.
13 In fact, only around 8 per cent of the French workforce belong to a union, but the unions are very good at latching on to any industrial dispute and taking it over. And naturally, when there is a strike, the media call up the union spokesperson, not the factory workers who have a grievance, so the unions feel a lot more powerful than they really are.
14 Coincidentally, the trains and buses bringing strikers to the demonstrations are never held up by strikes.
It is a well-known fact that on the French section of the front line,
the Battle of the Somme was stopped for lunch.
THE
3RD
COMMANDMENT
Tu Mangeras
THOU SHALT EAT
THOU SHALT EAT
IF THE BIBLE HAD BEEN WRITTEN BY A FRENCHMAN, THERE would have been a lot more recipes in it. And this would have been the first commandment.
You can’t live in France if you’re not interested in food. The French do not respect people who deny themselves any pleasure at all, and, despite what they might try to tell the world, they take food even more seriously than sex. So someone who is not able to groan orgasmically at the mere mention of pigs’ entrails is roughly equivalent to an impotent monk. And vegetarians are regarded with extreme
