Imagine an entire country whose elite formation is determined by undergraduates’ choice of government MPhil (+ some sums earlier)! Well thanks to this entertaining piece by ⁦ @Nicolas_Colin⁩, you don’t have to! Meet world-famous nearby place, France! https://europeanstraits.substack.com/p/france-as-revealed-by-its-elite

It must account for at least some of the French elite’s different, uh, timbre that there’s so much individual autonomy, compared to here, in its formation. Enarques stem from decisions tiny graduate adults make. Whereas here, our elite stems from grown-ups’ decisions for children

Here, elite formation basically ends with the start of an undergraduate degree. And those are very much the consequences of decisions adults make: both parents & the people admitting children to universities. *There* structure plays its part, but it enables personal adult choices

I largely don’t think France has the woes the lazy “Anglo-Saxon” critique attributes to her (I think she has far more solutions than problems, if that’s the frame of reference). But Enarques are surely fascinating for what they in contrast illuminate about Anglophone countries?

Which, simply put, is that: France has Enarques, we have lawyers*. Her elite forms *after* an undergraduate degree, ours before. *Except* for lawyers, who, uniquely, can & do habitually come into it after their first degrees.

*Which is the true German disease, not doctorates.

The French elite can thus do things via enarques which are here and in the US disproportionately the province of lawyers. The technical side of the French administrative elite is thereby freed from the personal and professional deficiencies which legal castes bring in their wake.

And that’s my BigTheory for the day. (Also: business degrees and other such tosh do nothing for elite *formation*: they don’t bring anyone into it: they’re just tinsel some simple people already in the elite like to tie into their hair, so others can soundly laugh at them.)