The French elite: from the struggle for domination to the struggle for survival

One thing may strike you: the closed-mindedness of the French elite, its one-track thinking, its sclerotic worldview. There is an immediate and obvious reason for this: the training it received, the way its system was programmed: the École Nationale d'Administration (ÉNA). This French 'Grande École', created in 1945 by Charles de Gaulle, trained about 100 senior civil servants each year, who then received the highest positions in the French administration, before often going to work in the private sector. There are many examples of people with three bachelor's degrees, two master's degrees and a PhD, who failed the entrance exam to ÉNA (Dominique Strauss-Kahn for instance). ÉNA has been renamed in 2021 as the Institut National du Service Public (INSP), but the changes are really cosmetic. This school was and still is the symbol of the French meritocracy, the symbol of an education system that privileges computer memory and machine work as qualities rather than creativity, debate, or social skills. The result is an astonishing inability to communicate and understand the world.

What other country has a system like this? What other country has a system that excludes everyone from the highest administrative and economic functions in favour of a handful of computers with brains ploughed in all directions by a single programme that favours memory over reflection?

The result is a closed, authoritarian elite, sure of its indisputable superiority, which organises each level of society according to a psychorigid hierarchy and excludes or even forbids everything that does not fit into its thought pattern. These people are in a way brilliant, but the problem is that they live in orbit around their navels, they don't live in the world as it is, they cut themselves off from the rest of the population in order to dominate it, to dominate everyone and to close the doors that question the system of domination. They all have the same faulty software, with no possibility of updating it, because it is supposed to be the best. There is nothing obvious about this intellectual superiority, once you have lived outside France:

The locked system of the French hierarchy is holding the whole of French society in its grip and suffocating it. I will give you a very concrete example: in the early 2010s, it was still impossible to criticise the excessive immigration welcomed by France without being insulted as a fascist or at least as a nationalist. But only in public. At the dinner tables, it was very different. In France, there is always a difference between what you think and what you can say publicly, which I don't see in Poland: it doesn't matter to us if we shock someone with our freedom of expression, and it is sometimes even tiring. The attacks of 2015 swept all the French immigration conformism away and there appeared polls in which we learned that "Islam [was] incompatible with French values for 61% of French people" (2019) [1]. In other words, France has gone into reverse exaggeration.

What can explain such a radical change in the public debate in such a short time? How is it possible that it took such bloody attacks for the French to realise that there was a problem with their uncontrolled migration model? Why was there a crackdown on warnings before 2015? Why were they pushed to the far right of the French political spectrum?

One of the reasons is that these opinions were obviously considered uneducated, since in France you have to be a graduate of a "Grande École" to be treated seriously. But there is another reason: the French media are controlled mainly by billionaires, some of whom have no prima facie interest in controlling the media. It is in their companies that former high-ranking French civil servants often work, so it is the same milieu, the same club. The control of the media in France is quite strict, it offers little diversity and contributes to the creation of an atmosphere where it is possible to exclude an opinion almost entirely by demonising it. There are other societies in the world, where the media is also controlled by billionaires, but where there is more diversity of opinion. In France, there is only one moderate opinion, surrounded on all sides by extreme opinions. This situation now seems to be reaching its climax with Emmanuel Macron, who had himself been an investment banker in charge of mergers and acquisitions in the media sector, and whose political party is the fusion of the moderate right and the moderate left.

However, this situation is the result of more than a thousand years of work, as the power of the central government was first developed by the French monarchy.

The French state's quest for cultural domination

France has always been a huge and unmanageable country. Almost 20 million inhabitants in the Middle Ages (England: 4 million). It was beyond anything else in Europe. Only Italy was so populated. This resulted in a great diversity of local cultures, as not everyone used the post office back then. We remember the Albigensians. Feudalism and centrifugal forces, the Middle Ages were the golden age of the regions, their local cultures and their autonomy. Each county had its own culture and language, which differed from the French language and culture in Paris. Then came the age of the construction of central power and the revolts of these local cultures: religious wars (vs. spiritual repression), jacqueries (vs. financial repression), frondes (vs. military repression), etc.

The French state has always been busy trying to strangle and erase local cultures and religions. The Third Republic, a decisive moment in the centralising work of the state, was able to implement the struggle against local cultures with modern means and even export it through the colonial empire: both took place at exactly the same time and with comparable methods. The francization of the people of France took place at the same time as the teaching of little Africans that they had been barbarians before they were taught French. Many languages were spoken in France until recently. Even in the 1950s, French children living in the countryside arrived at the Republic's school without knowing how to speak French. Their parents only used French for administrative matters and reading newspapers most of the time.

Here is a map of the forgotten / decimated languages of France :