Letter from Paris

Tricolore tape

Christine Brooke-Rose Paris Top people in South American countries apparently tell visiting Frenchmen (according to one of them) that France ought to export, not so much its cars and fishing-bait, but its administrative methods, and more particularly its Grandes Ecoles. I must admit I was astonished at hearing this. France seems to me delightful in every way except for its administration, at least as far as the ordinary citizen is concerned, who has a tough time of it, especially since a civil servant—in his anxiety perhaps not to be corrupted, even by a smile—rarely makes any effort to help him or even to be polite. The citizen, in any situation, always seems to be in the wrong and even if the Administration has made a mistake one tends to get the reply 'il fallait verifier'.

Naturally (as, I suppose, everywhere), red tape can be cut at the higher levels through personal acquaintance: wire-pulling is called 'se faire pistonner', 'avoir un piston des pistons'. But the unpistoned citizen, or even the pistoned citizen in unpistonable circumstances, is put upon in innumerable ways, which no doubt explains the particular type of French explosiveness: a cautious acceptance, even to the point of servility, for what individually affects everyone, but a quick inflammability where either the individual alone is concerned (say an accident) or where the 'everyone' is together against whatever the frustration is.

The English often complain about red tape but England is a paradise in this regard compared with France, though France is no doubt better than other Mediterranean countries. For the ways in which the citizen is put upon are found at all levels all of the time, from the civil servant or professor who, transferred elsewhere, won't see a salary for at least four months, to just anyone in any post office who, having four things to do, has to stand in four different queues.

The administration in fact (as my French visitor to South America put it) exists for itself, not for the citizen. A high civil servant naturally told me the opposite. But in practice the notion, so taken for granted in England, that the government employee serves the public, barely exists in France. So then I asked my friend : how is it that the super-administrators who come out of the Ecole Nationale de l'Administration ( ENA, hence Enarques) cannot overhaul the whole system from top to bottom ?

And the answer was that there is nobody more conservative than a French civil servant, so that, whatever the will or imaginativeness of the super-Enarque above may be, the world so well described by Courteline continues below, following instructions inflexibly. Courteline has a delightful story of a local post office director who comes out to greet a friend, chats about family matters for a while then asks what he can do for him. The friend has come to collect a parcel. Ah, do you have your identity card ?' No. Absolute impossibility of handing over the parcel. If however the friend can make sure that someone, anyone at all, will be at his home for the next postman's round the parcel will be delivered.

Life really is like that most of the time today—fortunately alleviated by easy friendliness in every other domain—and I find it hard to believe that nothing can be changed from the top. And yet it seems to be so. This probably explains why everything administrative in France seems so far behind the times. The recent adoption of summer time, for instance, was presented on the mass media as a minor cataclysm, with resulting confusion, and jokes about the lost hour going on for over a week. The problem of the grands departs and grands retours (everyone taking to the road at the same time), though talked about for twenty years, seems insoluble although every other country has systems of rotation. Great reforms are passed years after everyone else, meeting much resistance, and people rack their brains about problems long solved elsewhere.

So what about these super-methods of the Grandes Ecoles? Here, perhaps, I should explain the relative position of the Grandes Ecoles and the universities in France, since it accounts for much of the perennial unrest. Every Minister of Education boasts that the French system is the best and most liberal in the world, above all that there is no 'selection' for the universities: anyone with a 'baccalaureat' (roughly, Advanced School Certificate) can go.

In practice it is very different. For one thing the real selection occurs at the level of the Grandes Ecoles. The really bright student, after his bac, prepares two or three

• . years to get into one of them (Polytechnique

for Maths and Sciences, Normale Superieure for the Humanities, ENA for admin, etc). If and when he gets in he is already at degree level, and then he has to come out, and the coming-out grade determines his career: the top twenty (la bow) in any one year having the pick of the best jobs in government, industry, teaching etc., the others still being the future top people. All the rest, who do not prepare for the Grandes Ecoles but who still want a higher education, go to the university.

Secondly, the French student has a tougher time of it than his English and American

counterparts, who seem spoilt in comparison (though French students seem spoilt to the rest of the population here). When, for instance, I try to explain that yes, there is selection in England since every student with Advanced School Certificate also has to get a place, but that (a) this means that no college takes in more students than it can cope with, and (b) there are many univers)i ties so that it is a wide selection (too wild, some English say), and (c) that anyone wh° has obtained a place is entitled to a govern" ment grant on which he can live, simply but live, while he studies, nobody understands, since here the universities are overcrowded and never know how many students there will be until the students turn up. And manY, students have to earn their living full-time, the scholarship system being extremelY meagre. The universities seem to be the poor relations of national education. The left, of course, says that it is the Government's intention to strangle the universities in favour of the Grandes Ecoles and new establishments (e.g. at Compiegne) set up by private enterprise. The right says the universities are over-politicised and don't know what they want. As a foreign resident here I can express no opinion on specific situations, but, with students and teachers constantlY on strike or in the streets and spring fever every year with threats of a hot May-June. it is obvious to anyone that education is crippled with problems, not the least being the topic of this letter: namely, that since education is nationalised it is inevitably subject to the same disadvantages as all other government administration.

Although universities are officially autorr omous, it is nevertheless the Ministry whic tauh, decrees what type of matter is to be Light in what proportions for any one diplorna. delivered by the Ministry, and for which the Ministry decides in any one year whether conditions have been such as to validate: say, the degree (licence) as a`nationa.1 diploma', or whether to refuse to validate lt for a particular university or one of its departments. Naturally this is all part of a much wide,cr; crisis which universities all over the won have been facing for some time, and which is now caught up in the international crisis. 130` there is something peculiarly contradictorY and frustrating about the French systern. which is an inefficient and wasteful one, efficient, that is—like the administration la. general—at the base (for higher education• the universities), but supposedly sacif: efficient at the top (in higher education: tPt. Grandes Ecoles). And this is the case wha„ ever government is or might be in power. is only a pity that these famous and sur)posedly exportable Enarques seem inca,P; able of really altering the system, so that average citizen, fortunately protected bY his own native wit, is constantly caught UP, 11° just in a Kafkaesque or Courteline world'

or

but way back with Gogol or Dickens,.

with Melville's Scrivener Bartleby, who however, of sheer immobilism.