Ecole! Elysée! SCANDALE!

The path to the French White House requires a political education at one of the country's elite universities. As controversy swirls around Sciences Po-class treason, #MeToo à la française, creeping le wokisme-will its grip on power finally slip?

- SIMON KUPER

Hidden away on an unremarkable side street on the Left Bank in Paris is a university that fancies itself “the French Harvard.” One morning in March, the director of Sciences Po, Mathias Vicherat, who had taken office promising to combat sexual violence, resigned months after he and his ex-girlfriend went to the police accusing each other of domestic abuse. Vicherat became the school’s third consecutive director to leave (one in a coffin) in the shadow of personal or professional transgressions.

His departure was only Sciences Po’s second-biggest controversy of the week, behind a dispute between students over the war in Gaza. That row prompted French prime minister Gabriel Attal to make the 700-yard journey from his official residence to his old school’s council meeting to underline “the absolute necessity that the university remains a place of…healthy debates that respect the values of the republic.” Along with a spate of other recent scandals, the turmoil amounts to the most significant upheaval on Sciences Po’s campus in its 152-year history.

Meanwhile, President Emmanuel Macron, an alum, is busy committing patricide against his other alma mater, the tiny Ecole Nationale d’Administration, or ENA, where he went after Sciences Po. ENA has produced four of the last six occupants of the Elysée Palace, but it has become so widely despised as an elite nest that Macron pledged to abolish it. It turns out by abolish he just meant rename.

The French campus wars, like the American ones, are about much more than education. The French elite is fighting for survival, caught in a kind of civil war between generations, as well as the anger of the excluded 99 percent. The one percent, as in the U.S., has long been prepared in exclusive schools, which like the elite itself now face a choice: reform or die.

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