Once Upon A Time In France: Education Hiccups, Eliminating Elites, And Filthy Paris
Dreaming of the Canal Du Midi
(Note: Due to travel for family reasons, this newsletter is late and there will be no Thursday installment. However, I will no doubt have lots of humorous tales of life in suburban Kansas City for future editions. Regular publication will resume next week.)
This past week marked the start of France’s 3rd national confinement. That included a hybrid plan which closed schools but in a very limited fashion which I thought was somewhat clever even if it scrambled our own lives a bit.
To understand how, a little context is necessary. France is generous with vacations, with students getting two weeks off after approximately six weeks of school. For the February and April vacations, the nation is divided into 3 regions, and each region has 2 different weeks spread over a month. (Pay attention. There will be a quiz on this later!) The second week of one region’s vacation overlaps the first week of another region’s vacation.
To limit the impact of the latest school closings, the government decided to give everyone the same two weeks of vacation: This week and the next. Then, they added one week of distance learning before and after vacation. In theory, schools will reopen for in-person teaching the week of May 3.
This meant that our region’s two-week vacation was advanced one week, and so we had to rush to adjust our plans. But we weren’t the only ones caught unprepared. Although France has been somewhat successfully organizing distance learning since the first lockdown last year, day one last week was a disaster with the various distance learning platforms crashing. Our son tried to access the platforms for a couple of hours on Tuesday morning (Monday was a holiday), and then eventually gave up.
Turns out he was not alone. Across the country, national and regional school platforms were inaccessible for much of the first day.
The national platform, CNED, reported that it was the victim of a denial of service attack or DDOS. That means external hackers flooded the system with requests to overload it and prevent students and teachers from getting online. This was the latest major cyberattack the country has suffered this year, which has included hacks of hospitals. Still, that led to questions about why defenses and the systems were not better prepared.
Meanwhile, a separate system used by regions was also inaccessible. That touched off a war of words between the government and webhost OVHCloud. Readers may recall that the latter suffered a major fire at one of its data centers earlier this year, taking down a large number of websites across the country for several days.
Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer pointed the finger of blame at OVHCloud. There turned out to be one weakness to this assertation: OVHCloud was not the host of the systems in question. It turns out Amazon Web Services is the host, according to the OVHCloud CEO.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, Thursday (April 8) was the deadline for high school seniors to finish uploading all their university application information to a centralized system known as Parcoursup. The system is the perennial source of controversy for the way students get selected and the confusion around how those decisions are made. But adding to that annual anxiety, Parcoursup went down near the application deadline.
Eventually, the systems all came back online, though access remained spotty. Still, at a time when frustration over the government’s handling of the pandemic is growing, the series of digital stumbles hardly inspired confidence.
Eliminating Elites
Speaking of schools, President Emmanuel Macron delivered a shock when he announced that he would be closing the Ecole nationale d’administration. The ENA, which Macron attended, is basically the training ground for France’s civil service and political class.
While the idea originally was to create greater access to these positions, the ENA over time became an elitist institution. Matthew Fraser had a great Twitter thread that starts here about the ENA’s history:
As Kim Willsher of The Guardian further explains:
Founded by Gen Charles de Gaulle in October 1945 with the idea of breaking the upper-class hold over France’s higher echelons, ending nepotism and making the civil service more democratic, it has instead become a byword for an establishment elite and been accused by critics of encouraging groupthink.
Macron told a gathering of state officials, including ambassadors, prefects – and a number of énarques, as graduates of the school are called – that it would be replaced by a new establishment called the Institute for Public Service (ISP). However, potential students would still be required to pass a tough entrance exam and follow a specific study syllabus.
The goal is again to make government jobs more accessible and competitive. Symbolically, this feels like one of the central themes of Macron’s candidacy and presidency. He ran as an outsider (despite being an insider), creating his own political party and then attracting a broad range of supporters who won legislative seats despite having no background in government or civil service.
And yet, from the start, critics have tagged Macron as an elitist and “president of the rich.” He’s never likely to satisfy those critics. But the concept of meritocracy is about to get a new test in France. In a country that embraces égalité, one would think it would be an easy sell.
Filthy Paris
As long as I’ve lived in France, the nation’s capital city has been waging campaigns to clean up its streets. Whether it’s convincing people to stop throwing their cigarette butts on the street, or picking up their dog’s poop, Paris has been trying to present a neat and tidy image to the flux of foreign visitors.
But last week, the hashtag #saccageparis started trending. In this case, saccage could be translated several ways, including “trashed” or “rampage,” as in the sacking of Rome. In this case, locals seemed to be fed up with the increasingly dirty streets and the lack of garbage service that had left trash cans overflowing.
City officials issued a stout defense of their efforts as one does these days with a tweetstorm:
Noting that cleaning teams had been cut by 10% due to the pandemic, the city also claimed that many of the photos were either dated or taken just before cleaning crews had arrived. And the team of Mayor Anne Hidalgo also insisted it was a political smear job by right-wing opponents (Though some journalists debunked the argument that it was a political hit job.).
Hidalgo, a member of the Socialist Party, won re-election last summer with the support of the Green Party. And she’s ramping up her campaign for the presidential election in the Spring of 2022. So obviously images of a filthy Paris would be a black eye for the would-be president.
Dreaming Of France
The Canal du Midi runs 240 km from Toulouse to just near the Mediterranean Sea. The canal was considered one of the 17th centuries engineering marvels, though it never quite worked as intended. There is a bike path of mixed quality that runs along the canal, and our family spent 5 days riding the length of it. I’ve been intending to write up our adventure, so for now, will just offer this little glimpse.
Worth noting is that regional governments have allocated money to build a more durable bike path in the coming years. So for riders of all levels, this is a trip worth putting on your list.
Great Reads
Two weeks ago came the great secret dinner scandal, which continues to make daily headlines. Rather than hiding for cover, one of those accused of organizing these dinner parties, Pierre-Jean Chalençon, suddenly became ubiquitous on TV and Twitter, a clown prince of cuisine insisting variously that it wasn’t him or that it was an April Fool’s joke.
Hilarious. Right until police took Chalençon and chef Christophe Leroy and in for questioning for possibly violating Covid rules. According to The Local:
The two men, along with Leroy’s spouse, were interrogated for several hours by investigators before being released.
“At this stage of the investigation, there is no evidence that indicates any members of the government took part in the dinners being investigated,” prosecutors said.
Meanwhile, things are going from bad to worse for France’s winemakers. A deep freeze hit their vineyards, threatening the grapes and sending them into a panic. To keep out the cold, the vineyards turned to the traditional method of placing candles near the vines to keep them warm:
Unfortunately, the candles only had minimal impact, and the government is declaring it a disaster and putting together a bailout package.
In other gastronomic news, Lindsey Tramuta writing for Vice had an uplifting story about chefs and food organizations banding together to help university students who have been suffering during the pandemic. And at the other end of the culinary spectrum, Lauren Collins of The New Yorker details the rise of French Tacos, by far France’s most revolting food trend:
In the American imagination, French cuisine can seem a static entity—the inevitable and unchanging expression of a culture as codified by Carême and Escoffier and interpreted by Julia Child. Bœuf bourguignon, quiche Lorraine, onion soup, chocolate mousse. Although these dishes remain standbys, alongside pizza and couscous and other adopted staples, French cuisine can be as fickle as any. The latest rage has nothing to do with aspics or emulsions. What are French people eating right now? The answer is as likely to be French tacos as anything else.
Chris O’Brien
Overland Park, Kansas (temporarily)