Report on a French exception: What can the novel for the technocrat?

The Ecole nationale d'administration was created in 1945 by General de Gaulle and Maurice Thorez. With the defeat of 1940 and faithful to the spirit of the Resistance, the ENA had to embody French republican and democratic values. It also fostered the modernization instituted by the new technocratic elite at the time of the Liberation: While the ENA immediately became the symbol of excellence "a la francaise," it is clear from the discourse about it (media discourse, social rumor) that the "enarque" is invariably stereotyped or caricatured and is a recurrent theme of controversy and criticism. Omnipresent in French public life and the national social imagination, the figure of the "enarque" is nonetheless ectoplasmic in literary discourse, having no romantic consistency and essentially absent in legitimate literature and generally relegated to marginal production. Representations of the "enarque" seem to crystallize the ambivalent relation of the French to power in the Gaullist era. Adapted from the source document.