I just found out in an article in Le Monde that French elite school students are paid to go to study.
The article asks the question “should we still pay our grandes écoles students?”, as if it was something everyone knew about. I didn’t. Quite surprised, I put my ignorance on the account of my absence from France for a long time. But I asked around, and it turns out that most people I asked weren’t aware of it.
The rationale behind those students getting paid up to 2300 euros a month, is that their added value to the administration of the French state is worth paying them to study, if they sign up to dedicate ten years of their careers to public functions. By that rationale, shouldn’t we pay students aspiring to be teachers, fire fighters and policemen?
Clearly, no.
Why?
Because they’re replaceable.
Because these people aren’t part of the “elite”.
There is a cult around French elite schools that seems to make French people shake in their boots at the utterance of their names. Telling most French people that you’ve studied at “X” (meaning Polytechnique), at HEC, or another one of those, gives you unequaled respect and aura among most French people
Ask anyone outside of France, and most will smile, nod and reply, “OK, great. What school was that again?”
I don’t buy into that grandes Ecoles cult. If anything, this unique. single-track system has crippled some of the country’s potential for decades. The private sector in France is playing catch up with American companies for diversity. They are very far behind, but are still light years away from where the French public sector stands. It is completely paralysed. Without even mentioning gender or ethnic diversity, our “elite” clearly lacks diversity of thought, both in the private and public sectors.
Just looking at the performance and place of French technology companies in the world is a great example of how this model has fallen behind. The bourgeois elite is there to keep their old boys’ network in the top places of government, with a blatant disregard for pragmatism.
When our elites fall too far behind, their approach is a marketing campaign. One of the latest ones is the “French Tech” label, a branding strategy to sell the tech “génie français” to the rest of the world, notably across the Atlantic. I had the chance to be invited to a Japan-France summit on innovation at Station F, the epicentre of French tech innovation. Surrounded by state-of-the-art glass office space, where overpaid hipsters played foosball and video games on couches scattered among the occasional cubicle, our secretary of state for digital technologies made an underwhelming speech in subpar English to the audience, touting the “French Tech”. The Japanese delegation seemed unimpressed.
The event was a time for French and Japanese startup companies to show their new projects and prototypes. Among what the Japanese companies showed were different products, including an exoskeleton to help disabled people walk again, directly connected with a chip to the patient’s brain to neurologically control it, and a nanotech-based material that was as thin as silk and more resistant than kevlar.
The French, on their end, presented, among their most impressive French-tech backed innovations, what essentially could be summarised as a 60-pound Google Home on wheels that could follow you around the house, and an obscure AI algorithm, which supposedly could visually recognise counterfeit luxury bags, without the slightest explanation as to how it worked, or proof whether it did.
In my humble opinion, the French government, and at large, the European governments have failed at developing some key strategic technologies, despite their obsessive grooming of a so-called “elite”.
This country has created some key innovations, from vaccines to the microchip you can find on every credit card today. But this tendency of the French government, and the French elite, to always try to get credit for everything, to regulate and to patronise innovators with a top-down approach, beside driving me crazy, is counter-productive.
Today, an innovator from the south of France known as Franky Zapata will attempt to fly with his new invention, the Flyboard, across the English channel. His name seems to come out of a bad comic book, his board looks like an invention right out of science-fiction, to a point where even after watching videos of it on the internet a few years back, I couldn’t be 100% sure about their authenticity. Last week, Zapata demonstrated his new invention in front of the president, who slowly applauded him. This confirmed that it was indeed true.
I just watched an interview of Franky. He is simple, candid, and explained his path to developing a technology. When asked if he was an inventor, a businessman, or a stuntsman, he replied that he’s a jack of all trades and a problem solver. He has an iterative approach to researching and developing, and works with a team of people he loves. He doesn’t have a fancy title, and he doesn’t talk about bottom line, corporate vision, business plans, or paradigm shifts.
Zapata never went to university. He never got paid by my tax euros to study the technology he developed.
He did, however, had to deal with a lot of administrative hurdles on the French maritime authorities when attempting to cross the channel, so much so that he had to review his entire plan at the last minute. He’s already had to go to the US numerous times to test his prototype due to strict restrictions in France (flight height, etc.).
I wonder if our “elites” will give him room to grow or manage to make another innovator flee to another country.
Today, he is touted as a great innovator made in France. But no matter how hard I squint in front of my TV screen as he whizzes past the cameras, I can’t see a “French Tech” label on his Flyboard.
Good luck today Franky.