By Hugh Schofield

Supporters of President Jacques Chirac in the French parliament are calling for the abolition of one of the country's most sacred institutions - the elite Ecole Nationale d'Administration, or ENA.

Founded by General Charles de Gaulle in 1945 to provide a generation of technocrats to rebuild the country after World War II, ENA processes a super-select of no more than 100 young men and women every year.

The future of France in the family of great nations depends on our capacity for initiative - a value totally at variance with an enarque culture

Jean-Michel Fourgous and Herve Novelli

They invariably move into top echelons of the centralised French power-structure, running ministries and foreign embassies or serving as departmental "prefets" - or governors - in the regions.

Six out of the last nine prime ministers of France have been "enarques" - as the school's graduates are known - and two of the last three presidents, including Chirac.

Under the last Socialist government, eight out of 17 ministers were from the school.

But therein lies the rub.

Enarques may be responsible for the great successes of the last 50 years - the railways, the health service etc. - but increasingly they are also blamed for many of the problems of modern French society.

Arrogant

They are perceived as arrogant, incapable of change and caught in a self-serving network of interests with the political class which many of them go on to join.

In an amendment to a spending bill going through parliament, two members of Chirac's UMP (Union for the Presidential Majority) party spelled out the case.

"Half a century on, we cannot avoid the conclusion that ENA has produced nothing more than an omnipotent 'caste' capable of only one thing: planning its members' career-paths," said Jean-Michel Fourgous and Herve Novelli.

"The future of France in the family of great nations depends on our capacity for initiative - a value totally at variance with an enarque culture based on zero risk and suspicious of any idea of competition or power-sharing," they said.

ENA - for many - epitomises a very French malaise, which consists in the utter disenchantment of ordinary people with the elites who run their lives.

This year's presidential election - with the shock breakthrough of the far-right - was in many ways the culmination of this effect, and it is no coincidence that pressure to overhaul the system comes under a government born of that trauma.

Centre-right politics

Unique in recent French political annals, the centre-right government of Jean-Pierre Raffarin contains only a handful of enarques.

Raffarin himself is very proudly not a product of the system, and he has deliberately forged an image as representative of a France "from bottom-up," at odds with the rarefied world of the capital.

Fourgous and Novelli have backed a proposition that would cut ENA's budget so dramatically that it would be forced to close after the current students have graduated.

Others want a more gradual erosion.

They are unlikely to get their way, because the government is reluctant to eradicate so massive a pillar of the French establishment.

But reform, at least, may be on the way.