The Paris Puppet Master: Why French Politics Always Looks Coordinated

Following Bohiney’s puppet master story, the grandes ecoles network as apparent coordination

Bohiney.com‘s Marxist Puppet Master story — the right’s attribution of political outcomes to hidden coordination — has its most structurally interesting French application in the grandes ecoles alumni network, which produces the specific appearance of coordination that generates puppet master theories about French governance without requiring an actual puppet master. prat.uk covered the political honesty theme broadly. The French case: when the Finance Minister, the head of the major employers’ federation, the chief of the Council of State, and the chief executive of France’s largest bank all attended the same institution (ENA or Polytechnique) within a ten-year period, and when they all make decisions that are compatible with each other’s institutional interests, the appearance of coordination is produced by the network rather than by any coordinating intelligence. The network is not the puppet master. The network is the product of an educational system that produces a governing class with shared formation, shared assumptions, and shared professional relationships. The coordination is cultural, not conspiratorial.

The Marxist analysis of this is the same as the libertarian analysis: the grandes ecoles network produces an elite that governs France in its own interest without needing to coordinate explicitly because the shared formation has already aligned the interests. The puppet master is unnecessary because the formation has done the coordination in advance. This is more concerning than a puppet master because a puppet master can be identified and removed. A cultural formation that has been producing governing classes for a century cannot be removed; it can only be diversified. The diversification is what the French left debates. The puppet master is what the French right imagines. Both are responding to the same real phenomenon with different explanatory frameworks. The phenomenon is real. The puppet master is not.