It is an earthquake in the hushed environment of diplomacy. By next year, 900 senior officials from the Quai d’Orsay will lose their status to become “state administrator”, such as prefects, sub-prefects or finance inspectors. Ambassadors and consuls will now be chosen from this pool of mostly interchangeable profiles, or may come from the private sector, in any case they will no longer have a specific sector. The text published this Sunday, April 17 at Official newspaper signs the death warrant of the professional diplomat.
It concerns two bodies at the heart of the workings of French diplomacy: that of foreign affairs advisers and that of plenipotentiary ministers.. But like the abolition of the ENA, it is not a surprise, it is the consequence of the overhaul of the senior civil service promised by Emmanuel Macron in 2017 and emerged from the closet after the crisis of “yellow vests”. It is about putting an end to corporatism and “lifetime careers”.
Except that the interested parties do not agree. The minister responsible for implementing this reform, Amélie de Montchalin, explains in vain that the French diplomatic network will remain “one of the largest in the world”, the first concerned see it as a form of downgrading, a weakening of France’s external action. “What will diplomacy be without diplomats?” This is the question asked by the 150 signatories of a column published in November in the newspaper The world. In the midst of the war in Ukraine, some also consider the moment very badly chosen.
However, we have already seen ambassadors who had not followed the official route: writers in particular, Jean-Christophe Rufin, ambassador to Senegal between 2007 and 2010, Daniel Rondeau, in Malta from 2008 to 2011, Olivier Poivre d’Arvor, in Tunisia from 2016 to 2020.
But this kind of appointment does not always go over very well. Remember the controversy around Philippe Besson in 2018. Like many early supporters, the writer was present at La Rotonde alongside Emmanuel Macron on the evening of the first round of the presidential election. He had had access to the backstage of the campaign and had drawn a book judged very complimentary, A novel character published by Julliard. A year later, he was proposed for the post of consul in Los Angeles, a position with little exposure and much coveted.
At the time, the government spokesman, Benjamin Griveaux, congratulated himself: “different profiles are needed he said, come from civil society, from the world of culture (…) from the world of business, it will be good for our administrations“. Except that the accusations of cronyism weighed a lot. The Council of State ended up canceling his appointment by canceling the decree which allowed to add to the list of jobs for which the appointment was left to the decision of the government about twenty consuls general (Barcelona, Bombay, Boston, Cape Town, Jeddah, Dubai, Edinburgh, Erbil, Frankfurt, Hong-Kong, Istanbul, Kyoto, Los Angeles, Marrakech, Milan, Munich, Quebec, Saint-Petersburg, Sao Paulo, Shanghai and Sydney).
The fear today is to have profiles that are too close to power: this is what the politicians of the right and the left say who appropriately took up the subject before the second round of the presidential election. “France saw its diplomatic network destroyed after several centuries. The 2nd in the world. Promo buddies will be able to be named. Immense sadness”regrets Jean-Luc Mélenchon on Twitter. “President, I will restore a status of diplomat based on merit and the national interest”promises Marine Le Pen on the same social network.
But critics also come from former diplomats who believe that this reform is a mistake.
The Official Journal publishes the abolition of the Diplomatic Corps. France will therefore be the only major Western country without professional diplomats. A story of several centuries comes to an end. The door is now open to American-style nominations.
— Gerard Araud (@GerardAraud) April 18, 2022
Gérard Araud, former French ambassador to the United States, regrets the end of a two-century tradition that dates back to Napoleon. It is, he says, the open door “for American nominations”. In other words, the recasing of personalities chosen more for their proximity to the powerful than for their skills.