France has a new government and a female Prime Minister at its head. Elisabeth Borne. 31 years since a woman had held this position since Edith Cresson. A widely commented appointment this week, but in Social issue today, we are interested in the unique career of the Prime Minister, with the sociologist Jean Viard, research director at the CNRS.
During her transfer of power with Jean Castex, Monday May 16, Elisabeth Borne pronounced this sentence: “I would like to dedicate this nomination to all the little girls by telling them: go after your dreams.
franceinfo: Jean Viard, for you, the career of Elisabeth Borne, pupil of the Nation, is representative of what is called republican success. Why ?
John Viard: This is almost what interests me the most. A lady is good, but it is an exemplary journey. She is a daughter of Dutch Jewish refugees, a family that was in the death camps. His father was in Auschwitz, his grandfather and his uncle were in Sobibor. They didn’t come back. But it’s really those Jews who arrived in France before the war, who were actually resistant, more or less active, and who ended up in the death camps. Some survived, his father necessarily survived, then died quite quickly.
So, Elisabeth Borne finds herself a ward of the nation. She will go up the ladder and go to Polytechnique, just after girls are accepted there because before, there were no girls at Polytechnique. She is in the first generations to be able to go to the big school. It’s almost a model, one could say of the chance given to people who start relatively low in society, to go up, noticing one thing: when we look at the profiles of young people who come out of their milieu, the being children of immigrants is one of the criteria of dynamism. The fact of having moved is also one of the criteria of dynamism.
Basically, when you look closely at children in general, if you broaden the film in which the Prime Minister is one of the actresses, obviously, particularly for women – scientific studies for women at the time was almost non-existent and even today, God knows if we have problems – and there, we see this journey which is exciting. We mustn’t forget the suffering, we mustn’t forget the memory of Auschwitz. Let us indeed think of Simone Veil. There, there is also this trauma, this resilience, as Boris Cyrulnik would say. So there are all these forces behind.
But afterwards, if we look at the young French people of today, we always say: there is no more Republican lift. In reality, if you take the 10% of the poorest families, there are indeed 69% of their children who live better than them, at 28 – we take the measurement at 28 – who earn more than them . That is to say that the idea that we are all solely of social reproduction, I apologize, is very largely false. And what are the criteria? The criteria is either parents who have completed higher education, even if afterwards economically they are very disadvantaged or marginal, etc. They are children of immigrants, they are families in territorial mobility. So they tore themselves out of their framework, and then the fourth criterion which is deeply unequal to him, is that at 18, they lived in Île de France.
So there are criteria which are linked to the family trajectory, and to the struggles of these families to live, there is a trajectory which is quite scandalous, it is that on the whole the children ofIsle of France are privileged compared to the provincials. There is a real issue here. And then, let’s not forget one thing, which is that there is obviously the will, the work of those who have succeeded. They didn’t go up on their own, they worked like crazy. Somehow, that gives them a certain idea of work, and I think that the Prime Minister is somewhat in this vision of work very strongly with all the reforms she has made. That too, of course, matters.
On the policies that have also been carried out, we have the feeling today that following Elisabeth Borne’s career is a little easier. Were there systems that were put in place in schools, especially in the Grandes Ecoles too?
It’s easier in a way, but it’s debatable, because at the same time, look at the international rankings etc., we’re not always the best, so we haven’t necessarily progressed, especially in mathematics. Look at the mistake that was made of removing math from high school classes. So we have the question of the scientific training of young French people, of their passion for science, whether it be mathematics, but science in general.
The sciences, and the natural sciences, are a major challenge in the climate revolution in which we are engaged. So we have a lot to do there. But you know, it’s important to say that the machine is currently working quite well, but it needs to be improved. But not that it doesn’t work, because it doesn’t.