A Perfect Frenchman, Part 2

The Man Who Tried to Buy the World: Jean-Marie Messier and Vivendi Universal
by Martine Orange

(Page 4 of 6)

Although the Alpine university town played a leading part in the turbulent events of May 1968, the social upheaval bypassed the Messier household. They talked about the economy, which was still at that point enjoying the prolonged postwar boom, known as the "trente glorieuses" - the thirty glorious years. Strongly Catholic, the family supported social causes, notably those in favor of the handicapped after the death of Jean-Marie Messier's disabled elder sister. Otherwise, the most memorable event in his childhood would seem to have been a trip at the age of ten to Rome, where he sang in a visiting choir at St. Peter's Basilica and sat on a friend's shoulders to watch the pope say Mass. Without stretching himself, Messier obtained his scientific baccalaureate at the age of sixteen from a Grenoble lycée. Perhaps through lack of anything better to do, he appeared condemned to collect diplomas: the literary baccalaureate followed the scientific one a year later.

After the normal two years of grueling preparatory classes, he was offered a place at the Ecole Centrale, a good university in Paris. He was rejected, however, by the more prestigious Ecole Polytechnique. "For the first time in my life I felt challenged," he said, describing the setback as his personal "Rosebud."3 Against the advice of his teacher, who recommended that he settle for the certain offer rather than risk being refused again by the university of his choice, he decided to work at his mathematics for another year in the preparatory classes. His determination was rewarded: "Those were my best years. We had total freedom in all subjects," he said.

For more than two hundred years the Ecole Polytechnique had represented the acme of the French educational system and had imbued a sense of destiny in its pupils. Its statutes proclaimed its aim as being "to train men with the aptitude to become, after specialization, the top managers of the Nation." The institution was controlled by the ministry of defense, and its students wore a ceremonial uniform that included a sword and a distinctive two-cornered hat. They marched in the annual July 14 Bastille Day parade in Paris and undertook a year's compulsory military service at the start of the three-year course. An extraordinary mystique, a series of special rituals, and a private language tie those who have attended the school, known as "X."

On graduation from the Ecole Polytechnique, Messier contemplated going to business school in the United States. However, this plan collapsed after Total, the French oil group, refused to sponsor him through Harvard Business School - because, according to Messier, its analysis of his handwriting had revealed a worrying lack of ambition. In any event, Messier's final grades at the Ecole Polytechnique were good enough for him to go directly to the Ecole Nationale d'Administration without taking its competitive entrance exam. By entering ENA, Messier joined an even more exclusive cohort. Located close to government ministries in central Paris, ENA has since its creation by General Charles de Gaulle after the Liberation of France in 1944 accepted just 120 of France's brightest students each year. All university graduates, they are trained over twenty-seven months to hold the highest positions in France.

Known as énarques, these young men - rarely are there any women - can count themselves members of the most ruthlessly effective old boys' club in Europe. Enarques automatically use the familiar tu form rather than the formal vous when speaking to fellow graduates, irrespective of their ages. In a culture obsessed with secrecy, the closely guarded ENA alumni directory, a Who's Who of the country's leading decision makers, carries the home phone numbers of nearly all of its graduates for their exclusive use - right up to the contact details for presidents and prime ministers. They are represented in the highest offices of state: the current president, Jacques Chirac, is an énarque, as were three of the last four prime ministers: Edouard Balladur, who occupied Matignon (the prime minister's official residence) between 1993 and 1995; Alain Juppé, between 1995 and 1997; and Lionel Jospin, between 1997 and 2001. Enarques dominate the senior ranks of France's powerful civil service and public companies. They currently run about half the companies listed on the Paris stock exchange.

The Parisian school's dominance of French public life has led in recent years to growing criticism from parliamentarians eager to loosen that stranglehold. "Spain has the ETA, Ireland has the IRA, and France has the ENA," some of the school's critics like to say. When French populists need a target, ENA has long been a favorite. But during the 2002 electoral season, hostility toward énarques became more intense. Members of parliament debated ending ENA's state funding, while newspaper columnists dueled over the merits of the French system of elite formation. The college's ethos was at odds with the growing feeling that the government needed to heed "la France d'en bas," the term coined by Jean-Pierre Raffarin, Lionel Jospin's emphatically non-énarque successor, to denote the overtaxed "little guy." A survey commissioned by ENA in 2002 showed that 66 percent of French people believed énarques had too much political power. It also canvassed énarques currently in business or government, who agreed that the school bred an "aristocracy" and "arrogance among the elites."

Messier's classmates recall him as smiling, likable, helpful, but not especially impressive. Short and stout, licks of brown hair lolling onto his forehead, he appeared ill at ease with sophisticated students from the smart Parisian lycées, who formed two-thirds of the intake. Unused to debating the comparative merits of Raymond Aron and Jean-Paul Sartre and irredeemably untrendy, he settled the question once and for all in his own mind. He was provincial and proud of it. From then on, he ducked the cultural questions that mattered to Parisian intellectuals. He became a highly focused, efficient machine. At ENA, Messier had a reputation for dropping people who were no longer useful to his career and for putting his considerable ability to charm to work only on those in positions of power. He had set his sights on graduating at the top of his class so that he could become an inspecteur des finances. This provoked him to make lengthy and often redundant interventions in the classroom, where being seen to be engaged with the material was an important step toward securing a good grade. Familiar with such tactics, Alain Minc, then teaching at ENA, called Messier to his office to calm him down. He assured the student that he had noticed him and that he would have a good mark at the end of the year: There was no need to draw attention to himself.

After leaving ENA in 1982, Messier married Antoinette Fleisch, the level-headed daughter of a French general, and secured the place in the finance inspectorate he so wanted. There he encountered an even more exclusive and tight-knit corps of politically connected public servants trained in the art of implementing ministerial orders. These were the storm troopers of the French public service. At short notice, they would find themselves parachuted to take over branches of the sprawling state, with the expectation that their brilliant minds would rapidly solve the problems facing lesser mortals. They dominated the treasury and the ministry of finance, and moved silkily in and out of the public and private commercial sectors.

Just as Messier joined their ranks, another inspecteur des finances, Jean-Yves Haberer, was drawing up plans for the nationalization of a large number of French financial groups. Even as Margaret Thatcher was embarking upon a pioneering privatization program in the United Kingdom, François Mitterrand's France was heading in the other direction, with a policy of "socialism in one country." Haberer would later find himself rewarded with the chairmanship of Crédit Lyonnais, the state-owned bank. In many ways, his calamitous reign at Crédit Lyonnais, which collapsed after he bankrolled Giancarlo Parretti, a former Italian waiter, in his purchase of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film studio, was a prototype for Jean-Marie Messier's at Vivendi Universal a decade later. "With Crédit Lyonnais, I was trying to build the big French and European bank that would strengthen our national identity," Haberer later explained to a parliamentary inquiry. Replace the word "bank" with "media group" and multiply the sums of money involved by ten, and the idea is the same.

It was difficult to stand out in a group that counted among its members a president of the Republic, several prime ministers, governors of the Bank of France, and all the principal bankers of the place de Paris. In the evenings, he would go to a small club, the Association pour l'etude des Expériences Etrangères, known as the A3E - the Association for the Study of Foreign Experiences - where he would encounter the future power brokers of the French business world.* Every Sunday the group would meet at the home of Charles de Croisset, future chairman of CCF bank. It would include the likes of Baudouin Prot, managing director of BNP Paribas, the French banking group, and Nicolas Bazire, who would later succeed Messier as an adviser to Edouard Balladur before becoming a director of LVMH. Against the backdrop of the left-wing government's nationalizations, the group's discussions focused on the need for a rapid liberalization of the French economy. When it came to his turn to present a paper, Messier chose a theme of Margaret Thatcher's privatization policy in the UK. The subject was topical. Messier could not fail to be noticed. Jacques Friedmann, an inspecteur des finances who acted as a headhunter for the political center-right, was the first to spot him. A close adviser to Jacques Chirac, Friedmann had discovered Alain Juppé and persuaded him to embark upon a career in politics that would see him rise to become prime minister. Barely thirty years old, Messier, with Friedmann's imprimatur, soon found himself devising the opposition's privatization program.

Copyright © 2003 Martine Orange. All rights reserved. This excerpt, or any parts thereof, may not be reproduced without permission.