dFor some thirty years, the left and right of government have agreed on the necessary control of state personnel expenses. In particular, this took the form of workforce reduction or stabilization policies. The first with the general review of Nicolas Sarkozy’s public policies; the latter with the modernization of public action under François Hollande. Emmanuel Macron’s first five-year mandate, with the 2022 public action committee, was to return to reductions, but a double social (“yellow vests”) and health crisis (Covid-19) returned it to stabilization.
Ultimately, it is the choice of the saved or affected sectors as a priority that distinguishes the left from the right when they are in government. As far as educational policies are concerned, this goes back at least to the IIImy Republic. This regime made public education an issue of national policy and an area of direct intervention by the State. At the risk of making a somewhat hasty summary, let’s say that the Republicans in power assumed their political responsibilities.
In 1889, accepting their choice of compulsory and secular primary education, aware of the difficult burden that this would place on the municipalities, they appointed teachers as officials. The right, then still largely anti-republican, opposed this policy. An accusation published by Viscount Georges d’Avenel in the Two worlds review allows us to measure it. To denounce the civil service, a scourge for which he blames the Republic, he pointed to school policy: “To say that society owes free primary school to all minds is an equal, if not greater, paradox than saying that it owes free soup to all stomachs. »
55,000 fewer teachers between 2007 and 2012
Since then, with some ups and downs, the right has largely joined the Republican regime and explicit calls for the privatization of national education have become marginal. However, educational policies remain a matter of distinction, of which the decisions made in terms of budget savings are very revealing.
During Sarkozy’s five-year term, national education was not exempt from savings. In 2012, an evaluation of the general review of public policies, prepared jointly by the administration, social affairs and finance inspectorate, highlighted that it had provided up to its proportion of state personnel, that is, slightly less than half of the job cuts made. outside. The announcements of the plan to reduce 4,000 teachers by the Barnier government are part of a return to Sarkozy’s logic, in an apparently attenuated version. We could even consider that, ultimately, 4,000 places, although the number of students would decrease, is not that much. However, it is quite the opposite.
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