Biography|Frédéric Saint-Geours — The Léon Blum Year at the Old ENA on Saints-Pères

People now point at 13 rue de l'Université when they talk about the Paris ENA.

That building received students only from 1978.

Saint-Geours had already left.

He belonged to the promotion Léon Blum, which sat from 1973 to 1975 in the older house of the school: the Hôtel de La Meilleraye at 56 rue des Saints-Pères.

The hôtel particulier, built for Charles de La Porte in the seventeenth century, was the ENA campus from the late 1940s until the move across the quartier.

Sciences Po owned the walls and lent them to the school. The two institutions shared a garden.

The class list is the public fact. Martine Aubry, Pascal Lamy and Alain Minc sat in the same promotion. His father had been an énarque of 1949. His elder brother Jean-Philippe had come out in 1973.

The school did not invent the family. It certified a path already chosen.

Behind the ENA year sit the earlier addresses that French notices always stack in the same order: lycée Carnot, lycée Louis-le-Grand, a licence in economics, and the diploma of the Institut d'études politiques de Paris.

Those buildings still stand. The date that can be pinned without guesswork is the 1975 exit from this courtyard.

He then entered the Finance Ministry and, after 1981, the cabinets of Louis Mermaz and Henri Emmanuelli.

The private-sector turn came only in 1986, when the first cohabitation closed that ministerial door and PSA opened another.

A visitor to number 56 today finds Sciences Po, not the ENA plate.

The school itself later moved to Strasbourg and then vanished into the Institut national du service public.

The courtyard is still the place where the Léon Blum class was trained.

Photo: Eugène Atget, public domain, portal of the Hôtel de La Meilleraye, 1909, via Wikimedia Commons

Portrait: MEDEF, CC BY-SA 2.0, 27 August 2008, via Wikimedia Commons