An anthropologist at the Secretariat General

My fortnight at the Secretariat General of the Ministry for the Economy, Finance and the Recovery

By Marc Abélès
 

My journey to the centre of the Secretariat General of the economic and finance ministries started on a day in September 2020, a year that will remain indelibly marked by the great pandemic and its many repercussions. It was a bright sunny morning as reception pointed me in the direction of the offices in the Colbert building, a colossal edifice running for hundreds of metres perpendicular to the Rue de Bercy before dropping anchor directly in the Seine. I was about to discover my expedition’s port of call: a vast chamber housing the Secretariat to the Secretary General and the Deputy Secretary General. The Secretariat is akin to a hive where the telephone is always ringing, the photocopier forever humming, memos and other circulars constantly arriving and being printed out, and signature books hovering pending signature. Yet despite the bustle, I always found a warm welcome accommodating to the questions of this novice eager to understand and find his way around this strange new world of what is known as the Bercy administration.

For the ethnologist, the place and its occupants appeared as an invitation to the virtually initiatory discovery of this organisation – or, better still, this network of relations and interactions that is the core of the reactor in this uniform and multifarious ministry. Uniform in that the economic and finance administration looks at first glance like a powerful bloc steeped in a history reaching back through the ages. Multifarious in view of the diversity of occupations found in this administrative melting pot and the fact that the existence of several ministries reflects the complex reality alluded to by the term ‘economy’.

At the time of this study, the incumbent Minister for the Economy, Finance and the Recovery had no fewer than three ministers delegate (with responsibility for public accounts, industry, and small and medium-sized enterprises) and two ministers of state (with responsibility for digital affairs and electronic communications, and the social, solidarity and responsible economy). As these titles suggest, the focus on finance and industry, SMEs and digital affairs, communications and the social economy is a clear indication of the extent of the reach of this institutional leviathan, which finds itself in the front line of the current crisis. I was informed forthwith that the ministry has 138,000 staff, with 8,000 working in the central administration and the remainder spread nationwide.

I therefore found myself thrown into the heart of this massive machine, in Bercy, inside the mechanism responsible for coordinating its cogs. To my great surprise, I learnt that the Secretariat General had not always been there, as if it did not have a natural place in the ministry’s general structure, a little like an in-law in a large family living under one roof whose members do not feel the need for this extra addition. In the following pages, I will endeavour to describe my understanding of how the Secretariat General is run, its work and its staff’s representations.

As the reader will see, I pay particular attention to the staff’s words and the ideas behind them. I am also aware of the peculiar nature of my study’s time period, starting with wearing a mask all day long and virtually never having seen the faces of those I spoke to, which might appear inconceivable to an ethnologist. The ethnologist’s approach is based precisely on close human contact, on observing non-verbal reactions. Yet these have been abruptly neutralised, which does not make fieldwork easy. I have nevertheless endeavoured to render the everyday atmosphere and exactly how people were dealing with this unprecedented situation. My approach to the Secretariat General is from the perspective of a few main categories around which this universe of practices and meanings revolves: space, time, identity and change.

The space

“Bercy is a real city.” This statement was often heard on the lips of my respondents in one form or another. And it is true that, once past the security checks, you enter an immense closed space devoid of perspective lines. You take Allée Jean-Monnet, which links the ministry’s two main Colbert and Vauban buildings and leads you to the main courtyard where the ministers’ offices stand facing the Pierre-Mendès-France conference centre. From there, you enter what has often been described as a gigantic apartment block, in a wink to council flats, one of the main builders of which was Bercy’s architect Paul Chemetov.

I found the lobby, lifts and then corridors reminiscent of the opening shots of the film L'Auberge espagnole. The director Cédric Klapisch simply filmed the protagonist’s path from reception to the office where he is awaited in fast motion. The effect is gripping and expresses more than words what I felt in the first few days I was there. In the best case scenario, there is something interminable about this path, but you get to your destination in the end. In other words, you quickly get the impression of being in a maze, especially when wandering into the Vauban building or, worse, shuttling backwards and forwards between Colbert and Vauban. It is probably no coincidence that the corridors in the Vauban building contain references to the points of the compass (east, west, etc.). In an interview,¹, Bercy’s architects Paul Chemetov and Borja Huidobro were proud of what they considered to be a success, because they had transformed what was supposed to be “a straightforward administrative office complex” into an “urban event in Paris”. They highlighted both the functional and aesthetic nature of the building.

As an ethnologist, what is striking at first sight is the edifice’s symbolic resonance. It was designed to represent the state in all its majesty and omnipotence, at least such as it was perceived in the late 20th century. It is quite simply a fortress with its moats, drawbridge and mighty stone body. Viewed from above, it cuts a fine figure, like a sort of viaduct standing on piers (the name incidentally given the landmarks represented by the lifts). The prevailing symbolism is one of separation from the outside world. It suggests the centrality of the state, set apart from the surrounding society. The state and its monies are protected. Some critics have compared the ministry to a huge safe. In any case, the image of a citadel comes to mind, like a city within the city, virtually self-sufficient with everything it needs to meet its inhabitants’ daily needs: restaurants, grocer’s, post office and cashpoint.

There is something stern about this architecture. It has been called Brutalist. In any case, it is unsmiling without the slightest trace of humour. Huidobro’s view is that Bercy was intended to embody the triumph of rationality. Should not the modern state at all costs guard against the excesses that led to totalitarianism? As the artist Goya put it, “The slumber of reason breeds monsters.” The great halls that form the ground floor of the main building reinforce the impression of monumentality that you feel on the way to the lifts. It took a long time before anyone thought to cheer them up a bit. “It was like a mausoleum.”

This deliberate severity is impressive. The state is clearly present, intimidating. Unlike dominantly glass architecture, here it is the weight of the stone that prevails: no mirrors, nothing likeable or elegant, but an unashamed note of order, of classicism. And then there are the imposing figures: 195,000 cubic metres of concrete, 15,000 tonnes of steel, 360 metres in length for the Colbert building, 206,000 square metres of office space, and two huge arches measuring 70 metres long and weighing 8,000 tonnes each, one straddling the Rue de Bercy and the other the Quai de Bercy. All of this is duly listed on the ministry website. How can one not be struck by this image of power stoked by reference to the prides of the Grand Siècle: Vauban, Colbert and more recent luminaries such as Monnet and Mendès-France?  And displayed on the ground floor of the ministers’ offices are photographs of the successive holders of the title, consolidating the notion of a remarkable continuity in the exercise of economic authority. The ministry used to be housed in the Louvre, which was enough to endorse its pre-eminence. So it comes as no surprise that every effort has been made to give the new location the same symbolic resonance via another form of monumentality, even though the only remaining reference to the history of Paris is the old octroi building that is now the main entrance to the ministry. All of this literal and figurative weight I felt well before starting down the corridor to my destination.

The Secretariat General staff are spread over different floors. The Secretary General, Deputy Secretary General and various department heads are on the sixth floor. In Bercy, you quickly learn to read the spatial hierarchy and it comes as no surprise to find the SG’s office right next door to the ministers’ offices. Likewise, the location of the Directorate General of the Treasury and Budget Directorate’s finance inspectorates on the upper floors corresponds to their superiority in the ministry, at least in terms of prestige. I stress the word prestige, because political anthropology teaches us to differentiate between prestige and power, since the former is not always a reflection of the latter.

So, as was pointed out to me, the Secretariat General is not at the top of the pyramid. This simple spatial signal is significant. Being on the ministers’ doorstep does not place the structure on first-name terms with the heights of the symbolic hierarchy in the Bercy microcosm. In any case, I very quickly made out from my interviews with staff a certain insistence on verticality and the way in which the ministerial administration’s different strata are ordered in the staff’s representations.

Office size is also indicative of where staff rank in the hierarchy. It is measured by the number of walkways, since partitions can be moved and easily change the occupied space.

On my arrival in Bercy, I noticed a peculiar atmosphere in the air. Among other collateral impacts of the health crisis, some of the communal areas had been rearranged. At lunchtime, staff normally flood into the restaurants beneath the offices. However, in keeping with social distancing requirements, tents had been set up and chairs placed along the Allée Jean-Monnet. This air of conviviality, accentuated by summer-like temperatures, was nonetheless offset by a feeling of being tired (the word came up often) of Coronavirus constraints, the mask imposed even in the open air and the difficulties of living and working in these conditions. After enduring the lockdown that disrupted the work routines of a smooth running machine, the realisation started to dawn as the second wave of the pandemic loomed that the Bercy citadel with all its population density might not be the ideal place to keep the virus at bay. Those long corridors where we rubbed shoulders and all those spaces where we worked together – a product of the gigantism defended by the demiurgic architects – had become risk inductors.

Understanding the language

Getting to grips with an organisation as complex as the Secretariat General calls for a look into both the staff’s day-to-day lives and how they perceive their position in the ministry and the work they are doing when we meet. The first meeting I joined during my time in Bercy was called SG Schedule Briefing. It was a conference call in which the matter was raised of SIRCOM and also a CODIR preparing a seminar at the DITP and a possible speech at the IGPDE. Nothing could have been more natural for all those in the meeting, except myself. I was totally confused by this avalanche of acronyms. I have often observed that, for ethnologists, disorientation starts with words. More often than not, we wind up in societies where we do not speak the language. It took me over a year to become familiar with the language of the Ochollo in southern Ethiopia, my first piece of fieldwork where it was key to be able to understand the people and make myself understood. Nothing of the sort was obviously required in Bercy where I was working in my mother tongue. Yet that first meeting left me feeling out of place again, feeling somewhat “out of the loop” of this stream of acronyms that made their sentences virtually incomprehensible to me, even though they were syntactically well constructed.

I spoke to different staff in the Secretariat General and perused Secretariat General presentation brochures in an endeavour to master the lingo and stave off my discouragement in the face of this form of esotericism. One of these mysterious acronyms, both simple and sleek, discouraging any attempt at translation, was formed by these four letters: SAFI. SAFI comes up a great deal and you quickly understand that it is a key player in the Secretariat General.

SAFI turned out to be the Procurement, Finance and Property Department. The mist started to clear, until the fog rolled in with mention of SAFI 1, SAFI 2 and SAFI 3. These turned out to be the three sub-divisions that make up the department. All of this is in black and white in the Secretariat General’s organisation chart, which you need to keep clearly in mind if you want to follow the meetings.

Despite taking on board these designations, I still sometimes lost the thread, for example when talk turned to the APPACH Procurement Stratco to be held in the coming days. And yet, as I was assured by one respondent, nothing could be simpler: Stratco is a contraction of “strategic committee”. APPACH, however, is not so obvious. It is an information system designed to manage public procurement, excluding national defence and security (over €30 billion).

Reading certain documents accessible on the Internet is a good way to test your level of Bercy language assimilation. For example, the ministry website contains a job description for an “Information Systems Assistant Project Team Manager M/F” declared open for competitive examination in 2017. It makes for edifying reading:

The Procurement Information Systems Bureau (BSI) in the DAE designs, operationalises and steers the public procurement information systems. It provides the MOA for the procurement IS as well as in-house MOE for certain projects in liaison with the functional MOAs (ministries, regional procurement platforms and DAE), in-house economic and finance ministry MOEs (AIFE and SEPI) and external service providers. The BSI’s brief includes management of the APPACH project, an interministerial project in the TOP50 of sensitive government projects.³

Time systems

Understanding how the Secretariat General works entails consideration of the kind of ongoing balancing act it performs between an activity rooted in the urgency of the present and the need to anticipate, to forward plan to fully play its steering and coordination role in the ministry. In other words, time is key to understanding how things play out in this structure and its relations with the other ministry components. My attendance at meetings and interviews enabled me to understand how different time systems combine more or less harmoniously.

To quote the concept introduced by historian François Hartog⁴, presentism appears to be, at least at first glance, the exclusive horizon prevailing over the majority of the Secretariat General’s activities. This situation could also be summed up by the expression, “the need to deliver”. With its responsibility for the ministry’s support functions, the SG is constantly solicited in areas as different as real property, human resources and IT, to name but a few. They have to respond to requests from the central administrations. The very notion of support function refers to these countless key services required to run the machine.

As one of my interviewees told me, “You have to deliver every day, not that you get any thanks for it. However, the slightest ball dropped and your head’s on the block.” In other words, the importance of the role played by the Secretariat General is seen almost in a negative light. This is particularly striking considering that some of these support functions directly concern the activities of the ministers and their private offices: cars, chauffeurs, etc. Consequently, any hiccup could bring down the wrath of Bercy’s supreme leader.

I witnessed a scene that provides a good illustration of this rule of urgency: at the end of a meeting chaired by the Secretary General regarding SG organisational matters, we were interrupted by security chiefs (also an SG responsibility) advised by the minister’s private office that four people had used the minister’s toilets. It was unacceptable that there should be a repeat of this incident and a system needed to be set up immediately to screen people coming in from the Colbert building without going through the ushers in the ministers’ offices.

Clearly, the fact that the SG is solicited in this way and has to respond in real time models its way of working in contrast with the large directorates on Bercy’s upper floors – the Directorate General of the Treasury and the Budget Directorate – with their national economic and financial agenda.

Memory, myth and symbol

I heard someone remark, not without sarcasm, that where the Secretariat General was celebrating its 20^th anniversary in 2020, the Budget Directorate had celebrated its 100^th anniversary in 2019. Admittedly, budgeteers have their grand figures. They embody, alongside their Treasury colleagues, the perpetuity of national sovereignty. Here is a time system where transmission plays an important role, where memory is a fundamental element of the construction of the future. And I did not need to go far to see this symbolism in material form. Just one floor above, near the lifts on the 7^th floor, is a display case containing a late 19^th century inspector of finance uniform. This slightly dusty display is almost incongruous in contrast with the bare corridors. Yet it says a great deal about how the ministry is rooted in this prestigious corps, which is still a dream destination for young people planning to enter public service today.

The existence of a mythology endogenous to Bercy, with its elite of senior civil servants, its grand corps and its deep-rooted directorates, all this gravity, contrasts with the ultimately recent invention represented by the Secretariat General. It has to be said that it was born essentially of a chance happening in the shape of a failed reform. Historians have analysed at length how successor Laurent Fabius managed to come out on top of this conflictual situation by creating a small structure, an administration with a mission headed by a charismatic leader, Bernard Pêcheur.

The Pêcheur version of the Secretariat General hence stands as a prestigious memory. Although it did not last long, it is the legendary reference made, “Back in the day, the SG was just five people strong and they had strategic missions.” Most of the people I spoke to told the same story: how the Secretariat General turned from an “agile” steering structure driving reform and modernisation, whose leader was virtually a vice-minister, into a structure weighed down by taking on the support functions and in search of a second wind.

It is as if, lacking the historical legitimacy to which the large Bercy directorates lay claim, it were unable to make its own mark by embracing its early vocation, i.e. a specific capacity to plan and model the future.

The tyranny of the short timescale

Time and again as I watched the Secretariat General going about its daily business, I noticed this tyranny of the short timescale and how it was embedded not only in the staff’s practices, but also in their narratives. SG departments have to be constantly responsive, whether providing memorandums to the ministers’ private offices or in more concrete areas such as supplying computer equipment to teleworking staff or, more mundanely, moving offices in a ministry building. The tyranny of the short timescale puts its pressure on everyone all the way up to the pinnacle of the hierarchy, as I observed from watching the Secretary General at work.

Her schedule alone reflects all the complexity of the organisation: meetings to take stock of each department’s activities, attending the procurement strategic committee meeting and the committee of directors’ meeting, appointments to discuss communication and oversee labour-management relations, appointments with ministers’ private offices or directly with the ministers, meetings with administration directors, the list goes on and on. Consequently, and even when the Secretary General delegates to her deputy and department heads, time management can sometimes be a real headache. The expression ‘conflict of schedule’ clearly reflects this problem with time management when more than one appointment is made for the same time. Unable to meet all the demands, choices have to be made. Virtually every day, the schedule changes and one of the tasks of the Secretary General’s staff is to manage this situation.

“We’re always walking a tightrope,” one of my interviewees told me. They are expected to be in two places at once, which lends a Sisyphus edge to the collective endeavour at the Secretariat General. This may well have to do with the fact that the initially slim administration has turned into a management structure, but it also has to do with the cross-cutting nature of its action. Unlike the ministry directorates that steer and manage their own area of responsibility, the staff here work in partnership with the others. They are therefore (inter)dependent, and that is what gives them the feeling that they are sometimes slaves to time. Handling the support functions for the ministry and its different directorates brings a specific form of pressure to bear, and time management hence becomes a not-inconsiderable concern.

One example of the Secretariat General’s cross-cutting role and its huge exposure to the unexpected can be found in how it came to be handling the health crisis during the lockdown. One of the Secretary General’s responsibilities is as Senior Defence and Security Official. She is assisted in this by the Deputy SDSO and his team. The outbreak of the pandemic turned the SG’s priorities upside down, as protective shielding measures had to be put in place in record time while ensuring the continuity of the SG’s work. The Secretariat General found itself in the front line on all scores, including organising teleworking. A crisis committee meeting chaired by the Secretary General was held with the main managers concerned every morning and, throughout the period, a huge amount of the Secretariat General’s time was taken up by the crisis and its consequences.

Note also that in Bercy, as elsewhere, the experience of lockdown and the present need to live with the pandemic have brought the issue of teleworking to the fore, calling for a rethink of the practical terms of teleworking. The Secretariat General, in charge of labour-management relations, has set up a working group including union representatives (Solidaires, CGT, FO, CFDT and UNSA), chaired by the Deputy Secretary General with the participation of the Human Resources Department Head.

Dynamic, change and innovation

It is quite significant that, the very day lockdown was announced, a seminar for key managers on the transformation of the Secretariat General had to be cancelled at the last minute. Once again, the urgency took over. Nonetheless, everyone agrees that the SG rose to the occasion, fully playing its coordination role to ensure continuity of service. Key to risk management is the ability to be cross-cutting, which alone justifies the creation of this kind of system. The Secretariat General is now part of the furniture, but when I asked whether it was possible to do without it, some of my respondents were a little dubious. They felt that the fact that ministerial private office staff levels had been considerably cut back justified the need for an efficient administrative coordination body. But did the support functions really need to be concentrated in the one body when the large directorates still had their own departments?

The example is often given of the Public Finances Directorate General (DGFiP), with its 100,000 staff, which has kept its own human resources department and a high degree of autonomy in areas such as teleworking and digital management. In Bercy, the large directorates are seen, to use an oft-repeated expression, as real “baronies”. Yet whatever the power of the ministry’s large directorates, it does not change the need for a coordination body. The need for its creation moreover arose out of the problems the ministry came up against when it set out to reorganise its administrative structures by merging the General Tax Directorate with the Public Accounting General Directorate. Similarly, it was important for the Secretariat General to retain all its initial agility to be able to both deliver services to these different entities and produce the common policy framework.

Words that often came up during my exploration of the SG were dynamic, change and innovation. When you come from outside, you do not spontaneously associate these notions with the idea that one might have of a secretariat: of administration, bureaucratic organisation, and the structure’s ability to ensure the continuity and contribute to the stability of the Bercy universe. Yet when I was conducting this survey, several meetings attended by secretariat officials were held on the subject of change. I had the good fortune to attend, thanks to the approval of the Secretary General Marie-Anne Barbat-Layani, and the experience was useful for two reasons: i) to gain a better understanding of the developments large administrations have to address, and ii) in what emerged regarding the representations and expectations of the staff most directly involved in the Secretariat General’s governance.

From a methodological point of view, ethnologists as a rule take as their starting point the questions their respondents ask themselves rather than sticking a predefined analytic grid on the reality they are observing. One of the first meetings I attended concerned precisely the question of change at the Secretariat General. This was actually a project launched prior to the arrival of the current Secretary General by her predecessor Isabelle Braun-Lemaire. The initiative took its cue from a more general need raised by two decades of successive governments to modernise government by streamlining its organisations. The issue is nothing new. It dates back to the work of the Jean Moulin Club illustrated, among others, by the research conducted by sociologist Michel Crozier and his acolytes.

Modernisation here means to simplify, streamline and improve efficiency by restructuring inadequately run departments. It is a way of eradicating ways of working that give public action a bad name. These modernisation efforts have made an appreciable number of job cuts. Secretariat General staff numbers have been reduced from 3,000 to 2,400 and more job cuts are planned for the coming years. The same trend can be observed in the other administrations, particularly in networked directorates such as the DGFiP and the Directorate General of Customs and Excise (cut from 23,000 to 17,000 employees) with all their local and regional structures. This is due mainly to the fact that technological innovations, starting with the digitalisation of procedures, have made staff-intensive jobs obsolete. In addition, the introduction of modern management methods has brought with it the development of pooling in certain sectors.

In the early 2010s, a General Inspectorate of Finance (IGF) report proposed a pooling plan. However, Laurent de Jekhowsky, Secretary General at the time, encountered opposition to the plan in the ministry directorates and was unable to act on it. A decisive step forward was taken when his successor, Isabelle Braun-Lemaire, relaunched the administrative simplification project in consultation with the different directorates. Change became a fully-fledged part of the Secretariat General. A Policy Coordination and Innovation Delegation (SCI) was set up to work on this interministerial project, assisted by the Interministerial Delegation for Government Transformation (DITP) reporting to the Ministry for Government Transformation and the Civil Service.

Floating signifier?

What struck me at the very first meeting I attended, and more so thereafter, was the impression that ‘change’ is constantly shrouded in a certain vagueness reflected in the participants’ rhetoric. I happened to take part (merely as auditor) in a seminar following this first meeting and then a Committee of Directors meeting to review the state of play a few days after the seminar. At the seminar coordinated by a DITP team, who had produced a report (Report 347) ahead of the event, there was a lot of talk about performance, such as it is defined in the management handbooks, with the production of a balanced scorecard, the use of indicators, the notion of mutual commitment, and so on.

As was pointed out, the Secretariat General has to work with three different circles: the central administration, the ministry and the Secretariat General stricto sensu. The first circle involves the central directorates whose work is done entirely in Bercy; the second corresponds to the networked directorates with their local and regional branches; and the third concerns only the SG departments. This means that change has to be made in three types of contexts, hence the complexity of the enterprise. During the seminar, the managerial angle taken by the DITP support team had the advantage of formalising the operations designed to improve performance.

Yet beyond the innovation narrative (more simplification and more transparency), at least two questions started to emerge – and this time in the support function managers’ presentations. The first question regarded the first and second circles and the Secretariat General’s actual ability to make changes in association with directorates concerned to retain their autonomy in certain areas. The second question regarding the third circle concerned the internal restructuring that the performance-based model would induce in the SG’s departments in areas such as digital technology, real property and human resources.

Innovation and performance rhetoric aside, change raised a set of questions about the Secretariat General’s place and influence in the ministry’s dynamic. In this sense, change is none other than the pooling of functions in an environment dominated by budget constraints. It should come as no surprise to find the innovation argument voiced by the Policy Coordination and Innovation Delegation (SCI), who see it as a way of exercising their cross-cutting vocation, while the more prosaic version identifying change and pooling is expressed by the support function representatives.

Alongside these two ways of seeing change, a third could be added, which sees it as an opportunity for the SG to rise as a strategic flanking force with the capacity to open up new horizons (such as the importance of the matter of ‘risk management’). This proposal made by the Secretary General implies placing greater emphasis on thinking and planning. As she put it, one of the problems with working day to day is how hard it is to “free up brain time”. This would give the Secretariat General back its role as a source of inspiration, as it was before it became essentially a service provider.

The discussion regarding the role the Secretariat General can play in change clearly reveals the complexity of the issues and, therein, how this structure’s different components rank the priorities. In the meetings I observed, it seemed hard to produce a text expressing the view of what change and its main outcomes should be. There were moments when I thought back to how Claude Lévi-Strauss analysed the notion of mana in Polynesian society as both essential and vague enough for mere mention of it to wield particular power.⁵. There is no way of definitively defining mana, and it is its surfeit of meaning that lends value to this term invoked as much in a political context as in magic and myths. On the face of it, we are far from the Bercy microcosm here. And yet, I feel that the notion of change plays a similar role to that of mana: what is important is the function of marker and recognition attributed to this concept. It is a ‘floating signifier’ that in a way sews up the indigenous narrative, but where the signified remains indeterminate – a ‘surplus of signification’ – and therein lies one of the problems people experience appropriating this notion.

An uncertain identity?

The current Secretary General, like her predecessor, is confronted with the complex task of reshaping the organisation while defining priorities and giving a meaning to change. Abruptly interrupted by the health crisis, it is an important task considering that the Secretariat General is supposed to play a driving role in the ministry. What comes to light when addressing this issue is a more profound question regarding the identity of the Secretariat General. Among the staff members I spoke to, the theme of change immediately prompted reflection on the structure’s place, its relations with the different Bercy bodies and the image it projects of its work.

Since the SG took on the support functions, it has become key to the running of the economic and finance ministries. It is constantly solicited by the different administrations. From payroll to office management, from human resources to IT, the staff are on the front line on all fronts in an environment where pressure to reduce staff numbers is all too real. What emerges from these interviews, like the discussions I was able to follow, is obviously the awareness of being a key driver in Bercy life, but also the feeling of a lack of recognition to which my respondents ascribed a number of reasons.

“The SG is an afterthought,” whereas the large DGs enjoy historical legitimacy. There was also mention of the composition of the SG: a large majority of medium-rank and junior staff, whereas nearly two-thirds of Treasury staff are Grade A and A+.⁶. The Secretariat General, given the type of staff it employs and the work it does, is therefore doomed to be somewhat subordinate. One observer told me, “Here at the SG, we’re a bit like messenger boys,” with a muted reference to the “aristocracy” of technocrats in the large directorates. To a certain extent, the demand for change stirs this feeling of being “second-best”.

One of the leitmotifs of change is to improve service quality. This reinforces the idea that the Secretary General is first and foremost a service provider. On the face of it, nothing could be more natural considering the high level of support functions. Yet the effect of it is to reinforce the feeling shared by many of somehow being “at the service of the directorates”. In this regard, the recommended objective is to improve service performance: the level of customer satisfaction and putting the customer first in a more collaborative approach to service provision with the ministry directorates. This philosophy has been put into action with the creation of BercyLab, which is generally seen as having driven innovation by introducing new managerial methods. An example was given of the role it played when the Directorate General for Enterprise decided to switch to project mode.

BercyLab is a highly original enclave amid the general monotony of corridors and offices. When you walk in, it looks more like a start-up than a ministry department. Its layout and the pictures and mottos on the walls suggest a universe where people work more informally with an emphasis on collective intelligence. In just a few years, the Innovation Task Force has become synonymous with Secretariat General dynamism. The Secretariat General is behind some very tangible innovations in Bercy’s staff environment. The initiatives to fit out the ground floor of the Colbert building with leisure areas and even table football and a piano, and have food trucks in the courtyard on certain days, all came from the SG, making its mark as an innovator.

The initiatives have been very well received and most of my respondents mentioned them. However, enthusiasm was less forthcoming when talk turned to the new managerial methods. Not that anyone denies the importance of providing quality service. The peeve sometimes aired seems to be more with the emphasis placed on the service provider-customer pairing. Is the term ‘customer’ really suitable when dealing with a captive audience that does not choose its service provider and when SG staff are in no way in a situation of a service provider always seeking to fill the order book? In reality, they are rather snowed under by the number and variety of demands to be met.

This may seem like a mere quibble with words, but I felt that behind this discussion also lay how the Secretariat General is perceived. Should the directorates not be treated more like partners than customers? Otherwise, are they not forced, in the name of service quality, to submit to all demands? Service quality is not the sole doing of SG staff. They are generally held responsible for delivering late on requests from the directorates. However, as my respondents pointed out, consider too the delays attributable to directorate staff themselves (forms not filled in, unclear orders, etc.). The Secretariat General should not become trapped in a service provider mentality in the name of a one-way quality approach if it does not want to find itself forever in the hot seat. “We should be at our partners’ service, not subservient.” All in all, the Secretariat General has proved particularly efficient in its areas of responsibility, especially in its handling of the health crisis.

What emerges from my observations is rather the feeling of a lack of recognition from the administrations it coordinates, as if the Secretariat General had reached a point in its development where, in addition to the need to reorganise and rethink certain processes, a more profound existential question were in the balance. With progress in areas such as change and innovation comes a form of introspection. Who are we? What are our priorities today? What can we do to make our partners fully recognise our identity and the irreplaceable contribution the SG makes?

Here, the reference to identity is particularly significant as an identity built over time, but an identity in some ways unsure of itself. At stake behind the question of change is the affirmation of the collective identity and its vision. The Secretariat General’s image remains vague in some respects. As we have seen, it is the product of a history and a position associated with its forms of action and with a symbolic construction in which certain large directorates have the lion’s share.

The Secretary General emphasises the need to do the job drawing on the innovation dynamic developed by the Policy Coordination and Innovation Delegation (SCI). If the Secretariat General is to make its mark as a promoter of change, and not just a service provider bled dry by the provision of support functions, it needs to take up areas that will allow it to step into the light by displaying its forward-looking capacities. Such is the case with the Green Bercy ministerial plan that the Secretariat General has rolled out and coordinated. It features the major ecological transition actions for sustainable development and the deployment of a green approach. Yet above all, there is the concern to make a certain number of the approach’s aspects visible to ministry staff. During my time at Bercy, I saw work in progress on greening the ministry with trees planted in pots in the ministers’ courtyard and a long roll of natural turf laid in the central alleyway. Aside from a few sarcastic comments (“What an idea to green Jean-Monnet!”), the initiative was well received.

Clean transport, waste recycling and even Bercy honey: we found ourselves watching a show of a change to which the MEFR is a decided party. The operation was rounded out with notice boards in the lobby and conferences. The Secretary General played a very active part in the operation, including her participation in a debate with the director for sustainable development of a leading bank and the round table that followed. This type of initiative is a good illustration of the visibility strategy used. It is entirely in line with the need to affirm the SG’s identity. It may be the best way to propel it centre stage as a spearheader of matters that cannot be the prerogative of one or other of the ministry directorates, because they are cross-cutting from the outset.

Whereas this strategy offers a good way to step into the light and provide a positive, forward-looking response, it calls for the active engagement of its promoters, who are constantly at risk of being snowed under by their everyday workload. The Secretariat General bears a built-in structural tension – a product of its history – between the heavy weight of management and the ambition to be strategists. I saw it as the quintessence of “at the same time”, literally, since it operates both in the urgency of the present and in anticipation of the future. In its composition and the skillsets it possesses, the Secretariat General presents a richness and complexity such that it is understandable that they incentivise it to reinvent itself, without being too obsessed by the idea of its own founding myth.

As I left through the door of the old octroi building at the end of my mission, I could not help glancing back. Bercy’s majestic architecture dominated the environs. I had sometimes feared feeling claustrophobic in there, especially at nightfall. As one of my interviewees told me, “When you leave your office very late and find yourself alone in those huge corridors, it’s like being in The Shining,” Other people also mentioned Stanley Kubrick’s film. At the same time, I had managed to penetrate a universe full of dynamism and I had almost immediately found myself confronted with the main subjects of interest and one and another’s questions. They constantly fuelled my work. I can only hope that this study will resonate with its readers. It is a report on obviously subjective impressions impacted by the extremely difficult period we are enduring today.

By Marc Abélès

Professor at the School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) and Director of the Laboratory for the Anthropology of Institutions and Social Organisations at the National Centre For Scientific Research (CNRS)

[1]Architextures: “Le ministère des Finances”, by Claude Hudelot. With Paul Chemetov, Borja Huidobro, Frédéric Edelmann and Andrée Putman. Director: Bruno Sourcis. France Culture, 7 June 1990.

[2] Somewhat surprising from the point of view of its name is the Allée Paul-Ramadier, the name of a long-forgotten President of the Council of Ministers under the Fourth Republic, which may well be why the alley is located next to the car park.

[3] See the job description here (PDF, 161 ko / page consulted the 6 January 2021)

[4] F. Hartog, Régimes d’historicité. Présentisme et expérience du temps, Paris, Le Seuil, 2003.

[5]“Force and action; quality and state; […] abstract and concrete; omnipresent and localised.  And, indeed, mana is all those things together;” (Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss”, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987).

[6]See the 2018 social report on the economic and finance ministries.