The - PSL (; also known as ENS, , Ulm or ENS Paris) is a grande école in Paris, France. It is one of the constituent members of Paris Sciences et Lettres University (PSL). Due to its selectivity, historical role, and influence within French society, the ENS is generally considered the most prestigious of the grandes écoles, as well as one of the most prestigious higher education institutions in France. Its pupils are generally referred to as normaliens, while its alumni are sometimes referred to as archicubes.

The school was founded in 1794 during the French Revolution, to provide homogeneous training of high-school teachers in France, but it later closed. The school was subsequently reestablished by Napoleon I as pensionnat normal from 1808 to 1822, before being recreated in 1826 and taking the name École normale in 1830. When other institutes called écoles normales were created in 1845, the word supérieure (meaning upper) was added to form the current name. In 1936, the institution started providing university-level education.

As a grande école, the vast majority of the academic staff hosted at the ENS also belong to external institutions such as one of the Parisian universities, the CNRS and the EHESS. Generalistic in its recruitment and organisation, the ENS is the only grande école in France to have departments of research in all the natural, social, and human sciences. Its alumni include 14 Nobel Prize laureates, of whom eight are in Physics, 12 Fields Medal recipients, more than half the recipients of the CNRS's Gold Medal, several hundred members of the , as well as several French and foreign politicians and statespeople.

History

Founding The current institution finds its roots in the creation of the École normale de l'an III by the post-revolutionary National Convention led by Robespierre in 1794. The school was created based on a recommendation by Joseph Lakanal and Dominique-Joseph Garat, who were part of the commission on public education. The École normale was intended as the core of a planned centralised national education system. The project was also conceived as a way to reestablish trust between the Republic and the country's elites, which had been alienated to some degree by the Reign of Terror. The decree establishing the school, issued on 30 October 1794 (9 brumaire an III), states in its first article that "There will be established in Paris an école normale (literally, a normal school), where, from all the parts of the Republic, citizens already educated in the useful sciences shall be called upon to learn, from the best professors in all the disciplines, the art of teaching."

The inaugural course was given on 20 January 1795 and the last on 19 May of the same year at the Museum of Natural History. The goal of these courses was to train a body of teachers for all the secondary schools in the country and thereby to ensure a homogenous education for all. These courses covered all the existing sciences and humanities and were given by renowned scholars, including scientists Monge, Vandermonde, Daubenton, Berthollet and philosophers Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and Volney. The school was closed as a result of the arrival of the French Directory but this école normale was to serve as a basis when the school was founded for the second time by Napoleon I in 1808.

On 17 March 1808, Napoleon created by decree a pensionnat normal within the imperial University of France charged with "training in the art of teaching the sciences and the humanities".Law of 10 May 1806 relative to the creation of the Imperial University, article 118. The establishment was opened in 1810, its strict code including a mandatory uniform. By then a sister establishment had been created by Napoleon in Pisa under the name of Scuola Normale Superiore (SNS), which continues to exist today and still has close ties to the Paris school. Up to 1818, the students were handpicked by the academy inspectors based on their results in the secondary school. However, the "pensionnat" created by Napoleon came to be perceived under the Restoration as a nexus of liberal thought and was suppressed by then-minister of public instruction Denis-Luc Frayssinous in 1824.

Second founding

An école préparatoire was created on 9 March 1826 at the site of Collège Louis-le-Grand. This date can be taken as the definitive date of creation of the current school. After the July Revolution, the school regained its original name of École normale and in 1845 was renamed École normale supérieure. During the 1830s, under the direction of philosopher Victor Cousin, the school enhanced its status as an institution to prepare the agrégation by expanding the duration of study to three years, and was divided into its present-day Sciences and Letters divisions. In 1847 the school moved into its current quarters at the rue d'Ulm, next to the Panthéon in the 5th arrondissement of Paris.Serge Benoît, "La rue d'Ulm", in Christian Hottin (ed.), Universités et grandes écoles à Paris : les palais de la science, Paris, Action artistique de la ville de Paris, 1999, p. 177. This helped it gain some stability, which was further established under the direction of Louis Pasteur.

Having been recognised as a success, a second school was created on its model at Sèvres for girls in 1881, followed by other schools at Fontenay, Saint-Cloud (both of which later moved to Lyon, and Cachan). The school's status evolved further at the beginning of the twentieth century.

In 1903 it was integrated into the University of Paris as a separate college,Decree of 10 November 1903 (Pascale Hummel, Pour une histoire de l'École normale supérieure: Source d'archives 1794-1993, Éditions Rue d'ULM via OpenEdition, 2013 ). perhaps as a result of its exposure to national attention during the Dreyfus Affair, in which its librarian Lucien Herr and his disciples, who included the socialist politician Jean Jaurès and the writers Charles Péguy and Romain Rolland spearheaded the campaign to overturn the wrongful conviction pronounced against Captain Alfred Dreyfus.Adolphus Ballard, James Tait. (2010.) The Ecole Normale Supérieure and the Third Republic , Suny Press, p. 73. The first female student – Marguerite Rouvière – was accepted in 1910, which made headline news in France and polarised opinion. The ranks of the school were significantly reduced during the First World War, but the 1920s marked a degree of expansion of the school, which had among its students at this time such figures as Raymond Aron, Jean-Paul Sartre, Vladimir Jankélévitch and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The high sacrifice paid by normaliens in the First World War was recognized by the award of the croix de guerre avec citation à l'ordre de l'armée in 1925.1926, p. 26). AUx oRIGINES DE IJ\ KHAGNE 31 grecque, soit une explication d'allemand, ou d'anglais, ou d'italien, ou d'espagnol, soit une seconde interrogation sur I'histoire ou la philosophie ,. On avait donc tenté, semble-t-il, d'éliminer de l'écrit la plupart des épreuves qui demandaient un travail de révision trop intense, incompatible avec les quelques mois de préparation passés dans les centres de préparation mili- taires. Ces épreuves, reléguées a l'oral, voyaient d'ailleurs leur programme considérablement limité par rapport a celui des concours ordinaires. Ainsi, en histoire, les connaissances exigées portaient sur la France de 1789 a la fin du Directoire et sur u I'Empire allemand, I'Autriche-Hongrie, l'Angleterre et l'Amérique dans la seconde moitié du xrx" siècle >. L'organisation de ce concours spécial avait naturellement pour but, on I'a vu, de sauvegarder les droits des khàgneux dont la mobilisation et les années au front avaient interrompu les études. De son cóté, la III" République entendait ainsi reconstituer le plus rapidement possible cette ( élite u que son système scolaire était chargé de promouvoir et que la guerre venait de décimer. Et, de fait, la session spéciale de 1919 déboucha sur une promotion plus importante que les promotions habituelles, mais aussi, en termes relatifs, sur un pourcentage de réussites plus élevé qu'a l'habitude. Sur 233 candidats littéraires inscrits, 70 furent regus normaliens et 75 boursiers de licence ls. A titre de comparaison, avant et après le conflit mondial, pour un nombre a peu près égal de candidats, les promotions littéraires comptaient un peu moins d'une trentaine de membres, et une vingtaine de bourses de licence étaient allouées. D'une manière générale, et toujours dans le double dessein de préserver les droits des mobilisés et' de reconstituer des cadres vidés par la guerre, beaucoup d'examens et de concours universitaires de I'année 1919 et des années suivantes furent largement ouverts aux démobilisés : par exemple, l'agrégation d'histoire et de géographie de 1920 compta, pour sa session normale, sept regus - dont le premier fut Pierre Gaxotte -, ¤t, pour sa < session spéciale >, vingt-six regus. L'École normale supérieure en 1919. Du fait de la guerre, se cÒtoyèrent donc a l'École normale supérieure, en 1919 et dans les années suivantes, des élèves d'àges et d'expériences très différents. La promotion spéciale de 1919 comprenait des mobilisés de l'été 1914 et des soldats appelés sous les drapeaux au cours des années suivantes. Des élèves reQus au Concours de 1914 ei mobilisés aussitót après, tel Marcel Déat, commengaient, en réalité, eux aussi leur scolarité rue d'Ulm en 1919. Les survivants des promotions 1912 et 1913 reprenaient leurs années de scolarité a I'Ecole, interrompues par la guerre avant I'agrégation. Les élèves des promo- tions 191ó, 1917 ou 1918 continuaient leurs études ou les reprenaient, certains ayant été mobilisés après leur réussite au concours. Enfin, les élèves du concours normal de 1919 entamaient, eux aussi, leurs années d'études. Un texte de Paul Dupuy, qui fut pendant plusieurs décennies < surveillant 13. Joumal Officiel, 21 juillet 1925, p. ó859.

Twentieth century

After the Second World War, in which some of its students were players in the Resistance, the school became more visible and increasingly perceived as a bastion of the communist left. Many of its students belonged to the French Communist Party. This leftist tradition continued into the 1960s and 1970s, during which an important fraction of French Maoists came from ENS. In 1953 it was made autonomous from the University of Paris,Decree of 3 February 1953 (Pascale Hummel, Pour une histoire de l'École normale supérieure: Source d'archives 1794-1993, Éditions Rue d'ULM via OpenEdition, 2013 ). but it was perceived ambivalently by the authorities as a nexus of protest, particularly due to the teachings delivered there by such controversial figures as political philosopher Louis Althusser. As of now, by law, ENS comes under the direct authority of the Minister for Higher Education and Research.The decree of 26 August 1987 states that the Minister for Higher Education and Research has authority over ENS in the same way rectors have authority over universities, thus ensuring ENS's independence from the mainstream university system.

The fallout from the May 1968 protests caused the President of the Republic, Georges Pompidou, himself a former student at the school, to force the resignation of its director, Robert Flacelière and to appoint his contemporary Jean Bousquet as his successor . Both Flacelière and Bousquet were distinguished classicists.

The school continued to expand and include new subjects, seeking to cover all the disciplines of natural and social sciences and in line with this policy a new concours was opened in 1982, to reinforce the teaching of social sciences at the school. The concours, called B/L (the A/L concours standing for the traditional letters and human sciences), emphasises proficiency in mathematics and economics alongside training in philosophy and literature.