The École normale supérieure (French pronunciation: [ekɔl nɔʁmal sypeʁjœʁ]; also known as Normale sup’, ENS Ulm, ENS Paris and most often just as ENS) is a French grande école (higher education establishment outside the framework of the public university system). It was initially conceived during the French Revolution and was intended to provide the Republic with a new body of professors, trained in the critical spirit and secular values of the Enlightenment.
The principal goal of ENS is the training of elite professors, researchers and public administrators. Its alumni have provided France with scores of philosophers, writers, scientists, statesmen, officials and diplomats, journalists, lawyers, directors, managers and even officers in the army and churchmen. Among them are 13 Nobel Prize laureates including 8 in Physics, 10 Fields Medalists, more than half the recipients of the CNRS's Gold Medal (France's highest scientific prize), several hundred members of the Institut de France,several Prime Ministers, and many ministers.The school has achieved particular recognition in the fields of mathematics and physics as France's foremost scientific training ground, along with great notability in the human sciences as the spiritual birthplace of authors such as Julien Gracq, Jean Giraudoux, and Charles Péguy, philosophers such as Henri Bergson, Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Althusser, Simone Weil, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Paul Nizan, and Alain Badiou, social scientists such as Émile Durkheim, Raymond Aron, and Pierre Bourdieu, and "French theorists" such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.
