Apps

Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques — news, coverage & facts — IJR

1872 to 1945: Free School of Political Sciences

Sciences Po was established in December 1871 as the École libre des sciences politiques (ELSP) by a group of French intellectuals, politicians and businessmen led by Émile Boutmy, including Hippolyte Taine, Ernest Renan, Albert Sorel and Paul Leroy Beaulieu. The creation of the school was in response to widespread fears that the inadequacy of the education of the French political elite corps would diminish the country's international stature, as France grappled with a series of crises, including its defeat in the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, the demise of Napoleon III's regime, and the upheaval and massacre resulting from the Paris Commune. The founders of the school sought to reform the training of the French political and economic elite by establishing a new "breeding ground where nearly all the major, non-technical state commissioners were trained." His innovative intellectual axis was to teach contemporary history, whereas political elites had only been taught ancient humanities for centuries, which they could still learn in universities at the same time.

The École acquired a major role in France's political system. From 1901 to 1935, 92.5% of entrants to the Grands corps de l'État, the most powerful and prestigious administrative bodies in the French Civil Service, had studied there (this figure includes people who took civil service examination preparatory classes at Sciences Po but did not earn a degree and, in general, students were taking classes there on top of earning a degree at the University of Paris, in particular the Law Faculty).

Other countries created similar schools in the following century. In 1875, the Istituto Cesare Alfieri in Italy (now part of the University of Florence), at the end of the century, the École libre des sciences Politiques et Sociales in Belgium (not existing any more), the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik in Germany, the Columbia School of Political Science (now merged into the Columbia Graduate School of Arts and Sciences), the London School of Economics in the United Kingdom, and, after WW1, for the School of Foreign Service from Georgetown University in the United States and the Geneva Graduate Institute in Switzerland.

The connection between Sciences Po and French institutions meant that the school also played a key role in the apparatus of the French colonial empires. In 1886, the university established a colonial studies program with the goal of training students to take on professions in the colonial administration in a way that "propagates [...] a more scientific and international colonialism". Many professors and members of the ELSP administration, such as Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, chair in colonial affairs at ELSP, Joseph Chailley-Bert, Jules Cambon, Charles Jonnart, Auguste Louis Albéric d’Arenberg and Ernest Roume, were also closely linked to or worked directly with the colonial government. The colonial branch of ELSP closed in 1893 after a state-sponsored Colonial School was created in 1889; however positions in the administrations of French colonies and protectorates continued to accept graduates from the ELSP.

1945: Refoundation

Sciences Po underwent significant reforms in the aftermath of World War II in 1945. At France's liberation from Nazi occupation, the public servants were accused of collaborating with the Vichy regime and Nazi Germany. Communist politicians including Georges Cogniot accused the school to be the "home of collaboration" with Nazi Germany and proposed abolishing the ELSP entirely and founding a new state-run administration college on its premises. The school, however, had also trained eight out of the thirteen ministers of the Provisional Government of the French Republic, and several prominent members of the French Resistance. In order for the school not to be replaced, the director Roger Seydoux, his aid Jacques Chapsal and the school's most famous professor, André Siegfried, excluded those among the school's staff who were most compromised with the Vichy regime and Nazi Germany, and defended the school against accusation of collaboration and built up a communication campaign to save the school.

The choice regarding the future of the school would be made by France's Provisional Government, under Charles de Gaulle. The alumni Michel Debré, Jules Jeanneney and Roger Grégoire decided that the school would be preserved but transformed in a new structure. Two separate legal entities were created: the Institut d'études politiques (English: Institute of political studies) and the Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques (English: National Foundation of Political Science) or FNSP. Both were tasked by the French government to ensure "the progress and the spread, both within and outside France, of political science, economics, and sociology". The FNSP, a private foundation, manages the IEP de Paris, owns its buildings and libraries, and determines its budget. The two entities work together in lockstep, however, as the director of the school is, by tradition, also the administrator of FNSP. This institutional arrangement gives Sciences Po a unique status, as the school draws most of its resources through substantial government subsidies to FNSP, but does not subject it to many government interventions and regulations, giving it a much higher level of autonomy compared to other French universities and schools. The epithet Sciences Po is applied to both entities, which inherited the reputation previously vested in ELSP.

The public-private nature of Sciences Po, Paris, also distinguishes it from a network of institutes of political studies throughout the country that were inspired by its curriculum, namely in Strasbourg, Lyon, Aix, Bordeaux, Grenoble, Toulouse, Rennes and Lille. They are not to be confused with the seven campuses of Sciences Po in France.

The government also established in 1945 the École Nationale d'Administration (ENA), an elite postgraduate school for training government officials. From then on, the Grands Corps de l'Etat were obliged to recruit new entrants from ENA. Sciences Po became the school of choice for those hoping to enter the ENA, and so retained its dominant place in educating high-ranking officials.

Research

Research at Sciences Po covers economics, law, history, sociology and political science, while also taking in interdisciplinary topics such as cities, political ecology, sustainable development, socio-economics and globalization.

Sciences Po is home to a research community that includes over 200 researchers and 350 PhD candidates. In 2015, 32% of the school's budget was devoted to research. That year, 65% of its research publications were in French, 32% in English and 3% in other languages.

The institute has research centers, seven of which are affiliated with France's National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS).

Center for Socio-Political Data (CDSP), which provides scientifically validated data for international survey programs. It also supports training in data collection and analysis.

Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics (CEE), which focuses on inter-disciplinary European studies; participation, democracy and government; election analyses; the restructuring of the state and public action.

Centre for International Studies (CERI), which produces comparative and historical analysis on foreign societies, international relations, and political, social and economic phenomena.

Centre for Political Research (CEVIPOF), which investigates political attitudes, behaviour and parties, as well as political thought and the history of ideas.

Centre for History (CHSP), whose research focuses on: arts, knowledge and culture; wars, conflicts and violence; states, institutions and societies; the political and cultural history of contemporary France; from local to global; international history and its levels.

Centre for the Sociology of Organisations (CSO), which conducts research on the sociology of organisations, sociology of public policy, and economic sociology. It also studies issues related to higher education and research, healthcare, sustainable development, the evolution of firms, and the transformation of the state.

Center for Studies in Social Change (OSC), which conducts research on topics such as urban, school and gender inequalities, stratification and social mobility, and ethno-racial or social segregation.

Department of Economics, which investigates areas such as labour markets, international economics, political economy, microeconomics and development.

Law School, whose research focuses on globalisation, legal cultures and the economics of law. It has also produced work on the theory and history of law, public and private international law and intellectual property.

Médialab, which studies the way data generated by new information technologies is produced, circulated and exploited.

The Observatoire Français des Conjonctures Économiques (OFCE), which is both a research centre and an independent economic forecasting body. Its stated mission is to "ensure that the fruits of scientific rigour and academic independence serve the public debate about the economy".

In addition to these research units, the institute has recently established three major research programs – the LIEPP, DIME-SHS and MaxPo.

The Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire d'Evaluation des Politiques Publiques (LIEPP) analyzes public policy based on qualitative, comparative, and quantitative methods. The laboratory has been selected by an international scientific jury as a "Laboratoire d'Excellence" (Labex) that will be financed for the next ten years by the French government.

Données Infrastructures et Méthodes d'Enquête en Sciences Humaines et Sociales (DIME-SHS) aims to collect and disseminate data for use in humanities and social sciences research.

The Max Planck Sciences Po Center on Coping with Instability in Market Societies (known as MaxPo), was founded in 2012 in co-operation with the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies (MPIfG). It investigates how individuals, organizations, and nation-states deal with various forms of economic and social instability. It is located at Sciences Po's Paris campus.

Reputation and criticism

Sciences Po has been called France's "leading university in the social sciences". It is considered to be the most prestigious of all of the IEP (Instituts d'études politiques, or Institutes of Political Studies) in France. Sciences Po is widely regarded to be an elite institution due to its selectivity in admissions and its close connections to powerful networks within French society. It has been described as a "school of power" that has inspired schools abroad, such as the London School of Economics. Because of its role in training the French elite, it has been called the "school of domination". According Le Monde, the school's reputation for excellency and its prestige are such that some freshmen are sometimes "disillusioned" after having "fantasized" about the school.

Because of its role in training the French political, administrative and economic elite, the school has been criticized by far-left critics for the alleged close-mindedness of its students. Peter Gumbel called Sciences Po and other Grandes Écoles "elite colleges [which] have become a machine for perpetuating a brilliant but blinkered, often arrogant and frequently incompetent ruling freemasonry". The academic Gilles Devers criticized the institution for being the "base of the conservatism, and the mold of the molluscs that make the public elite" where "dissenting ideas are only admitted if they strengthen the system".

Sciences Po's core curriculum has historically been very transdisciplinary, as the students go through introductory classes to disciplines as diverse as political science, economics, history, law and international relations. This priority given to transversality of knowledge over expertise in one field has been the subject of praise as well as of criticism.

In 2021 Nicolas Metzger, a teacher and director of Sciences Po's governing body, the Conseil de l'Institut, criticized it for a "somewhat general decline in standards" and alleged grade inflation by means of "gaussiannized" grades to accommodate students from socially and economically disadvantaged backgrounds admitted via conventions d'éducation prioritaire and international students.

Alumni

It has been customary to graduate in Sciences Po in addition to a law school or a grande école in Paris, therefore many of these graduates are also graduates of the latter.

In 2016, the Sciences Po Alumni Association declared that there were 55,000 alumni. Many alumni are notable for their roles in fields such as politics or business.

Six of the eight presidents of the French Fifth Republic have attended Sciences Po, including Georges Pompidou, François Mitterrand, Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy, François Hollande, and Emmanuel Macron. Alain Poher (who served twice as acting president) was also an alumnus. A number of French politicians who are Sciences Po alumni also graduated from École Nationale d'Administration (ENA), as the Sciences Po degree and its preparatory programmes have shown high admittance rates to the ENA.

In 2017, 14% (81 of the 577) of French members of parliament elected that year were Sciences Po graduates, the most represented institution of higher learning and grande école in the National Assembly.

Some politicians having a role in international organisations were also students at Sciences Po, including Simone Veil, former President of the European Parliament; Boutros Boutros-Ghali, former UN Secretary General; Pascal Lamy, former Director-General of the World Trade Organisation; Michel Camdessus and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, former presidents of the International Monetary Fund; Jean-Claude Trichet, former President of the European Central Bank; and Marisol Touraine, Chair of Unitaid Executive Board.

Sciences Po is also alma mater to politicians including Władysław Grabski (Prime Minister of Poland 1920, 1923–1925), Habib Bourgiba (Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Tunisia 1956–1957 and the first President of the Tunisian Republic 1957–1987), Joseph Ki-Zerbo (Burkinabé advocate for African independence), Edem Tengue (Togolese first minister of maritime economy fishery and coastal protection(2020–2024)),Mohammad Mosaddegh (Prime Minister of Iran 1951–1953), Pierre Trudeau (Prime Minister of Canada 1968–1979, 1980–1984), Thanat Khoman (Thai Minister of Foreign Affairs 1959–1971 and Deputy Prime Minister 1981–1983) and Salome Zourabichvili (President of Georgia since 2018).

Among the recipients of Sciences Po doctorate honoris causa are Václav Havel (2009), Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2011), Elena Zhemkova (2022), and Angela Merkel (2023).

Senior French diplomats including Jean-Marcel Jeanneney (France's first Ambassador to Algeria) François Delattre (currently Permanent Representative of France to the UN), Gérard Araud (former ambassador to the USA), Sylvie Bermann (currently ambassador to Russia), Bernard Émié (former Director of the DGSE), Jean-Maurice Ripert (former Permanent Representative of France to the United Nations, Ambassador of France to Russia, and Ambassador of France to China), and Maurice Gourdault-Montagne (ambassador to China) are also alumni.

The writer Marcel Proust, the founder of the modern Olympics Pierre de Coubertin, fashion designer Christian Dior, author Leïla Slimani, author Emmanuel Carrère, Harvard University Professor of political science Stanley Hoffmann, Chinese linguist Ma Jianzhong, Director of Paris Peace Forum Justin Vaïsse, journalist Arthur Dreyfus, researcher, Margaret Maruani, political scientist Tiago C. Peixoto, and former Le Monde editor Jean-Marie Colombani were all graduated from Sciences Po.