École normale supérieure

École normale supérieure

École normale supérieure emblem
Other names	Normale sup’, ENS Ulm, ENS Paris, ENS.
Type	ENS (informal), grande école, EPCSCP (administrative)
Established	1794
President	Pierre-Louis Lions
Director	Marc Mézard
Academic staff	1,400
Undergraduates	250
Postgraduates	2,100
Location	Paris, France
Colours	Yellow, Purple
Affiliations	Paris Sciences et Lettres, Conférence des grandes écoles
Website	ens.fr

The École normale supérieure (French pronunciation: ​[ekɔl nɔʁmal sypeʁjœʁ]; also known as Normale sup’, ENS Ulm, ENS Paris, l'École and most often just as ENS) is a French grande école (higher education establishment outside the framework of the public university system), and a constituent college of PSL Research University. 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. It has since developed into an institution which has become a platform for many of France's students to pursue careers in government and academia. Founded in 1794 and reorganised by Napoleon, ENS has two main sections (literary and scientific) and a competitive selection process consisting of written and oral examinations. During their studies, some ENS students hold the status of paid civil servants.

The principal goal of ENS is the training of professors, researchers and public administrators. Among its alumni there are 13 Nobel Prize laureates including 8 in Physics (ENS has the highest ratio of Nobel laureates per alumni of any institution worldwide), 11 Fields Medalists (the most of any university in the world), 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 one of France's foremost scientific training grounds, along with notability in the human sciences as the spiritual birthplace of authors such as Julien Gracq, Jean Giraudoux, Assia Djebar, 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.