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The École normale supérieure (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 Napoléon I, emperor of the French, 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.
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, Nobel Prize in Literature 1927, Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Althusser, Simone Adolphine Weil, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Paul-Yves Nizan, and Alain Badiou, social scientists such as Emile Durkheim, Raymond Aron, and Pierre Bourdieu, and "French theorists" such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.