The Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques was created by an Edict issued by the provisional government of the French Republic government of the French Republic headed by General de Gaulle on October 9 1945.

Strictly speaking, rather than being created, Sciences Po was reborn. It is this rebirth that we are celebrating today. The new Foundation was simply another chapter in what was already a long story. Sciences Po began in 1872, when the original establishment, the Ecole libre des sciences politiques, first opened its doors. The educational vision of its founder, Emile Boutmy, was interdisciplinary, responding to a fast-changing world by including intellectual disciplines which were still excluded from university curricula in France.

Coming a few months after the liberation of France and the end of the war, the 1945 re-founding emerged from the desire for renewal which informed the public spirit of the time and which inspired governmental decision-making: the birth of the Foundation was part and parcel of administrative reforms, and it went hand in hand with the creation of a national school of administration (ENA) destined to train the upper echelons of the civil service. The formerly independent Ecole libre was absorbed into the State higher education system and turned into an Institute of the University of Paris.

Anxious to preserve the independence which for 75 years had allowed the private institution to experiment with original teaching methods and new subjects, the school’s governors and the State came up with an ingenious formula, one which, to some extent, anticipated the national educational reforms of 1968. Their idea was to set up a private law foundation which would be entrusted with running a public education establishment, and which would therefore receive State support. The formula thus combined the capacity for initiative of the private sector with the rigorous guarantees of the State. It has more than proven its worth over these fi rst sixty years: indeed, one might well wish it could serve as a benchmark for universities everywhere. From the outset, the ties between the Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques and the State authorities have constantly been strengthened, and their sphere of cooperation extended.

The new formula might have become little more than a legal expedient for an amicable settlement of the immediate difficulty of how to transfer the assets of the old private school to the State. Instead, over the years it has been a twofold academic catalyst: while the Institute, now promoted to the rank of grand établissement, became a university in its own right, the Foundation took its place in the field of research. In drafting the original edict, the government made the inspired choice to entrust the Foundation with a mission to promote the social, economic and political sciences, in France and worldwide. This was a way of affirming both the responsibilities undertaken by the Foundation in respect of the nation, and the multidisciplinary nature of its activities. Subsequent events have shown how far-sighted that initial intuition was: the founding of a number of research centres covering the entire domain of the social sciences, the recruitment of a community of top-level researchers, the growth of the library and documentary resources, the wealth of publications have all been contributing factors in making the Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques into a major centre for research at national and European level.

It has been our wish, in celebrating the sixtieth anniversary of the re-founding edict, to cast a brighter light on what has so far been the less visible face of the complex entity that is Sciences Po. Our intention has been to underscore both the originality of the formula and its beneficial effects. Our desire is to pay tribute to the prescience of those who conceived it, and also to those who, in the course of these six decades, have given life and meaning to that founding intuition.

René REMOND
De l’Académie Française,
President of the Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques