Chapelle de la Sorbonne, Paris

History & strategy

Founded in 1868, the École Pratique des Hautes Études occupies a unique place in the landscape of higher education and research. It stands out for its very high level of scholarship and its pedagogy of training for research through practice.

 

Founded in 1868, the École Pratique des Hautes Études occupies a unique place in the landscape of higher education and research. It stands out for its very high level of scholarship and its pedagogy of training for research through practice.
The history of a unique pedagogical know-how

On July 31, 1868, the Minister of Public Instruction, Victor Duruy, a historian specializing in antiquity and close to Emperor Napoleon III, promulgated the decree creating the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE). The first article stipulates that the aim of the School is "to place alongside theoretical teaching the exercises that can strengthen and extend it". It was then a question of promoting practical methods of training in research, as much in its experimental laboratories as in its seminars, to compensate for the conformism of the higher education of the time and to reinvent the link between training and research.


This is why many renowned scholars, convinced by this approach, taught at the EPHE or worked in its laboratories: Émile Benveniste, Fernand Braudel, Claude Bernard, Marcellin Berthelot, Paul Broca, Georges Dumézil, Sylvain Lévi, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Étienne-Jules Marey, Gaston Maspero, Louis Massignon, Marcel Mauss, Henri Moissan, Gabriel Monod, Gaston Paris, Louis Pasteur, Henri Poincaré, Lucie Randoin, Germaine Rouillard, Émile Roux, Ferdinand de Saussure, Germaine Tillion.
Even if today the practical approach has become commonplace, the School has continued to apply this precept, both in the experimental sciences and in the humanities: the choice of teaching based on "research in the making" continues to prevail.


During the fiftieth anniversary of the École in 1922, delayed because of the First World War, the President of the Republic, Alexandre Millerand, said: "The École Pratique des Hautes Études has justified its creation by its services and its results. It honors France and science. As we bow to its past, let us salute with respect and confidence the free grouping of its masters and their disciplines, the strength and hope of our country".


Today, the EPHE offers training in research through the practice of research in its three sections: Life and Earth Sciences (SVT), Historical and Philological Sciences (SHP) and Religious Sciences (SR), in Paris, in the provinces and in French Polynesia. Its teaching is essentially provided at the master's and doctoral levels, but in keeping with the spirit of its foundation, it continues to deliver an institutional diploma that does not require a diploma for admission.

 


Internationally recognized cutting-edge research and training

 

The School is known worldwide for its erudition and its rare disciplines, whether endangered or emerging, which allow us to understand civilizations from all their angles, through disciplines as varied as history, philology, archaeology, art history, linguistics, and the study of the world's religions, from Antiquity to the present day... For example, the EPHE is the only French institution offering training in all ancient scripts and languages, or in all fields of Mediterranean antiquity and its cultural areas. These advanced disciplines are supported by a very high level of teaching in Latin, Byzantine, and Hebrew paleography, in the history of science, in cultural and intellectual history, in representations of space, diplomacy, linguistics, numismatics, hagiography, images and emblems... In the life and earth sciences, the teaching emphasizes practical work and fieldwork in fields such as biology and health, neuroscience, ecology, anthropology, the environment and evolution.
A constant evolution in line with the challenges of society

The EPHE is constantly adapting to the evolution of the scientific landscape with, for example, the development of digital humanities or cognitive sciences, as well as responses to major societal issues such as ethics, secularism or religions.

 

Finally, the École pays particular attention to making the link with civil society: this is the case of the free auditors who have been taking its courses for more than 150 years, but also of the four institutes it has created that are interested in aging, coral reefs, rare languages, or the teaching of religious facts and secularism.

In recent years, the School has made a double choice. First, to join the Paris Sciences Lettres (PSL) university as a component institution alongside other prestigious schools. Located in the heart of Paris, PSL University, ranked among the top 50 universities in the world, brings together all fields of knowledge, innovation and creation. It is also a founding member of Campus Condorcet, a city of humanities and social sciences being built in Aubervilliers, where it is currently constructing its future headquarters. Alongside 10 other institutions, the EPHE is building an international campus to meet the educational, scientific and digital challenges of the 21st century.

 

"What was lacking, and what Duruy wanted, was for a great experimenter to be able to associate students with his research in the laboratory; there, in fact, participation in the common work is more instructive than a monologue in the pulpit. Such is the idea that suggested the creation of a practical school; the word practical, in this title, is an essential element."

Louis Havet, President of the Historical and Philological Sciences Section, 1912-1925.