and Nothingnesson the nature of time consciousness, as he would Husserl
and Heidegger, the next two major influences on his philosophical
thought, on the same topic.^9
Of all the lyce ́es in Paris, Louis-le-Grand had the highest record of
graduates who passed the entrance exam to the E ́cole Normale Supe ́rieure.
Sartre was number seven in the competition. Of the twenty-eight candi-
dates accepted in Sartre’s and Nizan’s class, half were from Louis-le-
Grand.^10 Among others in that stellar class entering in August of 1924 were
Raymond Aron, Daniel Lagache and Georges Canguilhem from the less
distinguished Lyce ́e Condorcet. They, Sartre and Nizan were the five
philosophy students in the class. They saw a good deal of one another
during the following years. Pierre Guille, Jean Hyppolite and Rene ́Maheu
arrived the following year, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty the year after that.
It should be noted that the E ́cole had accepted its first female student, the
mathematician Mme. Flamant (ne ́e Parize) in 1917 .Anotherwomanwas
admitted not without difficulty in Merleau-Ponty’s year, the mathematician
Marie-Louise Dubreil-Jacotin.^11 Two female philosophy students were
admitted in 1927 and Simone Weil gained entrance in 1928. According to
Maurice de Gandillac, these were the first three women admitted to
Philosophy at the ENS.^12 Weil, Merleau-Ponty and Simone de Beauvoir
were students at the Sorbonne, but Beauvoir had not applied to the ENS.
Founded by the Convention, October 30 , 1794 , the E ́cole Normale
Supe ́rieure is one of the fivegrandes e ́colesof France. These crown
the educational pyramid instituted by the Napoleonic reform and its
late nineteenth-century revision. Sartre’s father, stepfather and maternal
uncle graduated in the same year from one of these institutions,
the Polytechnical Institute, which trains engineers. But the ENS was
reserved for thecreme de la creme.
(^9) Already in his philosophical “novel,”The Legend of Truth, Sartre would turn a critical eye
toward the theories of time propounded by Bergson and by his respected contemporary,
10 E ́mile Meyerson (see below).
11 Life^57.
In fact, Mlle. Jacotin, though scoring second highest in the entrance to the ENS, was listed
twenty-first (after the males) by the Ministry of Education and hence denied admission.
A major protest had to be addressed to the ministry to rectify this injustice. SeeAnnuaire des
12 Anciens Eleves de l’Ecole Normale Supe ́rieure, ed. Jean Leray (^1974 ). Though she was at the Sorbonne with Merleau-Ponty and Beauvoir, Weil entered the ENS in 1928 (see Maurice de Gandillac,Le Siecle traverse ́[Paris: Albin Michel, 1998 ], 113 ;
hereafterSTG.
An elite education: student, author, soldier, teacher 23