4 The École Normale Supérieure 1952–1956
Arriving at the École Normale Supérieure in October 1952 was a
real liberation after all the years of trammelled life in khâgne. Even
though Jackie had to leave the rue Lagrange to share a room with
three other students, it marked a turning-point in his life. Finally, he
was ‘there’; fi nally, he ‘belonged’.
Founded in 1794 under the Convention, the École Normale
Supérieure has been located at 45, rue d’Ulm, since 1847. It is just a
few hundred metres away from the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. It awards
no degrees itself: its particular feature resides in the way it takes in
students in sciences and humanities in roughly equal proportions,
even if the two worlds remain quite separate. The ENS is, above
all, an extraordinary breeding ground for talent. It is impossible to
list all the famous normaliens. Henri Bergson, Jean Jaurès, Émile
Durkheim, Charles Péguy, Léon Blum, Jean-Paul Sartre, Raymond
Aron, and a host of others had, over several generations, ensured
the celebrity of this institution by the time it was Derrida’s turn to
enter it.
This little world, at that time exclusively populated by young men
- even though young women had no diffi culty in visiting it – was
known as the ‘cloister on the rue d’Ulm’, and it generated its own
mythology and rituals, hymned by authors such as Romain Rolland
and Jules Romains. Students study there for four years, with the
third year generally being devoted to preparing for the agrégation
and the last year to starting work on a dissertation. The students
have the status of trainee civil servants and commit themselves to
working for the state for at least ten years after they enter.
Since the beginning of the twentieth century, students at the
École have used their own jargon to refer to particular local fea-
tures. A ‘turne’ or ‘thurne’ is the room of a boarder, and ‘thurnage’
is the complex procedure in which thurnes are allotted to students
from their second year onwards. The student who comes top in the
entrance exam is called a ‘cacique’. An ‘archicube’ is a former student,
and the directory of former students is called the ‘archicubier’. In the