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Portant sur la formation à l’École nationale d’administration entre 1945 et 1982, cet article entend contribuer à l’analyse des ressorts cognitifs de la domination bureaucratique. Au moyen d’une étude archivistique, il montre que les enseignements sont travaillés par des processus de changement indexés sur des rapports de force situés au croisement du champ du pouvoir et du champ des grandes écoles. Ces inflexions permettent d’historiciser la figure du « généraliste », souvent mobilisée pour caractériser les hauts fonctionnaires français. Du haut fonctionnaire humaniste dans les années 1950 au modèle « opérationnel » des années 1970, en passant par le projet de haut fonctionnaire scientifique dans les années 1960, ces constructions curriculaires de l’excellence administrative participent à la recomposition des modes de légitimation des groupes bureaucratiques, ainsi qu’aux transformations des catégories symboliques qui encadrent les dispositifs d’action publique. Focused on training and curricula at the École nationale d’administration from 1945 to 1982, this article explores the cognitive underpinnings of State power. Drawing on the archives of the school, it shows that changes in curriculum and teaching at the ENA are structured by different strategies of legitimization and distinction driven by the professional groups that recruit graduates into the field of power, as well as the positioning of the grandes écoles in the field of higher education. These transformations help to historicize the changing figures of the senior civil servant, moving from the “humanist” civil servant in the 1950s, to the “scientific” civil servant in the 1960s, and then the “operational” civil servant in the 1970s. These successive models have a decisive impact on the mode of legitimization of different groups of top State officials, and on the symbolic categories that public policies articulate.

This article examines the attempt to create a common training programme for senior central and local government offıcials, which was announced by the Minister for the Civil Service in the autumn of 2003. The launch of the “Territoires” module in 2006, for both students of ENA (the French National School of Administration) and INET (the French National Institute for Territorial Studies), has offered an opportunity to develop a legitimate model for the senior civil service. However, it would seem that the two schools’courses have just been juxtaposed rather than merged with one another. The strength of each establishment’s traditions has made it impossible to forge a common programme and they still reflect different notions of the civil service, catering to the needs of two different types of labour market.; Cet article analyse le rapprochement des formations initiales des hauts fonctionnaires de l’État et des collectivités territoriales annoncé par le ministre de la fonction publique à l’automne 2003.À travers la création du module « Territoires », suivi conjointement par les élèves de l’ÉNA et del’INET depuis 2006, se joue la définition d’un modèle légitime de haute fonction publique.Toutefois, les formations des deux établissements apparaissent aujourd’hui davantage juxtaposées que fondues. La puissance des mécanismes de reproduction institutionnelle empêche de parler de l’appariement des deux institutions, qui continuent de refléter – et de revendiquer – des modèles hétérogènes de formation des cadres de l’action publique alimentant deux types de marché du travail différents.

Senior Civil Servants during the Fifth Republic : Received Ideas vs. What Analysis Shows Contrary to what sociological approaches tend to suggest, the analysis of professional careers shows that the relationships between administration and politics are defined in terms of underlying interactive structures. Analysis also shows the limitations of “models” of public administration during different historical periods : it is the availability of certain professional profiles that conditions political choice, politicisation leading to the definition of types of careers and various kinds of public action. The history of the “corps” and of senior civil servants is determined neither by mechanical rules nor by chance, but by specific normative structures. Due to the statistical nature of these structures, research on public administration follows two lines : a relative viewpoint and a long-term historical viewpoint.