The traditional system of elite education in France, which could be considered as a “French exception” (Lazuech 1999), is challenged by processes of internationalisation and globalisation of the field of higher education. The grandes écoles – the French elite colleges – with their two-year preparatory classes (classes préparatoires) at some prestigious lycées can be considered as unique in the severity of the selection processes (the concours), on which is grounded the great symbolic weight of these institutions of elite education, even more than the universities in France. The ongoing reorganisation of the French field of higher education, which Musselin (2017: 226) designates “fusion mania”, has led to the formation of greater research units such as the “Communautés d’universités et d’établissements” (COMUES) [Engl. Communities of universities and institutions]. These have recently been transformed into "universities”, which are new higher education formations that include the former universities, but also the grandes écoles and other research institutions. Against the backdrop of these transformations of the former power relations in the academic field in France, our paper focuses on the processes of reconfiguration of the traditional identities of the very nationally anchored institutions in elite education: the grandes écoles. Our research question is how discourses of self-construction and -positioning of the grandes écoles – in our study the Écoles normales supérieures – as well as their social constructions of an ideal student have evolved in the context of the reconfiguration of the higher education field in France. These constructions and positionings are understood as constituting elements of institutional habitus (Schippling 2018), a concept that develops the fruitful potential of the Bourdieusian theory of habitus for an organisational sociological perspective. From the theoretical perspective, our paper is situated within critical research on the education of elites (e.g., Bourdieu 1989; Hartmann 2002; Maxwell et al. 2018) and can be understood as a contribution to continuing research on the field of French elite education in line with the work of Pierre Bourdieu and his colleagues on La noblesse d’État (Bourdieu 1989). Our work refers mainly to the triad of the concepts, ‘habitus’, ‘field’ and ‘capital’. These concepts function as heuristic elements which are developed and, if necessary, modified within the research process. Our study includes two Écoles normales supérieures: the ENS de la rue d’Ulm and the ENS de Cachan (since 2016 École normale supérieure Paris-Saclay): two prestigious grandes écoles in France, which regard themselves as institutions forming the future research elite (ENS / PSL 2023). Bourdieu (1988: 19) designates these colleges “the apex of the whole academic hierarchy” in France. Our aim is to ascertain how these traditionally small and internationally less visible institutions, strongly founded in a national culture, react to the transformation of the field of French higher education in the construction of their institutional habitus. On the whole, our focus is on contributing to an update of the theory of social reproduction of the field of power – in this case the academic power field – which was developed in La noblesse d’État, taking into account processes of internationalisation and globalisation in the field of the grandes écoles: this perspective was not considered in Bourdieu’s work. In parallel, we open up comparative perspectives with other international contexts of elite education in the higher education system that are also affected by global transformations, but react in different ways (e.g., Verhoeven et al. 2022).

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