When institutes for primary teachers training called écoles normales were created in 1845, the word supérieure (meaning upper) was added to form the current name.

[9] As a grande école, the vast majority of the academic staff hosted at the ENS belong to external institutions such as one of the Parisian universities, the CNRS and the EHESS.

Its alumni include 14 Nobel Prize laureates,[10] of which 8 are in Physics, 12 Fields Medalists, more than half the recipients of the CNRS's Gold Medal, several hundred members of the Institut de France, as well as several French and foreign politicians and statespeople.

These courses covered all the existing sciences and humanities and were given by scholars such as: scientists Monge, Vandermonde, Daubenton, Berthollet and philosophers Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and Volney were some of the teachers.

On 17 March 1808, Napoleon created by decree a pensionnat normal within the imperial University of France charged with "training in the art of teaching the sciences and the humanities".

By then a sister establishment had been created by Napoleon in Pisa under the name of Scuola Normale Superiore (SNS), which continues to exist today and still has close ties to the Paris school.

During the 1830s, under the direction of philosopher Victor Cousin, the school enhanced its status as an institution to prepare the agrégation by expanding the duration of study to three years, and was divided into its present-day Sciences and Letters divisions.

In 1953 it was made autonomous from the University of Paris,[19] but it was perceived ambivalently by the authorities as a nexus of protest, particularly due to the teachings delivered there by such controversial figures as political philosopher Louis Althusser.

[20] The fallout from the May 1968 protests caused President of the Republic Georges Pompidou, himself a former student at the school, to force the resignation of its director, Robert Flacelière and to appoint his contemporary Jean Bousquet as his successor [citation needed].

ENS has a second campus on Boulevard Jourdan (previously the women's college), in the 14th arrondissement of Paris, which is home to the school's research department of social sciences, law, economics and geography, as well as further student residences.

Two hundred normaliens are thus recruited every year, half of them in the sciences and the same number in the humanities, and receive a monthly salary (around €1,350/month in 2018), and in exchange they sign a ten-year contract to work for the state.

Students who entered from a scientific concours (thus having mainly studied in their preparatory school maths, physics, and chemistry or biology) are encouraged to attend courses in the literary departments.

The main library, devoted to literature, classics, and human sciences, dates back to the nineteenth century when it was greatly expanded by its director, the famous dreyfusard Lucien Herr.

[63] In addition to this, the École normale supérieure cooperates in Atomium Culture, the first permanent platform for European excellence that brings together some of Europe's leading universities, newspapers and businesses.

During its history and due to the far reach of the French Empire during the colonial era, many schools have been created around the world based on the ENS model, from Haiti (in Port-au-Prince) to Vietnam (in Hanoi) to the Maghreb (in Tunis, Casablanca, Oran, and Rabat to name but a few) and Subsaharan Africa (in Nouakchott, Libreville, Yaoundé, Dakar, Niamey, Bangui for example).

[70] Since 2001, the École normale supérieure's internet portal, called Diffusion des savoirs ("Spreading knowledge") has offered access to more than 2000 recordings of conferences and seminars that have taken place at the school, in all sciences natural and social.

[71] The school also has launched its own short conference platform, Les Ernest,[72] which shows renowned specialists speaking for fifteen minutes on a given subject in a wide scope of disciplines.

It has also contributed to financing several positions for scientists in ENS laboratories, for instance in research on telecom network security with France Télécom and on "artificial vision" with the Airbus foundation.

[76] Throughout its history, a sizeable number of ENS alumni, some of them known as normaliens, have become notable in many varied fields, both academic and otherwise, ranging from Louis Pasteur, the chemist and microbiologist famed for inventing pasteurisation, to philologist Georges Dumézil, novelist Julien Gracq and socialist Prime Minister Léon Blum.

His teaching, which continued until 1965, was vastly influential in shaping his students, who included Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat, Gustave Choquet, Jacques Dixmier, Roger Godement, René Thom and Jean-Pierre Serre.

Since the 1936 establishment of the Fields Medal, often called the "Nobel Prize for mathematics", eleven normaliens have been recipients, contributing to ENS's reputation as one of the world's foremost training grounds for mathematicians: Laurent Schwartz, Jean-Pierre Serre (also a recipient of the inaugural Abel Prize in 2003), René Thom, Alain Connes, Jean-Christophe Yoccoz, Pierre-Louis Lions, Laurent Lafforgue, Wendelin Werner, Cédric Villani, Ngô Bảo Châu and Hugo Duminil-Copin.

Later, Marxist political thinker Louis Althusser was a student at ENS and taught there for many years, and many of his disciples later became known for their own thought: among them were Étienne Balibar, philosopher Alain Badiou, who still teaches at the school as an emeritus professor, and Jacques Rancière.

Contributing to ENS's role as the centre of the structuralist school of thought, alongside Althusser and Foucault, major psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Jacques Lacan taught there in the 1960s, notably giving his course, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, in 1964.

[78] During this time the school became a focal point of the École freudienne de Paris, and many of Lacan's disciples were educated there, including psychoanalysts Jacques-Alain Miller and Jean-Claude Milner, the first president of the World Association of Psychoanalysis.

Sinologist Marcel Granet, medievalist Jacques Le Goff, Egyptologist Gaston Maspero, archaeologist Paul Veyne, ancien régime specialist Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and Pre-Columbian civilisation anthropologist Jacques Soustelle were all students at the school, as well as Georges Dumézil, who revolutionised comparative philology and mythography with his analyses of sovereignty in Proto-Indo-European religion and formulated the trifunctional hypothesis of social class in ancient societies.

The school has also long been a centre for literary criticism and theory, from one-time director Gustave Lanson to major twentieth-century figures of the field such as Paul Bénichou, Jean-Pierre Richard and Gérard Genette.

Around this same period Algerian novelist, essayist and filmmaker Assia Djebar, who would become one of the most prominent voices of Arab feminism, was a student at the school, as well as Belgian writer Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt.

However, Gérard Debreu won the 1983 Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, and there is a growing output of economists from ENS, as evidenced by the young generation of French economists represented by Emmanuel Saez, winner of the 2009 John Bates Clark Medal, Esther Duflo, who won the same medal in 2010 and the Nobel prize in 2019, and Thomas Piketty, author of the 2013 bestseller Capital in the Twenty-First Century.

Third Republic Prime Ministers Jules Simon, Léon Blum, Édouard Herriot and Paul Painlevé as well as socialist leader Jean Jaurès were early examples of this trend.

At this time, quite a few ENS former students and intellectuals were drawn to socialism, such as Pierre Brossolette who became a Resistance hero and a major national leader during World War II.