Granet passed the baccalauréat examination and entered the École Normale in 1904, just as the tumultuous Dreyfus Affair was coming to a close and the French educational system was changing.

Émile Durkheim, the sociologist and founder of Année Sociologique in 1898, who would greatly influence the life and work of Granet, began teaching a course on pedagogy at the Sorbonne—it was compulsory for all students from 1904 until 1913.

At the École Normale, Granet embraced philosophy, law, and history, along with sociology, though his work in any field would adopt a Durkheimian character.

He became part of an elite group of students which included future medieval historian and founder of the Annales school of history Marc Bloch, the geographer Philippe Arbos, sociologist Georges Davy, Hellenist and future librarian of the École Normale Paul Étard, mathematician Paul Lévy, and more.

He apparently spoke to Lucien Herr—the librarian of the École Normale from 1888 to 1926 who was associated with Durkheim and his students, and who was active in the socialist movement and the Dreyfus Affair—who advised Granet, when the latter thought of considering the Japanese case, to seek the advice of respected sinologist Edouard Chavannes, then apparently the nearest Granet could get in Paris to an expert on Japan.

Granet wrote to friends at home, “We pack up: the twenty-four historians, in their frail cases, decorated with green characters, make a shaky structure.

In December 1922, Granet replaced Mauss, when the latter scalded his foot, as a member of the committee for Georges Davy's thesis, “The Swearing of Faith,” and subsequently published harsh criticism of it in the Journal de Psychologie Normale et Pathologie.

Acknowledging the decline of Année following Durkheim's death in 1917, several Durkheimians met in March 1923 in Paris to design a plan to resuscitate the journal.

He divided his teaching into the mythique and the juridique (the latter primarily consisting of rights and duties of kinship and marriage), though he did not necessarily succeed in eliciting in his students the same enthusiasm he possessed for both areas simultaneously.