How It's Used

“The grandes ecoles date back to the years before the French Revolution, when the monarchy felt the need for a highly specialized corps of technocrats, mainly to design roads and canals. Napoleon was particularly keen about creating new training schools at this level. In 1804, he created the famous Ecole Polytechnique—called simply X by the initiated—to provide the French empire with military officers.”

—Matthew Fraser, "Middle Kingdom: How France Grooms Its Elite," The Globe and Mail, June 13, 1994.

“Yet beyond the rhetoric, Mr [Jacques] Chirac's election promise to break the control of France's elites looks rather weak. He himself is an 'enarque' or graduate of Ena, the prestigious ecole nationale d'administration. So are many of his ministers and their advisers. Across the French political world, at top levels in the civil service, in the most senior positions in business and in other organisations, Enarques are widespread. So too are those known by the letter 'X', the graduates of the other top Parisian college, Ecole Polytechnique.

"As a recent comparative study by three French sociologists pointed out, a similar elite of public school and 'Oxbridge' graduates exists in the UK. But the pool in France is far smaller, with only a little over 100 graduates from Ena each year, for example. Furthermore, it is frequently not just any Enarque in charge, but the top handful of the school's graduates each year, who by tradition join the inspecteur des finance corps. Similarly, the X in top positions are often those from the small minority who are a member of the prestigious 'mines' corps.”

—Andrew Jack, “Establishment Under Attack,” The Financial Times, September 27, 1995.

“Nor, for all the talk about creating a more international business culture, are French companies all that keen to recruit abroad. Not a single boss of a French bank has ever worked in banking outside France, according to Korn/Ferry. French employers still regard with awe the diplomas dished out by their own prestigious grandes ecoles, particularly the Ecole Nationale d'Administration (ENA) and the Ecole Polytechnique (X). Even today, two-thirds of the chairmen of the top 40 listed French companies are graduates of these two schools. Only 28% of main board directors are genuinely independent, against 80% in America. The same faces crop up time and again in annual reports: just 10% of directors bag over a third of directorships of the top 40 companies. Many of the bosses of the biggest firms, such as Vivendi, Societe Generale, AXA or BNP, have shuffled there from top jobs in the civil service. Entrepreneurs such as François Pinault, who runs a successful retail empire, are still rare.”

—no author listed, “A wiser, weaker state,” The Economist, June 5, 1999.

“Out of 130,000 students who focus on math and science in French high schools each year, roughly 15 percent do well enough on their exams to qualify for the two- to three-year preparation course required by the elite universities. Of those who make it through that, 5,000 apply to Ecole Polytechnique, which is commonly called simply 'X,' and just 400 are admitted from France. Admission is based strictly on exam grades; there isn't even an essay requirement or interview. And there are no legacy admissions, sports scholarships or other American-style shortcuts for getting into X.

"'You can be the president's nephew and it won't help you get in,' says Bernard Oppetit, a 1978 graduate of X who later worked for BNP Paribas before starting Centaurus Capital, a London investment fund with $4 billion under management.

"The Ecole Polytechnique was founded in 1794, during the French Revolution, to train the country's military engineers, and it officially remains under the umbrella of the French ministry of defense. Not only is the school free, but students also receive a stipend from the government to cover their expenses.”

—Nelson D. Schwartz and Katrin Bennhold, “Where the Heads No Longer Roll,” The New York Times, February 17, 2008.

Links

Beyond eAlmanac
Wikipedia article on the École Polytechnique
The École Polytechnique official Web site (in English)