Before discussing the current place of Britain in the international strategy of the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE) and its possible evolution in the near future, it may be useful to start by highlighting a few of the EPHE's specificities against the general background of French higher education institutions.

The École Pratique des Hautes Études ‘At a Glance’

An explanation of the word pratique in the name of the school will serve as a good introduction to the motives behind the creation of the EPHE in the late 1860s and also to what it is today.

Until 1868, all teaching at the University of Paris's most prestigious Sorbonne was in the form of ex cathedra lectures delivered by the most distinguished of professors. The transmission of knowledge was, by ancient tradition, a top-down, one-way process, with the Sorbonne as the symbol of the preeminence of French science. Yet some felt that France needed to match the increasingly remarkable achievements of German academia. The rivalry between France and Germany, which originated in Prussian national resistance to Napoleonic conquest, was a key element of European politics throughout the nineteenth century and also a major source of wars (this is why historians regard the year 1914 as the true end of the nineteenth century in Europe). In an age of exacerbated nationalisms, this rivalry was very much alive in academic matters and French scholars were very much aware of their German counterparts’ achievements in many fields, ranging from philosophy to history to basic and life sciences. Central to German universities was a combination of ‘classic’ ex cathedra teaching – based on a clear hierarchy of authority between professors and students, as was the case in France – and a specific practice: the seminar. The principle of the seminar is that the professor and students do research work together in an environment where documentation is readily available. One can look up a reference in a book, put the volume on the table and start a critical discussion of a source or of an idea. The difference between the two approaches to teaching (or training) is substantial: the contrast is between, on the one hand, authority delivering scientific truth from on high and, on the other hand, a document-based, collective effort involving the joint practice of research and critical appraisal.