professorships are rare and competitive. Generalistic in its recruitment and organisation, the ENS is the only grande école in France to have departments of research in all the natural, social, and human sciences. Due to the selectivity of its entrance exam and its turnover among French researchers, it has a high proportion of prize laureates and therefore a very good reputation. Its alumni include 14 Nobel Prize laureates (ENS has the highest proportion of Nobel laureates among its alumni of any institution worldwide), of which 8 are in Physics, 12 Fields Medalists, more than half the recipients of the CNRS's Gold Medal (France's highest scientific prize) and several hundred members of the Institut de France, and scores of politicians and statesmen. The school has achieved particular recognition in the fields of mathematics and physics as one of France's foremost scientific training grounds, along with international notability in the human sciences as the spiritual birthplace of authors such as Julien Gracq, Jean Giraudoux, Assia Djebar, and Charles Péguy, philosophers such as Henri Bergson, Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Althusser, Simone Weil, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Alain Badiou, social scientists such as Émile Durkheim, Raymond Aron, and Pierre Bourdieu, and "French theorists" such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. The school's students are often referred to as normaliens. Its model has been replicated elsewhere, in France (at the ENSes of Lyon, Paris-Saclay, and Rennes), in Italy (at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa), in Romania, in China and in former French colonies such as Morocco, Algeria, Mali, Mauritania, Algeria, and Cameroon. History Founding The current institution finds its roots in the creation of the École normale de l'an III by the post-revolutionary National Convention led by Robespierre in 1794. The school was created based on a recommendation by Joseph Lakanal and Dominique-Joseph Garat, who were part of the commission on public education. The École normale was intended as the core of a planned centralised national education system. The project was also conceived as a way to reestablish trust between the Republic and the country's elites, which had been alienated to some degree by the Reign of Terror. The decree establishing the school, issued on 30 October 1794 (9 brumaire an III), states in its first article that "There will be established in Paris an École normale (literally, a normal school), where, from all the parts of the Republic, citizens already educated in the useful sciences