Sciences Po e la razionalizzazione democratica nella Terza Repubblica francese / Sciences Po and the democratic rationalization in the Third French Republic

The essay, that is part of a broader research conducted in recent years by the Author on political culture and intellectual world in the French Third Republic, assumes the founding moment of the Faculté Libre de Sciences Politiques in 1872 as the keystone of the republicanism between nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is in fact the moment of maximum effort in the planning some reform models of public education, basic and higher, which will get figures of forward-thinking intellectuals like Émile Boutmy to attempt to create a University at the same time free from State interference, but able to offering to the the same State an élite ‘scientifically’ trained to politics. Although marked by the lesson of positivism of the time, this devouring aspiration – a utopia for someone – will never be aseptic or neutral with respect to one’s time. So the extraordinary insistence, starting at the program of courses at Sciences Po, on history and the knowledge well anchored in the contemporary time, french and even more european. A contemporaneity of war, ça va sans dire.