Sciences Po
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sciences Po is a French abbreviation of sciences politiques, or political science, which is a division of the social sciences. It is also an epithet of the former Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques, founded in Paris in 1872 to train future French civil servants and diplomats. It was often referred to as the Ecole des Sciences Politiques or simply Sciences Po, or officially Institut d'études politiques de Paris (IEP).
In 1945, General Charles de Gaulle transformed the study of political science in France by creating a system of schools modelled after the Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques, which was founded as a private school and trained many of the European political and diplomatic elite. This system of schools evolved into nine public Institutes of Political Studies (French: Institut d'Etudes Politiques or IEP) at Aix-en-Provence, Bordeaux, Grenoble, Lille, Lyon, Paris, Rennes, Strasbourg and Toulouse.
The only IEP to retain the epithet Sciences Po is the National Foundation of Political Science (France) (French: Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques) and the school which it manages, the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris (English: Paris Institute of Political Studies) because they are the direct descendants of the École Libre des Sciences Politiques. The other the institutes are referred to as IEP or Sciences Po immediately followed by the city in which they reside (example: Sciences Po Lyon, IEP de Lyon).
