ABSTRACT
Economics in France has some very specific traditions closely linked to the national institutions. Roughly speaking, the profession has been divided from the middle of the nineteenth century into two separate groups according to their educational background and their professional activity; namely, the professors of political economy (professeurs déconomie politique) and the economic engineers (les ingénieurs économistes). Whereas the professors are educated in law faculties mainly in law and humanities, the engineers have been trained in the French scientific schools (les Grandes Ecoles), primarily in mathematics and natural scientific matters. As the French system of universities is public and highly centralized, the first group completely dominates the faculty of economics. The engineers, on the other hand, are most often members of prestigious corps of civil servants (ingénieurs des mines, ingénieurs des ponts et chaussées…) and have a determining influence in the administrative decisionmaking process. Anyway, the relationship between the two groups has, up to now, remained occasional and relatively poor because of the narrow dimension of their intersection, in spite of some recent rapprochements which will be described later.
