SAVING THE SCHOOL OF CHARTERS HOW TO ADAPT OR REINVENT THE SCHOOL OF CHARTERS IN A CHANGING ENVIRONMENT (1971-1980)?

On Monday, 29 November 1971, the Ecole nationale des chartes celebrated its 150th anniversary with pomp and circumstance at the Hotel de Rohan. On that occasion, Olivier Guichard, Minister of Education, and Jacques Duhamel, Minister of Cultural Affairs, announced that they were planning a reform capable of adapting the Ecole to its mission, in the wake of a controversy caused during the spring of that year by the exceptionally low number of positions open to the entrance exam. The year 1971 encapsulates the changing environment in which the Ecole des Chartes evolved from the late 1950s to the early 1990s, and even up to the present day, marked by the transfer of what was not yet called cultural heritage to a new Ministry of Cultural Affairs anxious to get the executives it needed to carry out a new policy, and by the creation of professional schools to provide better training for library, archive and cultural heritage positions. How has the Ecole des Chartes lived through and adapted to these changes?