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In France, while schools are supposed to be sources of social mobility, as in any democratic society, it appears that children from privileged socio-economic categories are increasingly overrepresented in preparatory classes for the Grandes Écoles. The French studies trying to understand elite reproduction have mainly focused on family inheritance overlooking the fact that social privilege is also mediated through institutions, as highlighted by the scientific literature on selective admissions in the US. Following such line of inquiry, this article aims to show how patterns of "school-linking processes" allow for social closure in France's first-class higher education. It presents a comparative case study research which is both descriptive and explanatory in design. Results combine quantitative data to identify the secondary schools that feed the elite paths of three major high schools offering preparatory classes; and qualitative data in order to understand the strategies of these three major high schools to select their applicants. The findings suggest that access to French elite education is clearly shaped by school-linking phenomena but that the forms of these links depend on the preparatory classes' geographical location and catchment areas inducing different types of strategies from the selection committees. The conclusion highlights that these French specificities in terms of institutional linkages lead to different practical implications from those of US research.

One hundred and twenty students successful at entering four of the most famous French "grandes ecoles" ("Ecole Normale Superieure" Ulm, Polytechnique, HEC, Sciences Po) were questioned about their institution's image. We focus on how the prestige of these institutions in the French society played a role in students' attraction and contributed to build their aspirations to integrate them. Initially, the knowledge and the awareness of the symbolic meanings associated with these institutions are very unequal among these students. As this paper shows, they depend on their family and school former socialisation. If the prestigious image exerts an undeniable attraction on numerous students, its effect on their feeling of accessibility is ambivalent. It intimidates the majority of them, particularly those with fewer social and cultural capital, thus complicating their identification with the institution. These findings suggest that the public image of these elite institutions can be of interest in understanding the socially differentiated attractiveness of this selective segment of higher education in France. (Contains 2 figures and 5 notes.)

This article starts from the puzzle that although French elite institutions enjoy extremely positive and attractive images, students from these schools generally choose to conceal their academic pedigree in their daily interactions. We show that, in a context of growing inequalities of access to "grandes ecoles," the strategy of hiding one's student identity may be understood as the desire to avoid six core threats associated with declaring one's association with an elite school: not conforming to group norms, confirming a negative reputation, not living up to a positive reputation, reducing one's identity, losing control of one's identity, and threatening the identity of the other. The conclusions highlight the implications of this microsociological study on a host of much wider questions useful in better understanding the ambivalent relations that exist between French society and its elites issued from the "grandes ecoles." (Contains 7 notes.)