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Focused on training and curricula at the École nationale d'administration (ENA) from 1945 to 1982, this article explores the cognitive underpinnings of State power. Drawing on the archives of the school, it shows that changes in curriculum and teaching at the ENA are structured by different strategies of legitimization and distinction. These are driven by the professional groups that recruit graduates into the field of power, as well as the positioning of this and other grandes écoles in the field of higher education. These transformations help to historicize the changing figures of the senior civil servant, moving from the “humanist” civil servant in the 1950s to the “scientific” civil servant in the 1960s, and then the “operational” civil servant in the 1970s. These successive models have a decisive impact on the mode of legitimization of different groups of top State officials, and on the symbolic categories that public policies articulate.