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This article outlines how public management emerged in France with the founding of the Centre d’Études Supérieures du Management Public (CESMAP) in 1970. It shows that the dual and purposeful conception of public management (management of public organizations and policies) is the result of a learning process, of interactions between management science and the humanities, and particularly of their confrontation with the reality and the consistent ambiguity of public action. Based on archival documents and interviews with former members of the CESMAP, the study highlights the context and dynamics (individual and organizational) that favored the rise of the CESMAP and its threefold offer (training, consulting, and research). It also exposes, through the limits of its entrepreneurial model, the contribution of its actors to the conceptual coherence of public management.