The grandes écoles (literally in French "great schools") of France are higher education establishments outside the main framework of the French university system. The grandes écoles select students for admission based chiefly on national ranking in competitive written and oral exams. In contrast, French public universities have a legal obligation to accept all candidates of the region who hold a baccalauréat. Usually candidates for the national exams have completed two years of dedicated preparatory classes, although this is not always the case. The grandes écoles do not have large student bodies (5,000 at the largest establishment; most have a few hundred students each year). They have traditionally produced many if not most of France's high-ranking civil servants, politicians and executives, as well as many scientists, writers and philosophers.^{[citation needed]} Some grandes écoles concentrate on a single subject area, such as engineering, sciences or business.

The phrase 'grandes écoles' originated in 1794 after the French revolution, when the National Convention created the École Normale Supérieure, the mathematician Gaspard Monge and Lazare Carnot created the École Polytechnique and the abbot Henri Grégoire created the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers.

Les Six is a name, inspired by Mily Balakirev's The Five, given in 1920 by critic Henri Collet in an article titled "Les cinq Russes, les six Français et M. Satie" (Comoedia, 16 January 1920) to a group of six composers working in Montparnasse. Their music is often seen as a reaction against the musical style of Richard Wagner and the impressionist music of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel.

Formally, the Groupe des Six members were:

In 1917, when many theatres and concert halls were closed because of World War I, Blaise Cendrars and the painter Moise Kisling decided to put on concerts at 6 Rue Huyghens, the studio of the painter Émile Lejeune. For the first of these events, the walls of the studio were decorated with canvases by Picasso, Matisse, Léger, Modigliani and others. Music by Erik Satie, Honegger, Auric and Durey was played. It was this concert that gave Satie the idea of assembling a group of composers^[which?] around himself to be known as Les nouveaux jeunes, forerunners of Les Six.