Between 1944 and 1968, the number of doctorates in physical sciences awarded in France was multiplied by 20: as the Second World War and the Hiroshima explosion revealed their full power, these disciplines were at the forefront of the massification and intensification of scientific activity and research training, that took off from the 1940s to the 1960s. By choosing a global approach that brings together research and higher education, this book offers a socio-history of the silent but successful revolution that took place in the professional practices of physicists and chemists – which eventually spread to all disciplines. How did the men and women in science, most of whom considered themselves to be scholars at the end of the Second World War, became researchers, gradually but en masse? How have universities and grandes écoles coped with and made possible this new system for producing both scientific facts and scientific elites?