Since 1946, in French universities, the training of teachers of French for general secondary education has followed two parallel paths - lettres modernes or lettres classiques (as a university course, lettres classiques is distinguished from lettres modernes by its heavy bias in favour of Latin and Ancient Greek. Both include French language and literature). Originally, after the Second World War, this duality – with no foreign equivalent – was a materialization of the double inheritance bestowed upon secondary education: higher primary education which nurtured lettres modernes, and secondary education stricto sensu, the bastion of lettres classiques. Constituting an original case, the duality of training of teachers of lettres long perpetuated the symbolic hierarchy which subordinated higher primary education to secondary education before the war and which restricted teachers of lettres modernes to inferior positions. As a reflection of the singular constraints imposed by secondary education on the French university system, the implementation and evolution of the lettres modernes and lettres classiques courses also present a striking vision of the strategies employed by professors to establish the position of their subject within the university. Together, the restitution of the different social, professional and cultural patterns of reasoning underlying the evolution of the group of teachers of French and the comprehension of their interactions, constitute the ambition of this study which is deliberately located at the intersection of areas of research which are all too often impervious to each other.