the public echo found immediately by the social opening of the most selective sections of higher education in the early 2000s contrasts with the modest and late interest expressed in these arrangements by those responsible for French policy in priority education areas (SPAs). The article describes that distance by representing the attitude of the central administration responsible for SPAs to the word ‘excellence’. It then restores their own perspectives to officials, ministers and advisers dealing with the matter at national level over the years 1999-2005. The successive configurations of their views would clarify the distancing and then the appropriation, as a legitimate instrument of the ZEP policy, of the initiatives of higher schools. By looking at the history of that policy, that episode contributes to the emergence of a ‘new age’ of priority education.