Lycée Louis-le-Grand
The Lycée Louis-le-Grand, also referred to simply as Louis-le-Grand or by its acronym LLG, is a public Lycée located on rue Saint-Jacques in central Paris.
It was founded in the early 1560s by the Jesuits as the Collège de Clermont, was renamed in 1682 after King Louis XIV, and has remained at the apex of France's secondary education system despite its disruption in 1762 following the suppression of the Society of Jesus. It offers both a high school curriculum and a classes préparatoires post-secondary-level curriculum in the sciences, business and humanities.
Location
Louis-le-Grand is located in the heart of the Quartier Latin, the centuries-old student district of Paris. It is surrounded by other storied educational institutions: the Sorbonne to its west, across rue Saint-Jacques; the Collège de France to its north, across ; the Panthéon campus of Paris 2 Panthéon-Assas University to its south, across rue Cujas; the former Collège Sainte-Barbe to its east, across ; and the Sainte-Geneviève Library to its southeast.History
Jesuit college (1560–1762)
Jesuit students, mostly from Spain and Italy, were present in Paris immediately after the Society of Jesus's foundation, first in 1540 at the and from 1541 at the. From 1550 on, Guillaume Duprat, the bishop of Clermont, who in the previous decade had met early Jesuit leaders and Diego Laynez and corresponded with Ignatius of Loyola, invited Jesuit students to stay in his mansion, the Hôtel de Clermont on rue de la Harpe. The Hôtel de Clermont thus became the Jesuit order's first permanent home in Paris. It no longer exists following its annexation in the 17th century by the nearby, and stood on a location that is now part of the Lycée Saint-Louis.Upon his death on, Duprat bequested an endowment for a new Jesuit college in Paris, as well as funds for two other colleges in the vicinity of Clermont, at Billom at Mauriac. The Parisian project was eagerly supported by Laynez, by then the Jesuits' Superior General, who wanted it to become "the most celebrated college of the Society". It was delayed, however, by dilatory initiatives by the Parlement of Paris, University of Paris, and local clergy, all of which opposed the Jesuits' establishment. In July 1563, the Jesuits were finally able to purchase the former Parisian estate of the bishop of Langres on rue Saint-Jacques, where its current cour d'honneur now stands, and started teaching there in late 1563. The new institution was named Collège de Clermont, in recognition of Duprat's support but also because one of the conditions that the Jesuits accepted to overcome local opposition was not to formally name the college after the Society of Jesus as they did elsewhere.
The college soon met considerable success, as it was both free and of high quality, disrupting the antiquated business models and longstanding conventions of the University of Paris. In particular, its theology course, led from the 1564 inception by Juan Maldonado, was so popular that the college's buildings were too small to contain the audience. Other prominent early faculty included Pierre Perpinien, Juan de Mariana, and Francisco Suárez.
The University of Paris had been hostile to the Jesuits from the start, in line with its general rejection of novel initiatives and long before that hostility took doctrinal undertones in the 17th and 18th centuries as the Jesuits became a key adversary for Jansenists. In 1554, the university's College of Sorbonne had already issued a negative opinion regarding the opening of a college in Paris. That opposition was temporarily overcome at the monarchy's initiative during the Colloquy of Poissy on, but the university kept debating the matter after the college started teaching in 1564. On, it refused to recognize it and thereby nullified the prior favorable decision of Poissy. The multiple cases brought by the university before the court of the Parlement of Paris, and counter-cases from the Jesuits, resulted in a stalemate that lasted over the next three decades: the Collège de Clermont was not readmitted into the university system, but the Jesuits were able to continue and expand their activities, even though Maldonado was removed from Paris in 1575 following accusations of heresy by Sorbonne theologians. While the courses were free of charge, boarding costs for the resident students, who typically came from elite families, were covered by gifts and scholarships, and the corresponding accounts were kept separate until the Jesuits' departure in 1762. In the 1580s, the college's students numbered in the thousands, of which several hundreds were resident. The faculty included several dozen Jesuit priests.
Unlike most colleges of the university, the Jesuit college remained open during the Siege of Paris in 1590, albeit with reduced activity, and inevitably colluded with the Catholic League, as did the university too. On, an alumnus of the college, Jean Châtel, attempted to assassinate King Henry IV. As a reaction, the king took the side of the Jesuits' longstanding accusers such as Parlement lawyer Antoine Arnauld, and expelled the Jesuits from France, including those in Paris. In 1595, the bibliothèque du roi was relocated into the college's premises and stayed there until 1603. That year, Henry allowed the Jesuits to return to France on the conditions that they be French nationals. They were allowed to retake the college building in 1606, and to fully restart their teaching in 1610. On, however, upon a new case brought by the university and in the changed political context resulting from Henry IV's assassination in May 1610 by François Ravaillac, the Parlement of Paris forbade the Jesuits from teaching in Paris. That ruling, however, was reversed by a decision of Louis XIII on, allowing the Jesuits to resume teaching for good.
Despite its near-continuous interruption between 1595 and 1618, the College de Clermont almost immediately recovered and reached an equivalent level of activity to its heyday of the 1570s and 1580s. Its adversaries made sure that it would still not obtain admission into the university, but otherwise their attempts to undermine it met with decreasing success, given the continuing support the Jesuits were able to secure from the monarchy and high nobility. The college was regularly bolstered by royal visits, including by Louis XIII in 1625 and Louis XIV in 1674. On the latter occasion, the king donated a painting by Jean Jouvenet, Alexander and the family of Darius, which remains to this day in the office of Louis-le-Grand's principal.
Several notable scholars were resident in the college, including mathematician Pierre Bourdin, historian Philippe Labbe, or Latinist Charles de la Rue. Other faculty included author René Rapin, scientist Ignace-Gaston Pardies, historian Claude Buffier, theologian René-Joseph de Tournemine, sinologist Jean-Baptiste Du Halde, rhetorician Charles Porée, and humanist Pierre Brumoy. Composer Marc-Antoine Charpentier, who may have studied at the college, was its music master between 1688 and 1698. The college library had about 40,000 volumes as of 1718, and included unique manuscripts such as the Chronicle of Fredegar or Anonymus Valesianus. As in other Jesuit colleges, theatrical representations became increasingly prominent during the 17th century. Also as in other colleges, in 1660 the Jesuits opened an observatory, and in 1679 they created the elaborate sundials, augmented in the 18th century, that survive to this day on the northern side of the cour d'honneur thanks to preservation campaigns in 1842 and 1988.
The college undertook a rebuilding campaign in 1628, on a design attributed to Paris municipal architect Augustin Guillain. It expanded by acquiring more buildings, to its northeast from the recently closed in 1641, and to its south from the in 1656 and 1660. In 1682, the college was able to expand further by acquiring the buildings of the to its east, after a century of attempts, as that college's activities were relocated elsewhere in Paris.
Also in 1682, Louis XIV formally authorized the college to change its name to Collegium Ludovici Magni. That act confirmed its royal patronage, despite the near-simultaneous Declaration of the Clergy of France and the kingdom's ongoing conflicts with the Papacy, to which the Jesuits were directly tied by their vows. Already in 1674, during his visit, Louis was said to have remarked "c'est mon collège". A black marble slab with the inscription COLLEGIVM LVDOVICI MAGNI was promptly placed on the façade, in substitution to the earlier text COLLEGIVM CLAROMONTANVM SOCIETATIS IESV, which triggered controversy. The new inscription survived later turmoil, and was relocated on the eastern side of the cour d'honneur during the late-19th-century rebuilding.
In 1700, Louis-le-Grand took over the École des Jeunes de langues, founded in 1669 by Jean-Baptiste Colbert, in line with the Jesuits' leadership in studying foreign languages and foreign cultures, reinforced since 1685 with the permanent mission in China initiated by six Jesuits from Louis-le-Grand. Antoine Galland, the first Western European translator of One Thousand and One Nights, had studied in this section and taught Arabic there from 1709. In 1742 the college had five Chinese students: Paul Liu, Maur Cao, Thomas Liu, Philippe-Stanislas Kang, and Ignace-Xavier Lan, who had come from China via Macau together with Jesuit Father Foureau.
After 1762
With the suppression of the Society of Jesus in France, the Jesuits were ordered to cease their teaching and leave the college on. The establishment was immediately nationalized and renamed Collège royal Louis-le-Grand. Teachers from the nearby replaced the Jesuit fathers as faculty. This change triggered a broader reform of the University of Paris. The scholarship students of twenty-six smaller colleges of the University of Paris, known as the petits collèges, were invited to follow classes at Louis-le-Grand. By 1764, these students also boarded at Louis-le-Grand. By then, the petits collèges effectively ceased autonomous activity, after which their property were gradually sold. Louis-le-Grand thus became the center of the university, even though ten other grands collèges survived until 1792. The nearby buildings of the, one of the petits collèges, were purchased by the monarchy in 1770 and repurposed as headquarters of the University of Paris. Meanwhile, by 1764 the former faculty of the Collège de Beauvais took over teaching at Louis-le-Grand from those of the Collège de Lisieux. Between then and the French Revolution, there were about 190 boursiers every year at Louis-le-Grand, and a smaller number of pensionnaires whose families paid for their boarding.As a broader consequence of the Jesuits' termination, the French state in 1766 initiated the Aggregation examination to raise the standards of teaching in secondary education. Louis-le-Grand aspired to a leading position in supplying future agrégés. Its ambitions failed to materialize, however, as only nine of its boursiers succeeded in the Agrégation exams between 1766 and 1792, out of a total of 206 successful candidates during that period.
During and after the French Revolution, the college was renamed several times in response to France's changing politics: Collège Égalité in January 1793, Institut central des boursiers in 1797, Prytanée français in July 1798, Lycée de Paris in 1803, Lycée impérial in 1805, Lycée Louis-le-Grand in 1814, Collège royal de Louis le Grand in 1815, Collège royal Louis-le-Grand in 1831, Lycée Descartes in 1848, Lycée Louis-le-Grand in 1849, Lycée impérial Louis-le-Grand in 1853, again Lycée Descartes in 1870, and finally again Lycée Louis-le-Grand in 1873. It has kept that name ever since.
Throughout the troubled 1790s, it was the only Parisian educational institution that remained continuously open, as it had been during the 1590s siege of Paris. Part of its premises, however, were used as barracks for soldiers, then as political prison and workshops. In 1796, three more écoles centrales opened in Paris, respectively in the former Abbey of Saint Genevieve, the Professed House of the Jesuits, and the Collège des Quatre-Nations. The latter building, however, was repurposed in 1801 for artistic training, and its secondary school was relocated to the adjacent to Louis-le-Grand then known as the Prytanée, then merged into it in 1804. In 1803, Napoleon created the Lycée Condorcet in the former couvent des Capucins de la Chaussée d’Antin, and in 1820, another new lycée took the premises of the former, now the Lycée Saint-Louis. Louis-le-Grand was thus one of only five public lycées in Paris for most of the 19th century, until Jules Ferry's reforms greatly expanded secondary education in the 1880s.
Bordering Louis-le-Grand to the north, some of the buildings of the former were partly used by the École normale from 1810 to 1814 and again from 1826 to 1847, after which it moved to its present campus designed by architect Alphonse de Gisors on. Others parts of the Plessis complex were temporarily awarded to the Paris University's Faculty of Letters and a section of the Faculty of Law, but were demolished in 1833 as they had become derelict. During the early Second Republic, an école d'Administration opened in July 1848 on the École Normale's former location, promoted by politician Hippolyte Carnot, but it met overwhelming opposition and ceased operating after about six months. Louis-le-Grand eventually acquired the remaining Plessis buildings in May 1849 and tore them down in 1864. Meanwhile, in 1822, Louis-le-Grand had expanded southwards by taking over the former from the university. Louis-le-Grand's main buildings themselves were in an increasingly dilapidated state, implying danger for the students. From the 1840s onwards multiple attempts were made to start their reconstructions, but faltered for several decades. In the mid-1860s, Georges-Eugène Haussmann promoted a project to move Louis-le-Grand to the premises of the hôpital des incurables on, but that initiative was short-lived and the complex on rue de Sèvres was instead repurposed a decade later as.
Eventually, Louis-le-Grand was almost entirely reconstructed between 1885 and 1898 on a design by architect, on a complex schedule so that teaching activities could continue during the works, and at a record high cost. Le Coeur's design only preserved the northern and southern sides of the inner court from the earlier college facilities. He created two vast courtyards to the north and south of that central space, with multiple levels of classrooms connected by airy arcaded corridors. That rebuilding project took place the context of broader urban remodeling of the neighborhood around rue Saint-Jacques, also including the rebuilding of the Sorbonne and the extension of what is now the Panthéon campus of Paris 2 Panthéon-Assas University.
During World War I, the neighborhood was hit by Paris Gun shells, known to Parisians as la grosse Bertha. One shell tore through the ceiling of the main entrance hall on, and another left a large hole in the pavement of rue Saint-Jacques in front of the lycée's entrance on. During World War II, Jacques Lusseyran founded the resistance group Volontaires de la Liberté, in which a number of his fellow Louis-le-Grand students participated.
The last significant new building project was a new auditorium, located in the southeastern corner of the premises and completed in the late 1950s.
Louis-le-Grand had its share of May 68 turmoil and subsequent violence between far-left and far-right student factions. On, it hosted the general assembly of the high-school students' action committees which called for a general strike. On Jean Tiberi, a gaullist member of parliament who would later become the mayor of Paris, was assaulted during a visit of the lycée. A hand grenade exploded inside its premises in early May 1969.
A collection of the school's old scientific instruments was curated from 1972 and is now managed autonomously as the Musée Scientifique du lycée Louis-le-Grand.