Lycée Louis-le-Grand
The Lycée Louis-le-Grand (French pronunciation: [lise lwi lə gʁɑ̃]), also referred to simply as Louis-le-Grand or by its acronym LLG, is a public Lycée (French secondary school, also known as sixth form college) located on rue Saint-Jacques in central Paris.
"Louis le Grand" redirects here. For the namesake king, see Louis XIV.
Former name
Collège de Clermont (1563–1682)
local public Institution (EPLE)
1 October 1563
Joël Bianco [1]
1,818 students in 2009
French
It was founded in the early 1560s by the Jesuits as the Collège de Clermont, was renamed in 1682 after King Louis XIV ("Louis the Great"), 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[edit]
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 rue du Cimetière-Saint-Benoist; the Panthéon campus of Paris 2 Panthéon-Assas University to its south, across rue Cujas; the former Collège Sainte-Barbe to its east, across impasse Chartière; and the Sainte-Geneviève Library to its southeast.
Operations[edit]
Louis-le-Grand has about 1,800 students, nearly a tenth of which are non-French from more than 40 countries. About half of these are enrolled in high school, and the other half in the classes préparatoires. Its boarding capacity is of 340 inside the building.[28]
Together with its longstanding rival the Lycée Henri-IV, Louis-le-Grand has long been the only French lycée that is exempted from the scheme of location-based enrollment known as the Carte scolaire,[29] even after the introduction in 2008 of the nationwide application known as Affelnet. This exemption has been criticized as a breach of territorial equality and a device for the self-perpetuation of French elites.[30][31] It was decided to reform it in 2022.[32]
Louis-le-Grand has long been considered to play an important role in the education of French elites. In 1762, just before the college's nationalization, scholar Jean-Baptiste-Jacques Élie de Beaumont wrote: "The Jesuit College of Paris has for a long time been a state nursery, the most fertile in great men." Many of its former students have become influential statesmen, diplomats, prelates, writers, artists, intellectuals and scientists.
It counts seven Nobel Prize laureates as alumni, second only to the Bronx High School of Science in New York City, one Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences and six Fields Medal winners. The Louis-le-Grand alumni laureates are, by chronological order of prize-winning: Frédéric Passy (Peace, 1901); Henri Becquerel (Physics, 1903); Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran (Medicine, 1907); Paul d'Estournelles de Constant (Peace, 1909); Romain Rolland (Literature, 1915); Jean-Paul Sartre (Literature, 1964); Maurice Allais (Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, 1988); and Serge Haroche (Physics, 2012).
Other notable alumni include:
(These pages are in French)