Elite of the Elite

An ordinary Frenchman trying to squeeze into the tiny French intellectual elite is like Charles de Gaulle trying to squeeze into the back seat of a baby Renault. Yet room at the top is always open for top graduates of Louis-le-grand, France's most prestigious lycee, or state-run academic high school. Across the street from the Sorbonne in Paris, Louis-le-grand has an ancient passion to create "an elite of the elite" and a modern penchant for vaulting brainy boys into the grandes ecoles, the supra-universities whose graduates virtually run France. This week Lycee Louis-le-grand celebrates the 400th anniversary of its founding by a once despised elite: the Jesuits, then mostly Spaniards, who in 1563 started their own school in the Bishop of Clermont's Paris mansion. Young and liberal, the Jesuits irked Sorbonne theologians with novel notions--for example, that the pains of purgatory might last only ten years. Yet by 1594, they had taught some 220,000 students, including the future St. Francis de Sales. The Jesuits welcomed anyone who could hurdle the entrance exams. They lured rich and poor, Jansenists and Protestants, Bourbon princes, colonial Americans, Turks and even Chinese. The best students were often uncut diamonds like Jean Baptiste Poquelin, son of a long line of upholsterers. The Jesuits put him on a diet of Terence, Lucretius, and French drama. Wielding a pen sharper than a needle, he became the playwright Moliere. Perverts & Premiers. All this so impressed Louis XIV, the Sun King, that in 1682 he took over the place and declared "Ourself founder." The faculty, rendering unto Caesar, removed "Jesus" from the front door and put up "Ludovici Magni" (Louis-le-grand). The pleased king founded a foreign-language study annex in Constantinople and a scholarship fund that salvaged more talent, including Encyclopedist Denis Diderot and one Franc, Marie Arouet, the talented son of a notary who later called himself Voltaire. "Everyone who carries a name in France has spent his early youth in Louis-le-grand," gloated the Archbishop of Paris --charitably including that perverted praetorian, the Marquis de Sade. The pattern continued despite the suppression of the Jesuits in 1762, when the jealous Sorbonne swallowed the school. During the French Revolution, the school doubled as a jail for "enemies" of the Revolution, including Old Grad Robespierre, on his way to the guillotine. So combustible was 19th century France that between 1801 and 1873 the school was renamed eight times--from the Lycee Imperial (Napoleon's era) to the Lycee Descartes (the 1848 revolution). What never changed was the stunning output of famous men. Painters Degas, Delacroix and Gericault went there; so did Sculptor Frederic Auguste Bertholdi, who designed the Statue of Liberty. Louis-le-grand taught Writers Victor Hugo, Charles Peguy, Theophile Gautier, Paul Claudel and, more recently, Jean-Paul Sartre. The poet Baudelaire was aptly pegged ("somewhat bizarre charm") before being expelled for refusing to unhand another boy's note in class (he swallowed it). Louis-le-grand produced Bankers Henri and Alphonse de Rothschild; Sweden's King Oscar II, France's President (1913-20) Raymond Poincare, Senegal President Leopold Senghor. Premier Georges Pompidou went there, and so did at least three of his predecessors: Paul Reynaud, Pierre Mendes-France and Michel Debre. Straining Minds. Louis-le-grand is today a classic building in the Rue Saint Jacques, its quiet broken by the whining Vespas of its 2,000 boys and the almost audible straining of their minds. Beset with bourrage (cramming), they wearily carve on their desks such mottoes as "Work is a sacred thing; better not touch it," and with good reason. Most French lycees span seven years, the goal being two baccalaureat exams for university entrance at the level of U.S. college sophomores. But getting educated is a lot tougher at Louis-le-grand. It now specializes largely in three postgraduate years for boys aiming to enter the much harder grandes ecoles, particularly the Ecole Normale Superieure, France's top source of professors, which gets two-thirds of its students from Louis-le-grand.

Protesting the school's harsh discipline, some critics want to "democratize" the system by shifting grandes ecoles candidates to the more adult, laxer university. That thought appalls Charles Poignant, the school's censeur (disciplinary head), who fears that standards would plummet. "There is great jealousy of our role," he says, and it delights him. With Premier Pompidou due to lead the birthday party, Censeur Poignant & Co. aim to launch Louis-le-grand on its fifth century in the same old magisterial manner--a place where the elite of the elite meet, and damn the dullards.

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