T ucked away in an unassuming side street that runs between the Place du Trocadero and Rue de Passy in Paris’s chic 16th arrondissement is a secondary school that has educated scions of the world’s richest family, counts the French first lady as a former staff member, and has a rooftop that regularly hosts fashion shows thanks to its fabulous view of the Eiffel Tower. Forget Eton, Le Rosey or Spence, meet Lycée Saint-Louis de Gonzague, or Franklin to those in the know (after the main school’s location, Rue Benjamin Franklin). Aloysius Gonzaga, the school’s titular saint, was a young Italian nobleman born into the cadet branch of Mantua’s ruling Gonzaga family in the 16th century.
Eschewing his inheritance to become a Jesuit priest, Gonzaga died at 23, after caring for the sick during a plague epidemic in Rome. Canonised in 1726, Gonzaga has subsequently become the patron saint of young students, particular Jesuit ones. So he is a fitting namesake for the only remaining Parisian school still run by the Roman Catholic religious order renowned for its commitment to education, missionary work and intellectual rigour.
A fresco with scenes from the saint’s life by Henri de Maistre, a prominent 20th-century French painter of religious art, adorns Franklin’s in-school chapel, recently restored at a cost of more than €800,000 (or more than £660,000)..
