Lycée Condorcet

The Lycée Condorcet occupies a massive, somber block along the rue du Havre, identifiable by its high, window-pocked stone walls that seem to turn their back on the street. It began in seventeen eighty as a school for the children of the aristocracy, managed by the Brothers of Charity. When the French Revolution broke out, the school’s director, Abbot Guéret, managed to keep the doors open by rebranding it as a secular institution, narrowly avoiding the chaos that shuttered every other religious school in Paris.