Lycée Janson-de-Sailly

The Lycée Janson-de-Sailly exists because of a bitter act of spite. In the early nineteenth century, a wealthy Parisian lawyer named Alexandre-Emmanuel-François Janson de Sailly discovered his wife was having an affair. To ensure she would not inherit his fortune, he rewrote his will to bequeath his entire estate to the French state, specifically to fund a new school for boys. His widow spent nearly fifty years tied up in legal battles trying to overturn the will, but the state eventually won. Construction finally began in eighteen eighty-one, more than half a century after his death. The school opened in eighteen eighty-four, quickly establishing itself as the first republican lycée in France, designed to train the nation's new intellectual and political leadership under the principles of the Third Republic.