by MAURER Thalea, LANCEROTTO Bianca and TAO Perle
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The Story of the School
In 1513, in Tarbes, a secondary school, teaching students from year 7 to year 10, was created. The current location of the school was once a private mansion belonging to the marquis d’Ossun. It was bought in 1633 by the city of Tarbes to become the new place of the school. In 1670, an institute called “les Pères Doctrinaires” took over the school under the official approval of King Louis XIV (a famous French king). At the time, only young boys from the middle class could attend classes there.
During the 1750s, constructions were made to enlarge the building, enabling it to contain up to 700 students, coming from all over the Department.
After the French Revolution in 1789, it became a school holding a central role in the education of the area, where famous figures of the region would come to teach the students, like Ramond de Carbonnières. It changed its function to that of a Royal Secondary School (1853) before becoming a national secondary school in 1870.
The town council proposed the current name of the school in 1911, to honor the memory of Théophile Gautier on the hundredth birth anniversary.
That is how, in 1912, “Lycée Théophile Gautier” became the official name of the school.
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Important figures
- Louis François Élisabeth Ramond was a politician, geologist and botanist born in 1755 in Strasbourg. He died in 1827 in Paris. He is considered as one of the first explorers of the Pyrenees. He studied in the university of Strasbourg and became a lawyer. He traveled to Switzerland, with a friend, and got caught up in the experience of discovering the valley of the Rhine. Ramond’s passion became the mountain. He also visited Auvergne and Barèges (spa town), before deciding to study and explore the Pyrenees. Totally invested in nature and its history, he became a biology teacher in a school in Tarbes, who would later be named Theophile Gautier. His lessons had a lot of success, and he became a specialist in botany and the geology of the central Pyrenees.
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- Théophile-Gautier was a poet, writer and a French art critic of the 19th century. He spent his whole life dedicated to his passion, literature. He wrote many poems, theaters, novels and narratives that describe his voyages in Europe.
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- Abbé Torné (Pierre Anastase Torné), was born in 1727 and occupied for a certain amount of time the function of librarian in the school, Théophile Gautier. He later became a bishop and pronounced the funeral sermon for Louis XV, a king of France. He also got jailed in this high school because he refused to pay his allegiance to the state.
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Some anecdotes
The place where Abbé Torné got imprisoned (in the building of the school Theophile Gautier) was a room that later became a common room, filled with an atmosphere of conviviality and relaxation.
A student’s 80 year old neighbour who gratuated from Theophile Gautier high school was shocked after she told him that she studied at the same place he used to study. He got confused since he thought only boys could go there. Little did he know, girls can attend classes there too now !
He also told us that in philosophy classes, they only accepted 7 girls who were placed at the front to not disturb the boys.
A piano teacher of the conservatory also told us that in the 2000s there was a music workshop in a classroom where there is currently only a piano, the last thing left of this workshop.
Sources
Wikipedia : https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyc%C3%A9e_Th%C3%A9ophile-Gautier
And former students like :
Our History/Geography teacher
Perle’s neighbour and piano teacher