Villa St. Jean International School

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[edit] 1903-1970, Fribourg, Switzerland

Founded in Switzerland in 1903, during an upheaval of anti-clericalism in France, as a boarding school for the scions of the French elite, the Villa St. Jean International School [1]evolved over the decades into an international school educating students from around the world. Illustrious alumni include the aviator and author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, considered by many the greatest French writer of the Twentieth Century, and Juan Carlos I, the current King of Spain. Other prominent present-day alumni include famed soccer coach, Anson Dorrance, the Turkish historian, Selim Deringil [2] and Indonesian photographer, Rio Helmi [3].

According to tradition, the school's founder, François Kieffer, a Catholic priest of the Marianist teaching order, consciously modeled Villa St. Jean on the Rugby School, then as now an eminent English public school (private school in American parlance), noted at the time for intellectual rigor and rugged sportsmanship.

Villa St. Jean's Coat of Arms and motto, "de toute Son Âme".

Fr. Kiefer built his school on a secluded clifftop bluff, surrounded on three sides by the sinuous Saane/Sarine River, and bordered on the fourth by the quiet neighborhoods abutting the Boulevard de Pérolles, a main thoroughfare leading out of the medieval Swiss burg of Fribourg, considered among the most beautiful cities in the country. In her biography[4] of Saint-Exupéry, author Stacy Schiff described the campus as a "tidy red-roofed village unto itself" overlooking "sleepy" Fribourg. Ms. Schiff's evocation of the self-contained, red-roofed village is quite accurate, but the campus did not overlook the city so much as it was perched on a flat, wooded plateau, nestled in an elbow high above the Sarine River which over the eons had carved the bluff's curling cliffs. At its edges, in the woods beyond the unmarked perimeter of the campus, the plateau, now the site of the Swiss lycée le Collège St. Croix[5], gives way to those cliffs which fall 200 feet to the winding Saane/Sarine below.

A 1911 bird's-eye view of the campus.

Despite their architectural and historical significance, most of the campus buildings were razed in 1981, a travesty which would not have been permitted under more recently enacted Swiss architectural preservation laws. Apart from a wooden-roofed outdoor basketball pavilion, the only building which was left standing, and which still stands today, is Gallia Hall. It is commonly accepted, though not definitively proven, that Benito Mussolini, who spent a period during his youth as a construction worker living and working in Switzerland, contributed to the building of Gallia.

Villa St. Jean, under the guidance of the Marianist brothers and priests who founded and administered it, was remarkable among elite Swiss boarding schools for its ability to reinvent itself as required by changing times. Prior to World War II, the school was distinctly Gallic in character, a pensionnat (boarding school) educating mostly French aristocrats, many of whom today recall its sometimes strict ascetism. In the decades after the War, Villa St. Jean was transformed, and by a decade and a half after the War's end the school had become a metropolitan, international institution, teaching principally an American high school curriculum to a student body gathered from Europe, the Americas, the Near and Far East, and conferring on its graduates either an American high school diploma or a Swiss or French baccalaureate degree, as appropriate to the individual student. The principal year of transition from French to an American curriculum was 1962.

During its incarnation as an international school, though nominally a Catholic institution, the Marianists administering Villa St. Jean hired lay faculty and staff without reference to religious affiliation, and admitted students on the same basis. Consequently, the student body was a diverse religious mix of Catholics and Protestants, Muslims and Buddhists, consistent with its international character.

Buildings near the northern end of the campus in 1909 with students playing in the foreground.

Yet, despite this ability to adapt and change, like so many other boarding schools in Switzerland at that juncture in time, Villa St. Jean was ultimately unable to weather the changes of the late 1960s, and it closed its doors permanently in 1970.

The Villa, as seen from the soccer field.

The notion of looking on at life has always been hateful to me. What am I if I am not a participant? In order to be, I must participate. -- Saint Exupéry

Extensive excepts of the Villa's last yearbooks have been preserved on the web, along with photographs contributed by students from earlier decades.

The students, an uneven mix of nationalities and character, lived in the Ormes, Sapinière and Bossuet dormitory buildings and attended classes in the aforementioned Gallia Hall. They skied during the winter, often at Chateau d'Oex and Gstaad and competed against other international schools.

In historical terms, the Villa, at the end, was one of the last all-male boarding schools. The contrast with the culture of the United States at the end of the '60s made for jarring adjustment for many Villa graduates, many of whom lost contact with their classmates during subsequent college years.

The Marianist creed for the school and its students was "The Whole Man." Auguring the upheaval which a year later would seize colleges and universities in Europe and North America and the student "strikes" which would shut down many campuses in the United States, in the spring of 1969, formal classes briefly stopped as students and faculty wrestled with the relevance of the school's culture against the backdrop of dramatic changes in Western culture.

Villa students, circa 1966.

The Marianists' decision to close the Villa was made in December 1969, according to Jerry Gregg, a teacher at the school at the time. Months later, in the spring of 1970, four of the school's six Marianists -- Cy Boschert, Werner Dobner, Fred Fuchs and Gregg -- left the order. The other two -- Brother Patrick Moran, S.M. and the Rev. James Mueller, S.M. -- returned to the United States.

The effort to reunite the Villa community, driven primarily by Steve MacIntyre (class of '68) and Kevin Di Palma ('67), did not occur until the mid-1990s, a quarter of a century after the school was closed. Di Palma, now teaching in China, is the author of the school's unofficial web site. A house band of students, The Sufferin' Kind, maintains a web site here. Several class reunionshave been held in Switzerland and in the U.S. in recent years.