The Lycée Stendhal of Milan (Italian: Liceo Stendhal) is a French international primary and secondary school located in Via Laveno, 12 in Milan, Italy. It is managed by the Agency for French Teaching Abroad (AEFE) with its curriculum accredited by the France Ministry of National Education and overseen by the French Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs.[1][2]
There is also an "Italian Section" for Italian-speaking pupils in the secondary classes which prepare for the three-year EsaBac program and the dual-diploma that comes with it. The school has over 1170 students of 37 different nationalities.
History
Early years
In 1946, the French Chamber of Commerce in Italy created a French school inside of its headquarters in Milan for the children of expats. Its first year, the school had six alumni. In 1951, under the guidance of its first principal, Madame Meyer, the lycée moved to a small apartment in Milan's Via Rugabella, allowing the number of students to reach 45.
In 1959 however, French president and General de Gaulle and Italian president Giovanni Gronchi met in Milan to celebrate the centenary of the Battle of Magenta. To commemorate his visit, the city council decided to officialize the French school and offered it a plot of land to build its first campus. The construction was completed by 1961. The arrival of a larger school got the number of students to 162.
The road to self-sufficiency
By 1963, partly due to the permanent closure of the nearby French Catholic School, the number of pupils attending the school reached 500.
In the year 1977, thanks to this increase in student attendance, the high school hosted for the first time in its history the baccalauréat, ending high school students' longtime custom of travelling to Rome and passing their exam at the Lycée français Chateaubriand. The change was met with mixed feelings: Families rejoiced to the idea because it would avoid the weeks-long, complicated and expensive travel of pupils to Rome; however alumni mostly cherished this thirty year-long tradition and enjoyed ending their school year with this sort of 'holiday' to the capital, which also helped alleviate the stress of the exam. This change symbolically showed the level of independence the school had gained, no longer living in the shadow of its Roman counterpart. From a national point of view, this represented the new bipolar characteristics of French education in Italy (as opposed to the previously centralised approach), with three French schools in the south and three in the north of the country, the first being controlled by the Roman institute, the second by Milan's.
The following years saw an expansion of the campus: First a new building for kindergarten pupils in 1970, then a new gym in 1979 and finally a second floor to host primary students in 1983. In 1982, Madame Meyer left her place as the lycées head master after 31 consecutive years due to her having reached the age of retirement. She was awarded the Ordre national du Mérite, a prestigious French order of merit, by the French consul in Milan for her vital contributions in transforming what was once a petite école (small school) into a true établissement (educational institute). Indeed, under her administration, the number of alumni went from 6 to over half a thousand. In 1990 the school was named Stendhal to honour the French author who spent much of his life in Milan. The romantic writer in fact believed the city was 'one of the most beautiful places in the universe'.
Twenty First Century
In the year 2000, the city council agreed to double the initial surface of the school. By 2006, the campus was finalised and ready to host an increasing number of students, especially of Italian and foreign origin. It is believed that with current growth rates of the student body, the lycée shall soon be confronted with a lack of space. The construction of a new building on school ground or the possibility of asking the city council for a new surface expansion are both options being currently discussed.
On May 19, 2018, the school celebrated its seventieth anniversary.