The Lycée Militaire de Saint-Cyr (or Coldo) is one of six schools of Defense (former military high schools) of the Ministry of French Armies , located in Saint-Cyr-l'École (Yvelines). The buildings of the school have a particularly rich historical past: in fact, preceded it by the Royal House of Saint-Louis (1686-1793), the Prytanée militaire (1686-1793) and the Ecole Spéciale militaire (1808-1940) . The mottos of the school are "Plutôt mourir" and "La véritable école du commandement est donc la culture générale".
The school educates students whose parents are soldiers and civil servants as well as teenage scholarship holders. It is only for preparatory classes for the grandes écoles that he carries out his mission of training young officer cadets. The latter are prepared for the competitive examinations for the major military schools in the same way as their civilian comrades; compulsory sports training at the rate of four hours per week, the presence of a military staff and the wearing of a fatigues are part of the differences with the other preparatory classes.
The end of the reign of King Louis XIV was marked by long and costly wars in human lives. The king therefore decided to create establishments to accommodate the children of nobles who could not give their descendants an education worthy of their rank: the companies of cadets to train the sons of poor noble families to be officers, and the Maison Royale de Saint-Louis to welcome young girls from noble families in need, with priority to those whose fathers had died in combat.
During the French Revolution, the Royal House of Saint-Louis , which has educated more than three thousand young ladies during its history, is abolished by decree of the Legislative Assembly, like all religious establishments, on August 16 , 1792.
In 1800 , the First Consul Bonaparte, gives back to Saint-Cyr its school vocation, but masculinized, by establishing a division of the Prytanée français, a free school for the sons of soldiers. It is a question of educating and raising there free of charge the sons of those who died in the field of honor. In 1803, Napoléon reinforced the military character of the school by adding preparation for the Special Imperial Military School of Fontainebleau. In 1805 , it became the “Prytanée militaire français”. Students now only prepare for a military career.
After the Restoration the institution become the Ecole Royale Spéciale Militaire. But there are few candidates for the posts of staff officers, cavalry and infantry and the students are recruited mainly from noble families or from the upper middle class. The School then took an even more marked royalist tendency and did not hesitate to prove its support for the monarch: thus, in July 1830, students guard the Château de Saint-Cloud and the Pont de Sèvres , while King Charles X faces a revolution; on the night of the 30th to the 31st, they escort him into his exile.
Eager to give a more modern image, and anyway disliked by students because of his Orleanist ancestry, king Louis Philippe thought of dissolving the school that he considers as a pool of futureopponents. It is finally maintained but the July monarchy deprives the Saint-Cyriens of the best officer positions to give them to fallen Bonapartists after the fall of the Empire. The students' resentment towards the king led them to support the revolution of February 1848 , which proclaimed the Second Republic.
Napoleon III became emperor in 1852 and took a great interest in Saint-Cyr. He had a cavalry quarter, two amphitheatres, a water tower to serve the upper floors, and had gas lighting installed there. He restores the imperial eagle as an emblem at the School.
The Saint-Cyriens outfit took its final form in 1852 , based on sketches from 1845 . But it was during the visit of Queen Victoria in France that is adopted plume worn on the shako : it is made from the cassowary , a symbol of Australia, then a British colony. Napoleon III wanted to flatter the queen during the military review of the August 24 , 1855 which she must attend, and chooses the red and white colors of the bird, which are also those of the British royal family.
It is under the Third Republic that the School reached its peak, continuing to train elite officers in the infantry, cavalry and the staff, but also colonial officers. It continues to welcome foreign students, attracted by the prestige of the institution.
During World War 2, while France is invaded, the students who were to start their schooling in Saint-Cyr reach the relocated site of the school, in Aix-en-Provence, the March 20 , 1940.
Over the course of its history on the Saint-Cyr site, the Special Military School have trained 40,000 officers, 8,000 of whom died for France. Thirty-seven generals succeeded each other at the head of the establishment. On May 8 , 2002, the side-alley between avenue Jean-Jaurès and the lycée takes the name of “avenue de l'École Special Militaire de Saint-Cyr”. The school occupies the number 240, which does not correspond to a consistent numbering but responds to a tradition of the institution, where the figure is of particular symbolic interest . A bust of General de Gaulle , a former pupil and former teacher, was inaugurated the same day in front of the entrance to the establishment, while the ceremonies of the bicentenary of the Ecole Spéciale Militaire were being celebrated.
After the war, because of the destroyed buildings and the increasing urbanization of the Paris region, the site of Saint-Cyr no longer allow to properly train the officer cadets of a now modern and mechanized army, which has need large spaces.
In 1959, the President of the Republic Charles de Gaulle , a former Saint-Cyrien of the “Fez” promotion, expressed his wish for “the reconstruction in this set of a square of buildings intended to perpetuate the tradition of Saint-Cyr. "
In the mid-1960s, reconstruction finally took place, but the authorities chose not to re-establish a military site there but to install a secondary school under military supervision, intended for students whose parents worked in the army. In the meantime, the Ecole Spéciale Militire had been moved to another site, in Coëtquidan in Britanny. However, in 1961, the establishment of Coëtquidan officially took the name of "Special military school of Saint-Cyr", in order to perpetuate the memory of its secular history in Saint-Cyr.
In 1983, the establishment becomes a high school and took the name of Lycée Militaire de Saint-Cyr.
Complementary mods:
-Versailles - Domaine de Trianon, Grandes Ecuries and other landmarks: https://flightsim.to/file/13766/versailles-domaine-de-trianon-grandes-ecuries-and-other-landmarks
-Lac de la Sourderie and other landmarks for Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines: https://flightsim.to/file/18243/lac-de-la-sourderie-and-other-landmarks-for-saint-quentin-en-yvelines
laudey1
😃c'est très sympa de nous peupler la région de Versailles comme cela
UnitDeath
Abors ça, c est franchement sympa !!