Villa St. Jean International School

Villa St. Jean International School, originally named Collège Villa St. Jean, was a private Catholic school in Fribourg, Switzerland from 1903 to 1970.

Prior to its closure it was the final remaining all-boys' boarding school in 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, Villa St Jean International School evolved over the decades into an international school educating students from around the world. Deceased illustrious alumni include the aviator and author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (who attended with his younger brother), considered by many among the greatest French writers of the 20th century, and Alfonso, Duke of Anjou and Cádiz, a 20th-Century claimant to both the French and Spanish thrones who served as both President of the Spanish Olympic Committee and Spanish Ambassador to Sweden. During the Second World War, the nephews of Charles de Gaulle were enrolled under pseudonyms to protect them from the Germans. Among prominent alumni living today are Juan Carlos I, the recently abdicated King of Spain, the famed soccer coach Anson Dorrance, chocolate entrepreneur, Michael Litton, Turkish historian Selim Deringil, and Indonesian photographer Rio Helmi.

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

Fr Kieffer 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 one of the most beautiful cities in the country.

In her biography 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 Collège St Croix, gives way to those cliffs which fall 200 feet to the winding Saane/Sarine River below.

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