Ancient roots

Chavagnes en Paillers has a long history of association with England, and with a general attitude of welcoming outsiders. The motto on the official arms of the village comes from the 133rd Psalm (Ecce Quam Bonum): ‘Habitare fratres in unum’ (Behold how good it is for brethren to dwell together in unity.)

Chavagnes International College is in its 20th year (incorporated in 2001, opened in 2002) but we are proud to live and work on a site which has been a seat of learning for centuries. We celebrate the many positive aspects of this history.

The land on which the College is built, formerly near the site of a Roman villa, was given to a community of Benedictine monks in the thirteenth century by the Anglo-French family, Harpedan de Belleville, who then ruled the area. The monastery built at that time was dedicated to St Anthony of Egypt (also called St Anthony the Great), the founder of monasticism. The monastery received a canonical visitation from a Papal Legate, Bertrand de Got in the late 12th century. He subsequently became the first Pope at Avignon, Clement V.

Venerable Louis Marie Baudouin

In the years that followed, Chavagnes saw many changes and upheavals. In the nineteenth century, its walls housed the first junior seminary in France after the Revolution, founded by the Venerable Louis-Marie Baudouin in 1802. Father Baudouin recounted a prophecy whispered to him by a dying priest, renowned for his sanctity: “il y aura toujours un séminaire à Chavagnes”(“there will always be a seminary in Chavagnes”). This legend would later inspire several successful attempts to keep the seminary open against the will of the Emperor Napoleon, the Fourth Republic and the Nazis.

Already recognised by Napoleon (who actually met Father Baudouin and his pupils), and under the authority of the diocesan bishop, it received a royal charter from Charles X in 1825, as the ‘Ecclesiastical school of Chavagnes’, during the brief period of the restored Bourbon monarchy (1824–30). During this period, the institution was staffed by priests of a community founded by Father Baudouin, named the "Fils de Marie Immaculée".

The buildings were confiscated from the Church in 1905 as part of the anti-clerical crackdown throughout France. The priests then involved with educating the boys at Chavagnes were exiled to Shaftesbury in Dorset.  It was a sad time for Chavagnes. Two gendarmes guarded the gates of the empty building for seven years. That was the end of the junior seminary founded and run by the Sons of Mary Immaculate, the congregation founded by the Venerable Louis Marie Baudouin, but it was not the end of the story.

A new junior seminary

In 1912 the buildings were bought back by a local aristocrat, the Comte de Suzannet, and reopened as a junior seminary, much to the chagrin of the Paris authorities. This time, the staff was made up of diocesan priests. (The Sons of Mary Immaculate soon also returned and founded a similiar establishment also in Chavagnes, educating boys drawn to a missionary vocation.)

The new diocesan institution saw its buildings again requisitioned in 1940, when the College building was shared between German soldiers and junior seminarians during World War II, housing a small garrison and a military hospital. A machine-gun was placed in the clock tower, dominating the village, but the Nazi soldiers turned a blind eye to over 50 Jewish children sheltered by local families until the liberation. The villagers were so good at keeping a secret regarding the hidden Jewish children, that the information only emerged in the 1990s.

After World War II

In July 1950 the College (then still the Petit Séminaire de Chavagnes) received the visit of Angelo Cardinal Roncalli, Papal Nuncio in Paris. The then Mayor, Mr Gilbert de Guerry de Beauregard, gave a welcome speech in which he alluded to the previous visit of a Papal Legate in the 12th Century and mentioned that the last one had become a Pope. He suggested that Cardinal Roncalli might also share the same destiny. Roncalli became Pope John XXIII a few years’ later. In an interesting turn, the Pope of the day, Pius XII sent a long letter of greeting to the people of Chavagnes, referring to the historic faith of the people of the Vendée area, in the wake of this visit. The letter was signed by a substitute, by the name of Martini, later Pope Paul VI.

From 1950 the older boys (15-18) went to study in a new establishment in Les Herbiers. Sadly, for the next 20 years the junior seminary of Chavagnes went through a period of decline and mismanagement and was closed in 1974. Its buildings were used until the mid 90s by the local Catholic secondary school, until 1997, when, as had happened many times before in the history of Chavagnes, the building closed its doors for a time.  In 1999 the buildings housed fifty refugees from Kosovo.

New beginnings, new faces, a new language ...

Finally, in September 2002, with the active support and blessing of the local Bishop, a group of English, American, Australian and Irish teachers, led by Ferdi McDermott, reopened the school, but with a different, international emphasis.

In 2004, two founding Masters of Chavagnes International College, Robert Asch and Ferdi McDermott, were invited to visit Cardinal Ratzinger in Rome. Cardinal Ratzinger blessed rosaries for the boys at the College and expressed the hope that his forthcoming retirement would enable him to work more closely with his visitors.

However, he too became Pope, as Benedict XVI, making him the fourth Pope with a particular link to this remote French village and with its little “ecclesiastical school”. In one of his last acts as Pope, Benedict XVI gave the title Venerable to Father Baudouin (the founder of the Petit Séminaire de Chavagnes) on 20 December 2012.

Arms and Motto

The arms of the College combine those on the second Great Seal of King Richard I of England, used by his successors until 1340 with the French fleurs-de-lis and the ecclesiastical mitre: “Sinister, three golden lions passant guardant, on a red field; impaled, dexter, with Azure, two fleurs-de-lis of the Kingdom of France, and an episcopal mitre between them.”