Timeline

Heritage classified

Key figures

Origin and history

The castle of Sainte-Barbe-des-Champs, built in the first half of the eighteenth century, replaces the former seigneurial house of Sainte-Geneviève. It then includes a main house body and a common court on the east wing. This site became a teaching place after its acquisition in 1851 by the Collège Sainte-Barbe in Paris, where major developments were carried out between 1852 and 1862.

In 1852, architect Henri Labrouste oversees the transformation of the castle into a college, while between 1854 and 1862, a wing on the garden and probably the west wing were added. After the departure of the college in 1899, the Petit Séminaire de Notre-Dame-des-Champs de Paris acquired the premises and transferred in 1901 a chapel designed in 1862 by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, under the direction of architect Ruprich-Robert.

The law of separation of the Church and the State in 1905 led to the seizure of the buildings, attributed to the municipality of Fontenay-aux-Roses in 1907. Housing was set up in 1927 by Georges Boiret, followed by the installation of a day care centre in 1937. A school then occupies the wing on the garden. The chapel of Viollet-le-Duc was demolished in 1974, and around 1990 the old buildings of the court of communes disappeared.

Ranked a Historic Monument by decree of 17 December 1943, the site illustrates the successive transformations of a seigneurial estate into a school and then into a communal heritage. Its history reflects the architectural and social evolutions of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, marked by the interventions of renowned architects such as Labrouste and Viollet-le-Duc.

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