Ecouen's young girls school, a real factory of lil homemakers
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The tops
1805. Napoleon I founded several good manners schools for young girls whose dads died on battlefields.
One of those schools settled in castle of Ecouen! Managed by Mme Campan, former reader for king Louis XV’s daughters and Marie-Antoinette’s maid.
Among the residents, we had: Caroline, Napoleon’s sister; Mme Campan’s niece; marshal Ney’s future wife, Aglaé Auguié; Louise de Guéhenneuc, marshal Lannes’ future wife… perfect ladies!
Napoleon wanted to transform them into "believers, not into intellectuals". For this, no Latin, no foreign languages! Only cooking and seam! Well, they had to be future housewives, hadn’t they?
And one day, Napoleon even came to pay them a visit: he looked at the socks they were knitting and asked to taste a piece of the pies they cooked… So cute!
But the school closed in 1814, when they gave back Ecouen to the Condé family. Mme Campan died alone in 1822, after the death of her only son…
The school made a come-back between 1850 and 1962, then it definitively closed its doors.