The school
French international school Pondicherry
Mission & Vision
Our mission is to establish or participate in the establishment of bridges between France, or more broadly Europe, and India by welcoming students mainly French and Indian but also of all nationalities. We want to accompany them, to help them become autonomous thinkers, original creators and responsible individuals capable of adapting to an ever-changing global reality. By relying on one of our specificities, “Two Cultures, Four Languages”, we prepare the citizens of tomorrow.
We give ourselves the means to achieve our ambitious and realistic goals by offering the children entrusted to us, our students, a safe space in which they can express themselves freely, learn by allowing themselves to make mistakes, discover their identity, participate in contradictory debates, and live and develop their interests and passions. We encourage them to build a citizenship pathway, to use their knowledge on a daily basis and to defend the humanistic values we have instilled in them in order to work together for a better world.
We work to develop in our students not only knowledge but also a taste for and a sense of academic work and autonomy in order to prepare them for a rich and fruitful university life. The academic, social, international, and intercultural dimensions with which they are confronted give them an exceptional adaptability to the requirements of many university education systems.
Principal's welcome
I am very happy to welcome you virtually on the website of the Lycée Français International de Pondichéry.
The LFIP is a school that belongs to the network of the Agency for French Education Abroad (AEFE). The AEFE has 543 schools in 138 countries, with over 375,000 students, 40% of whom are French and 60% of whom are of other nationalities.
The school welcomes more than 420 students from kindergarten to 12th grade. Students at our school receive a quality education based on the humanistic principles that characterize French education. The academic programs follow scrupulously the curriculum of the French National Education. The teaching aims at excellence while respecting the students. Rigor and benevolence structure the pedagogical commitment of each of the teachers who ensure that each student can express his or her potential to the fullest in order to acquire the knowledge and skills they need.
The serious work of the professionals working in the school and the commitment of our students to their own cognitive and cultural development allow them to find a place in the best higher education institutions in France or abroad.
The sociological and demographic evolution of the city of Pondicherry has forced the school to adapt to a steady decline in enrollment for several years. The management and staff have worked with professionalism to reorganize their pedagogical and administrative missions in order to maintain the level of excellence that has made LFIP a renowned institution. This commitment by all is reflected in positive results. Indeed, we are pleased to announce that the curve has been reversed for the first time in a decade. However, we must continue to work to make this situation more sustainable over time.
As everywhere on the planet, LFIP has faced the pandemic that has spread across the globe over the last two years. LFIP has adapted its operations according to the official instructions of the Indian authorities while respecting the recommendations of its supervisory authorities. Both the staff and the students of the school have tried to adopt responsible behavior in order to facilitate and make as efficient as possible the “degraded operation” of LFIP. We must thank the teams of the school who have made the effort to totally review their working methods in order to do a job that is not really theirs, I mean distance learning. In February 2022, our functioning was back to optimal and let’s hope, for a long time.
At the time of social networks and the development of artificial intelligence, the LFIP website was not really in line with what is done today in this field. This is why I am delighted to welcome you to this new LFIP website that we wanted to be more modern, more readable, more interactive and more aesthetic. I would like to thank all those who have worked on its rapid development. I hope that everyone will be able to quickly find the information they are looking for!
Finally, as the new principal of this prestigious school, I hope that, under more ordinary health conditions, we can all, teachers, non-teachers, parents, students and partners, work together to allow our students to embark with serenity on the already long adventure (1826) of this very beautiful tool for the dissemination of knowledge and interculturality that is the Lycée Français International de Pondichéry.
French international school Pondicherry
A little bit of history
The founder, Eugene Panon DESBASSAYNS count of RICHEMONT
Born in Paris on March 29, 1800, he was the son of Philippe PANON DESBAYSSINS and nephew of VILLELE. He arrived in Pondicherry on March 12, 1826, with the title of Marine Commissioner, General Administrator of French Establishments in India, Governor of Pondicherry from June 18, 1826 to August 2, 1828.
In two years, since he left the bar in 1828, he achieved a considerable work. An outstanding administrator, having a perfect knowledge of India, he promulgated between July 1826 and August 1828 one hundred and eight ordinances. He created the Royal College on October 28, 1826; he endowed Pondicherry and Karaikal with free schools for Indians. Eager to make culture accessible to all, in May 1827 he created the Pondicherry public library.
He was interested in the sanitation and embellishment of the capital, in particular by building the Cours Chabrol. He endowed Pondicherry with a central “bazaar”. He strove to introduce the great colonial cultures into the city and his major achievement was the ordinance of July 7, 1827, which was to constitute the Pondicherry “agricultural code” for several decades.
Returning to France in 1828, after the July Revolution he resumed his studies in physics and chemistry and presented several of his works to the Académie des Sciences.
In 1842, he helped provide Pondicherry with a leper colony through a donation to the Charity Committee. He died in Paris on June 26, 1859.
On October 28, 1826, creation of our establishment
From 1834 to 1899
The college was modest (40 students in 1834); The teaching was entrusted to the Foreign Missions of Paris in order to improve its quality. They kept control until 1899, with the exception of an interlude from 1879 to 1887 where their place was taken by the fathers of the Holy Spirit. Political regimes had succeeded in France and the revolution of 1848 had transformed the Royal College into the Colonial College.
Reopening of the Colonial College in 1900
Pondicherry joined India in 1954
Time passed, the colonial world faded away before the freedom of peoples and nations, the Colonial College became the French College. After the Second World War, Pondicherry joined India in 1954. Nehru honored our establishment with his visit and it was there that he pronounced the words of hope and brotherhood on “Pondicherry, open window on France“. That these words have sometimes been overused since, in no way detracts from their original force.
1972, the French College becomes the French Lycée
They assign the French Colleges a unique place since they combine the education of children from the French community that remained in Pondicherry and the reception of young Indians attracted by French culture. maintaining the French language and culture is one of the specificities and one of the assets of the territory of Pondicherry within the Indian union. The place of the school was guaranteed by article 21 of the Treaty of Cession, signed by the governments of the French Republic and the Indian Union.
The AEFE network
School accreditation: a quality label
The largest educational network in the world
- 522 schools
- 139 countries
- 370 000 students
A quality environment
- 6,500 qualified agents delegated from the Ministry of National Education to the AEFE
- 15,000 locally recruited staff
- A well-targeted selective recruitment policy
- An effective evaluation system
- An important training program: 900 training sessions for 33,000 trainees per year
