Biography | Guillaume Faury — The Palaiseau Campus Where the X87 Class Took the Engineer Title

People tell the Airbus story as if it began in a hangar. The engineer title was taken on a plateau south of Paris. Guillaume Faury entered the École polytechnique in the class known as X87 and graduated in 1990. The school had left the Latin Quarter in 1976. By the year he finished, the working campus was already the one Henry Pottier built on the Route de Saclay at Palaiseau. OpenStreetMap places the college at about 48.7128 north, 2.2107 east. The lake, the barracks, and the main teaching block are still the public face of the site. Faury was born on 22 February 1968 in Cherbourg. His father, François, a polytechnician himself, ran the Ateliers et chantiers du Havre. English-language biographies place the secondary schooling at the Lycée François-Ier in Le Havre. French accounts add the classes préparatoires at the Lycée Sainte-Geneviève in Versailles before the Palaiseau years. Those two statements can both be true. One is the lycée town of a shipyard family. The other is the two-year grind that feeds the X. The pin is the campus that awarded the title, not the family house and not a current office. From Palaiseau the next school was already chosen: the national aeronautics school in Toulouse. The Corps des ingénieurs de l'armement sat behind that choice. A visitor can walk the public edge of the plateau and see the same lake the class of 1987 walked past. The interior teaching rooms are not a pilgrimage stop. Photo: Jérémy Barande, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: Xavier Lejeune for the European Commission, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.