Biography | Bernard Arnault — The Public Lycée in Roubaix Where a Builder's Son First Learned a City

Bernard Jean Étienne Arnault was born in Roubaix on 5 March 1949, in a family that made its living from civil engineering rather than couture. The private house on avenue Pluquet is not the pin. The place a visitor can still stand is the public lycée that still bears the name Maxence Van Der Meersch, at 1 avenue Maxence Van Der Meersch, opposite the velodrome in the Trois-Ponts quarter. He did the whole of his secondary course here, in a cité scolaire built in the mid-1950s when Roubaix was still a textile city packing more children into new classrooms. A 1965 première-class photograph, published decades later by La Voix du Nord, places him in the second row of that building. The official LVMH biography records the same sequence: the Roubaix lycée, then the classe préparatoire at lycée Faidherbe in Lille, then Polytechnique. His father, Jean Léon Arnault, was an École Centrale engineer who ran Ferret-Savinel, the works firm founded by the maternal grandfather, Étienne Savinel, in 1926. His mother, Marie-Josèphe Savinel, came from that same industrial household. The contrast that later headlines loved — Europe's richest businessman from one of France's poorest communes — was already the geography of the school gates. Roubaix sits eight kilometres from the Belgian line. The lycée looked out on a city that was already losing mills. Nothing in the public record says the boy planned a luxury group from these corridors. What the record does say is narrower and more useful. He left this building for Lille, failed the Polytechnique concours in 1968 after a broken arm kept him from the physical tests, and passed the next year. The school is still a working state lycée. The visitor will find pupils, not a museum. The pin is the public door on the avenue, not a private parlour. Photo: likeness of Bernard Arnault by Jérémy Barande, École polytechnique, 14 March 2017, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. A later portrait; the school itself remains a working lycée.