Biography|Maxime Picat — The Civil-Engineering Diploma from This Building on Saint-Michel

People date his industrial life from a plant clock at Mulhouse.

The school date comes first, and it belongs to this courtyard on the boulevard Saint-Michel.

In 1998 Maxime Picat left the École nationale supérieure des mines de Paris with a diploma in civil engineering.

The school has occupied the Hôtel de Vendôme at 60 boulevard Saint-Michel, on the edge of the Jardin du Luxembourg, since the ordinance of 6 December 1816 put it back in Paris after the Napoleonic years.

A visitor still enters that same block.

The Mines diploma is the credential PSA itself repeated when it named him to the Peugeot brand in 2012 and when it put him on the Managing Board in 2016.

He had reached the school the usual hard way for that house: a classe préparatoire at the Jesuit lycée Sainte-Geneviève in Versailles, the prep school nicknamed Ginette.

The Paris school is the one that put a title on the paper.

He was twenty-four.

The group hired him the same year.

Later profiles treat Mines as a logo on a biography slide.

The useful fact is narrower.

An Alsatian student finished a civil-engineering course in this building in 1998 and walked from here toward a factory gate in Haut-Rhin, not toward a ministry or a bank.

The façade on the boulevard is still the public face of the school.

The mineralogy museum inside the same hôtel is the room a stranger can actually enter.

Photo: Mbzt, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons