Biography|Vincent Rambaud — The Palaiseau Campus He Entered as Promotion 1979

People still picture the École polytechnique on the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, in the Latin Quarter quadrangle it occupied for a century and a half.

By the year Jacques Marie Vincent Rambaud entered, that address was already empty.

The school had moved its teaching to a new campus at Palaiseau, on the Saclay plateau, in 1976.

The first promotions slept and sat examinations in Henry Pottier's concrete complex while the last fittings were still being finished.

Rambaud is promotion 1979.

The school's library matricule records him under the full name Jacques Marie Vincent Rambaud.

He was born on 6 May 1959 in the 16th arrondissement of Paris.

The Palaiseau site, not the old Paris block, is the ground under the start of his public career.

From this campus he went on to ENSTA Paris and left as an ingénieur de l'armement.

The next posts were civil-service posts, not factory floors.

He served as a chargé de mission at the Direction des Affaires Internationales of the DGA, inside the defence ministry, then at the Service des Entreprises Nationales of the industry ministry.

Only in 1987 did he leave the state for the strategy firm Mars and Co, founded by Dominique Mars.

A visitor standing on the Route de Saclay today still sees the same plateau campus the 1970s promotions used.

The lake, the long teaching block, and the ring of student housing are the buildings of that transfer, later folded into Institut Polytechnique de Paris.

The school did not invent a new identity for him.

It put an engineer of the armament corps on a suburban plateau three years after the move from Paris, and the rest of the résumé — foundry, Panhard, Mercosur, the Peugeot brand — grew from that intake year.

Promotion 1979 is a register fact, not a slogan.

The pin is the campus he actually walked, not the Left Bank address the tourist guides still reprint.

Photo: Jérémy Barande, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons