Maison Saint Louis, St.-Hélier
JERSEY,
1982, honoring Links with France, Scott 297
Teilhard de Chardin and the Maison St. Louis
The Maison St. Louis Observatory, St.-Hélier
JERSEY, 1982, honoring Links with France, Scott 294
Charles Rey and the Maison St. Louis Observatory
JERSEY, 2008, weather signals series showing the observatory
French Jesuits came to Jersey in 1880 and purchased a property called Highlands in St-Hélier in the Parish of St. Saviour for a naval training college, Notre Dame de Bon Secours. The school had begun in Brest and trained sailors for the French navy, but anticlerical laws forced the Jesuits into exile. The Jesuits also established on this property Maison St. Louis as a School of Philosophy for their own men who had been forced out of France, like Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1902-1905) and Henri de Lubac (1920-1923), and for others around the world like W. Norris Clarke (1936-39), a philosopher from the United States. Both schools were occupied by German forces during the Second World War, and by 1954 both were closed. The philosophate moved to the Jesuit school of Les Fontaines in Chantilly outside Paris. The naval college passed first to the Brothers of Christian Instruction as a missionary school, and then to the States of Jersey as the site of Highlands College. Maison St. Louis became first the old Imperial Hotel and now the four-star Hotel de France. In 1894 Fr. Marc Dechevrens a Swiss Jesuit who had run an observatory in China oversaw the building of an observatory and instrument tower. His observations date from 1 January of that year. Fr. Charles Rey, SJ, who studied at the Maison and worked at the observatory from 1917 to 1921, returned in 1934 as its director for the next 47 years; he remained even after other Jesuits had left and after the States of Jersey took over the observatory in 1974.