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Friday 30 April 2021

On the occasion of the anniversary of the birth of Saint Jean-Baptiste de la Salle, UniLaSalle Rouen creates a tourist website to retrace the history of the founding father of the Brothers of the Christian Schools.

A committed educator and innovative pedagogue, Jean-Baptiste de la Salle was the founder of a network of free schools accessible to all in order to educate the most disadvantaged populations. If the network of Christian Brothers that he founded is now known worldwide, some people are still unaware of who Saint Jean-Baptiste de la Salle was and even less of the fact that this priest from Rheims spent an important part of his life in the City of a Hundred Spires: "In talking with the local population, we realized that many of them had absolutely no idea who Jean-Baptiste de la Salle was," explain Alice Royer and Louise Anfrye, in charge of communications at UniLaSalle, an engineering school in agronomy and the originator of the project, "This contrasted with the enthusiasm of the Lassalian delegations visiting our school, for whom 'JBS' is truly a model! ".

Three walking routes to discover JBS

The idea was then to create a website listing the 12 points of interest in Rouen linked to Jean-Baptiste de la Salle and to propose them in the form of walking routes enriched with information: "We relied on all the work that had been done by Mr. Jean-François Pezot, deputy director of the Jean-Baptiste de la Salle boarding school, who provided us with the texts detailing all the places and their history."

Each walker is free to choose his or her own itinerary: beginner, intermediate, expert... or à la carte! In addition, the site provides information on the life of Jean-Baptiste de la Salle but also informs about the new identity of each place: "Today, some places have nothing to do with their original assignment. For example, we find a place dedicated to Science, an exhibition space or an escape game that organizes murders! ".

The website will be launched on April 30, the date of the birth of Jean-Baptiste de la Salle, at the same time in Rouen, in France and in the LaSalle World network which now has more than a thousand Lasallian educational centers spread over the five continents!

Following in the footsteps of Jean-Baptiste de La Salle