1: Factual-esque background

In the beginning, Chambéry was the prestigious capital of the Duchy of Savoie,* an independent principality that was annexed to France in 1860. In contrast to Grenoble, a poorly-connected backwater dot on the map of France, Chambéry had long been touted as The Crossroads of the Alps. All this began to change when Grenoble was chosen not just to host the 1968 Winter Olympic Games, but also as the site for the Institut Laue-Langevin (ILL), a European nuclear research facility, which brought in the first wave of expatriate scientists (mostly British and German, with a smattering of Americans and other nationalities for garnish). The autoroute came in, as did more comprehensive train service, and ultimately Grenoble became home to the Synchrotron (a high x-ray particle accelerator). By the 1990s, Grenoble had fully eclipsed Chambéry and was well on its way to becoming France’s answer to Silicon Valley.

It took a long time for Chambéry to change its focus so as to benefit from its southern neighbor’s success. Spurred on in part by the 1992 Olympic games in nearby Albertville, and already something of a powerhouse in glass manufacturing, Chambéry began to concentrate more and more on fiber optics, high-tech ceramics, polymers, and other kinds of non-metal materials. This new focus dovetailed nicely with the interests of the high-tech manufacturers in Crolles, an industrial hub in the northern end of Grenoble’s Grésivaudan valley—and thus within nearly as close a drive to downtown Chambéry as to downtown Grenoble and the manufacturing and chemical plants along the latter’s southern perimeter.

Grenoble’s political and business leaders had wrested concessions from Education Ministry officials in the Academy of Grenoble in the late 1970s to accommodate the major expatriate communities by first offering primary-level French as Second Language classes and a few hours a week of academic support in students’ native languages. Under continued pressure, the Academy then created a special secondary school, the Cité Scolaire Internationale Europole, which housed six exclusive French international sections (Arabic, British English, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish). These international sections offered six hours of language instruction and two hours of history-geography taught in the language of the section in addition to the regular French middle and high school curriculum (in other words, all other subjects were taught in French, including math and science). All American students were placed in the English section, which ultitmately penalized short-stay expatriate students, whose lack of fluency in French and unfamiliarity with French methodology nearly always put them a year or more behind in math and science upon their return to the United States. (Ultimately, the private, tuition-based American Multinational School of Grenoble was created to deal with this situation for students in grades 6 through 12.) 

It wasn’t until the late 1990s that the Academy of the Savoie in Chambéry established secondary-level international sections (British English, German, Italian, and Spanish) on a somewhat smaller scale, each housed in a local school. Demographically, however, there was no way to support another fully private American school, so business and political leaders came up with an unprecedented idea—the L. M. Montgomery† American School (“L2M”§). Like its southern counterpart, L2M offered short-stay anglophone expatriate families what the English international section could not: mathematics and science taught in English. Unlike its counterpart, however, L2M would receive partial support through public monies: the French government would provide free logistical support (classrooms and overhead expenses) and would pay its teachers’ salaries, but would not exercise any control over pedagogical content and methodology. Oversight and inspections were to be provided through an American accreditation board. 

Although on paper this looked good—at least to the business leaders and politicians and even to the American families—the creation of L2M was met with strenuous resistance from within the Academy, and especially from educators associated with the English international section. L2M was an affront, an aberration, an insult to French education, a boil on the face of the Academy! Notwithstanding controversy and quasi-legality, economic arguments prevailed, and by 1996, L2M was housed in two small suburban high and middle schools—the Lycée Polytechnique and the Collège André Gallice (a local hero of the French Resistance), both in the town of Myans, conveniently adjacent to the A41 autoroute on the side of Chambéry closest to Crolles and Grenoble.

Long-term plans called for building a facility similar to Europole in Chambéry which would house all the international sections under one roof. Long-term planning did not take into account human nature’s dislike of change, however. Once the Bellecombette facility in downtown Chambéry was completed, all the French international sections were torn kicking and screaming from their local host schools and forcibly relocated—and to the consternation of the American community, so was L2M. It is on the eve of this forced relocation in 2001 that I and my family enter the picture.

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*“Savoy” in English; “Savoie” is pronounced “sav-wah,” which is comparatively easy to say. I will be using the French spelling throughout this book, so please mentally pronounce it correctly. Thank you.

† L. M. Montgomery, as in Lucy Maud Montgomery, author of the celebrated Anne of Green Gables novels. But wait, you say, she was Canadian (and many points to you if you knew this). Well, yes. Why her name was chosen to grace Chambéry’s American school, particularly when the Canadian system resembles more that of the U.K. than that of the U.S., remains something of a mystery, as does the definitive word on who chose the name in the first place. The “best” explanation I have heard is that Canada, like the U.S., is part of North America, ergo Canada is, um, “American,” too. The fact that no Canadian I’ve ever met would ever take kindly to the thought of being so closely linked to the U.S. did not figure in this decision. However, Canadian-ness aside, the choice to honor Ms Montgomery is a reasonable one, given her strong emphasis on the importance of education throughout the Green Gables series (as well as in her other works of juvenile fiction).

§ Although the American convention for abbreviating L. M. Montgomery is normally “LMM” (el-em-em), both the American and French school populations in Chambéry followed the French convention: when spelling aloud a word that has two of the same letter in a row (using “sunny” as an example), the French say: s, u, two-N, y, rather than s-u-n-n-y. Thus the school’s abbreviated name is “L2M,” which should be mentally pronounced “el-deuh-zem”—though if you’d rather think “el-two-em,” I will understand.