Alphonse Lavallée

Alphonse Lavallée is the founder of the École Centrale Paris, a French Grande École.

He was born in Savigné-l'Évêque. After studying law in Paris, Lavallée became the director of various companies such as the Compagnie du chemin de fer de Paris à Orléans. He also became a businessman in the region of Nantes, working for ten years with his brother-in-law who was a shipowner of the merchant vessel Bourgault Ducoudray. After moving to Paris in 1827 where he moved with his wife and his one-year-old daughter, Amazilli, Lavallée became a shareholder of the Le Globe, a liberal opposition newspaper with Saint-Simonian roots.

Two years later, Lavallée decides to create a new school of engineering for the emerging industrial sector in France, at a time where all the leading institutions were essentially training engineers for public administration.