FRANCE’S resounding victory at the international football championship final last week turned the media a bit upside down and, consequently, the coverage of a distinguished traditional event was hushed to the back seat.
But let us keep ourselves concentrated on the Concours Général that readers will certainly find much more interesting than a football match.
It is the most prestigious examination held once a year in this country for the past nearly three hundred years and is open to all high school students. The winners, and here comes the big surprise, are offered absolutely nothing as recompense save for a great national ceremony at the Sorbonne University in Paris in the presence of the education minister.
That doesn’t mean however that they are totally forgotten. To give you only a few examples, among the most well-known and legendary historical figures to have passed this test are, Arthur Rimbaud the poet, Louis Pasteur the biologist and inventor of vaccination and of course, Victor Hugo the novelist whose works Les Miserables and the Hunchback of Notre Dame are known all over the world.
As a matter of fact, nobody is really obliged to enter the competition but practically everyone dreams of doing it at least once in their lifetime. There is no parallel to this French tradition in any other country.
The Concours Général, created in 1744, expects the participants — boys as well as girls — to answer questions in science, history, geography, mathematics and literature, also submitting essays in classical languages such as Greek and Latin. The whole process requires about five hours and takes place every year in March while the results are made public by mid July.
As the first step of the procedure, high school teachers all over the country test the applicants to make sure they will be able to stand up to the requirements of the nation-wide intellectual match.
Out of nearly eighteen thousand candidates this year, 129 were declared successful. Despite such a vast variety of subjects and the fact of a number of young people coming out brightly, there inevitably is one whose talents outshine those of others.
This year’s Concours Général star proved to be a sixteen-year-old Parisian named Octave Vasseur-Bendel who earned top positions in geography and Latin language besides being brilliant in other subjects such as mathematics and Greek philosophy.
Both his parents are lawyers, his mother an attorney at the Supreme Court and his father a counselor at the National Appeals Court. They say although they do everything all parents do to help their children, Octave’s phenomenal progress is the result of his own incredible talent for remembering whatever he has read or heard just once. Apart from the subjects that are taught normally in the class, he has a great passion for Greek literature and philosophy and reads Homer and Plato’s works in their original versions without requiring any help from a professor.
Octave’s mother adds he makes very rare use of a computer or the internet and largely keeps away from the so-called social networks, having a natural gift for concentrating on anything he is doing.
As for the intellectual championship winner, his own explanations of success are fairly modest: “I have the good luck to have parents who help me in every way. In order to have me admitted to Henri IV high school, the best in France with excellent teachers, they moved their residence to the neighbourhood. I have a further advantage of living next to the best bookshop in Paris only a few steps away from our house.”
To the question as to what career he would prefer to choose once he has finished his studies, Octave responds unassumingly: “Oh, the job of a schoolteacher or a research scholar will suit me fine!”
The writer is a journalist based in Paris.
Published in Dawn, July 22nd, 2018
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