Montmuzard campus

The full story

Until the end of the 18th century, eastern Dijon was countryside crossed by springs, where the Château de Montmuzard stood alongside two farms, the Champmaillot and Motte-Saint-Médard estates, which shared most of the land. The hill, covered in old orchards, has also known dark hours. On 30 October 1870, the Prussian army came in by the heights of Montmuzard. Between 1940 and 1944, 126 people were shot at the Montmuzard firing range, where a memorial was unveiled in 1952.

Rector Marcel Bouchard, in office from 1946 to 1967, envisaged a vast hospital and university complex on this hill, a programme he set out in his book “Pour la Bourgogne, son Université” (For Burgundy, its University). The architect Roger Martin Barade designed the first buildings, in Comblanchien stone, built from 1955. On 12 October 1957, the Minister of Education René Billères opened the science faculty, the Gabriel building, and laid the foundation stone of the law faculty. The university then had 2,700 students.

Most of the campus went up between 1960 and 1968: halls of residence, faculties of medicine and pharmacy, law (opened on 6 October 1962) and letters (1965), a library and a student restaurant. The student pavilions bear the names of famous Burgundians, such as Lamartine, Bossuet, Rameau and Vauban. Not everyone applauded: from 1964 to 1967, arts and law students demonstrated against this American-style campus model, which isolated students outside the town. Yet there were 9,400 of them by 1968, and the Aristote and Platon lecture theatres rose in 1969.

The campus is also an open-air museum. After Hubert Yencesse’s bronze statues of Research and Teaching (1957-1958) and Yaacov Agam’s tent (1974), Karel Appel’s Anti-robot, in painted steel, 6 metres tall and weighing 4 tonnes, was put up in September 1976 on a lawn beside the science faculty. On 30 September that year, the sculptor Arman created a work at the IUT in a single day. In 1983 came the Atheneum, a cultural centre whose silhouette recalls a grey volcano.

Since September 1993 a bus line has crossed the campus, and since 2012 tram line T1 has served its Érasme and Université stops. The architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, with the artist Rémi Zaugg, designed the “Coulée verte” (green corridor) that runs through it. In 2008-2009, the university had 27,000 registered students.