Irish College in Paris
Roman Catholic educational establishment for Irish students
The Irish College in Paris (Irish: Coláiste na nGael, French: Collège des Irlandais, Latin: Collegium Clericorum Hibernorum) was for three centuries a major Roman Catholic educational establishment for Irish students in Paris, France. It was founded in the late 16th century, and closed down by the French government in the early 20th century. From 1945 to 1997, the Polish seminary in Paris was housed in the building. It is now an Irish cultural centre, the Centre Culturel Irlandais.
Foundation
The religious persecution under Elizabeth and James I led to the suppression of the monastic schools in Ireland in which the clergy for the most part received their education. It became necessary, therefore, to seek education abroad, and many colleges for the training of the secular clergy were founded on the continent, at Rome, in Spain and Portugal, in Belgium, and in France.
The founder of the Irish College in Paris was John Lee, an Irish priest who came to Paris, in 1578, with six companions, and entered the Collège de Montaigu. Having completed his studies he became attached to the Church of St. Severin, and made the acquaintance of a French nobleman, John de l'Escalopier, President of the Parlement of Paris, who placed at the disposal of the Irish students in Paris a house in the Rue de Sèvres (fr), which served them as a college. Lee became the first rector in about 1605.
“Irish College in Paris” enters the record as roman Catholic educational establishment for Irish students. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Irish, College and Paris can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5087076. VIAF identifies the subject as 169572896. The Library of Congress control number is no2008059614. Authority coordinates are 48.844, 2.346. None of the 3 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1945, 1997, 1578 and 1605.
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This entry incorporates text from “Irish College in Paris” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.