Biography|Patrick Pouyanné — The Palaiseau Plateau Where He Took the X Diploma

The assumption is that French oil chiefs walk out of a Parisian courtyard on the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève.

By the time Patrick Pouyanné arrived, École Polytechnique had already left that hill.

The school moved to the Palaiseau plateau in 1976.

He entered with the promotion X1983 and took the engineering diploma in 1986.

The Association des anciens élèves still files him under that promotion, with the public-service grade ingénieur en chef des mines.

The Annales des Mines notice repeats the same two schools: Polytechnique, then École des mines de Paris.

That sequence is the Corps des Mines track.

A high exit rank from the X opened the door to the mines school and to the state engineering corps that still staffs French industry ministries.

The campus pin is the Cœur de Campus on the Route de Saclay, the rectangular teaching block Henry Pottier built for the move.

Cour des cérémonies sits a few hundred metres north of here.

This is a public grande école, not a private address.

From these rooms he went into the Ministry of Industry in 1989, not straight into a wellhead.

The oil years began only in January 1997, when Elf sent him to Angola as secretary-general of the exploration subsidiary.

The plateau explains the method more than the product.

Maths first, administration second, barrels third.

In 2017 he came back here as chairman of Total, photographed in the same buildings by Jérémy Barande for the school.

The visit closed a loop the 1983 intake could not have drawn: the civil engineer returned as the man who ran the company that had absorbed Elf.

Photo: Peter Potrowl, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (École polytechnique, Palaiseau, 2011). Portrait: Jérémy Barande / École polytechnique, CC BY-SA 2.0, 2017.