UCLouvain Charleroi  UCLouvain Charleroi is a campus of the University of Louvain in Charleroi, Belgium. Consisting of 3 faculties and a series of research centers and institutes, UCLouvain Charleroi consists of the Maison Georges Lemaître, in the center of the city, and a branch in Montignies-sur-Sambre. It is one of the three UCLouvain sites in the Hainaut Province, along with UCLouvain FUCaM Mons and UCLouvain Tournai. During the Leuven crisis in the 1960s, a transfer of the French-speaking part of the Catholic University of Louvain from Leuven to Charleroi, one of Belgium's largest cities though without any university, is considered as one of the major alternatives to a relocation in Ottignies, which will later hold Louvain-la-Neuve. When the university is legally split in 1970, the Maison Georges Lemaître became property of the French-speaking University of Louvain. It is a large neo-Gothic mansion, designed by architect Auguste Cador. It is located on boulevard Devreux, a few dozen meters from the birthplace of Georges Lemaître, which was located rue du Pont Neuf 10. Georges Lemaître, the founder of the Big Bang Theory, was an alumnus of the Catholic University of Louvain. Until 1995, courses of the University of Louvain Faculty of Economics, Social and Political Sciences and Communication in Charleroi were organised in the buildings of the Institut Saint-André, a secondary school located next to the Maison Georges Lemaître. A violent fire on 7 March 1995 ravaged the secondary school, which was rebuilt in 1997. UCLouvain thus completely renovated the Maison Georges Lemaître in 1995, and now concentrates most of its Caroloregian activity of teaching and research there. In parallel and since 1975, the Catholic University Faculties of Mons (FUCaM), which were an independent university until 2011, have been offering programmes in economics and management sciences on the Sainte-Thérèse site of the "Institut d'Enseignement secondaire complémentaire catholique" (IESCA), in Montignies-sur-Sambre.