What they were offering – through a programme titled Safe Place for Science – was a sort of “scientific asylum”, offering three years of funding at their facility for about 20 researchers.

On Thursday the university said it had received 298 applications in a month, of which 242 were deemed eligible. The applicants hailed from institutions such as Johns Hopkins University, Nasa, Columbia, Yale and Stanford, it said in a statement.

Most of the applications were sent using encrypted messaging, the university’s president, Eric Berton, wrote in the French newspaper Libération.