Sorbonne, La. The history of the Sorbonne and that of the University of Paris are closely interwoven [see Scholasticism]. The college of the Sorbonne was founded in 1253 by Robert de Sorbon, chaplain and confessor to Louis IX, to provide free moral and theological education for poor students. Gradually the Sorbonne became identified in people's minds with the faculty of theology. Around the 13th c. the theological reputation of Paris was at its highest, with teachers like Abélard, the Dominicans Albert the Great and Aquinas, and the Franciscans Bonaventure and Duns Scotus.
The next two centuries saw a period of decline, tempered, however, by the presence of figures like the mystical writer Gerson (1363-1429), the reforms drawn up by Cardinal d'Estouteville in 1452, the founding of a chair of Greek in 1466 (though the Sorbonne was to become suspicious of Greek scholarship, in new translations of the Bible), and the establishment of the first printing-press in France by two of its doctors. In the 16th c. the Sorbonne had to contend with both the spread of humanism (symbolized by the Collège Royal, later Collège de France) which was often at odds with its reactionary clerical culture, and the introduction of Lutheran and Calvinist ideas. The right of censorship, by now invested in it and exercised in an ill-defined partnership with the king and the Parlement, affected not only theologians, but also philosophers like Ramus (who published plans for reforming the university and weakening the power of the Sorbonne) and imaginative writers like Marot and Rabelais. The same repressive attitude is seen in its rejection of both Jansenists and Jesuits in the 17th c. and of
The whole university was reorganized in the 1880s [see Education] and a new Sorbonne emerged. Unlike at Oxford and Cambridge, there are few physical remains of the medieval university colleges, and none of the Sorbonne: of Richelieu's major rebuilding (1627-42) only Lemercier's chapel has survived. More recently, after the student riots of May 1968, further reorganization has taken place, and there are now 13 different universities of Paris, three of which contain the old name: Panthéon-Sorbonne (Paris I), Sorbonne-Nouvelle (III) and Paris-Sorbonne (IV).
[Peter Sharratt]
