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Robert de Sorbonne – The Sorbonne, its Origin and History – Richelieu – The Revolution – The New Sorbonne – Mercier’s Views

THE Sorbonne owes its origin and its name to Robert de Sorbonne, chaplain and confessor to Louis IX. Like so many other scholars of the same period, this priest had been compelled to rely on alms to defray the expenses of his education. Touched by miseries which he himself had shared, he established a society of secular ecclesiastics, whose function it was to give gratuitous instruction; and he petitioned the king to endow the charitable enterprise with a dwelling for those pupils who could not pay for their lodging. Nor was his request unheeded. Thanks to royal patronage he was able, in 1253, to open his college. Indigent scholars were taught for nothing; those not quite destitute of means paid five sous and a half weekly. The institution was directed by the associates, who had neither superiors nor principals. The Sorbonne, as the new College was soon to be called, was attached, like all other establishments of the kind, to the University of Paris, and the connection, throughout its long and brilliant history, never ceased. But the ties which bound it to this central institution became looser and looser as the Sorbonne increased in importance. The provisor, who after a time made the appointments in the Sorbonne, was himself elected by a jury composed of the local archdeacon, the great chancellor, the masters and the faculty of theology, the deans of law and medicine, the rector of the university, and the procurators of the “four nations” into which the university was divided. The election took place in this manner until 1524, after which the provisor was elected by the members of the college, the former jury of election being now only called upon to confirm the choice.

If the Sorbonne was the great school of theology in the middle ages, it was not its cradle; theology was born with scholasticism in the ninth century. It had already nourished with Longfranc, Saint-Anselme, Abailard, and Pierre Lombard before bearing riper fruits with Albertus Magnus and Saint Thomas Aquinas. Already the court of Rome submitted questions of pure dogma to the theologians of the University of Paris, while reserving to itself all questions of canonical law. But the college founded in so humble a manner by Robert de Sorbonne was soon to become the official organ of scholastic theology; and in its bosom were discussed questions which embarrassed the Church of France and even the court of Rome. From its walls went forth the sentences, decrees, and censures which were to have force of law throughout the Catholic world.

The Sorbonne was not only a teaching establishment, it conferred degrees. The theses of the Sorbonne acquired particular celebrity, the “Sorbonic thesis” being regarded as the ideal of the theological essay. During the middle ages and even to the end of the seventeenth century the Sorbonne was the great theological authority; but it had politics of its own which, viewed in the present day, do not seem to have been always in accord with its religious teaching. It took part with Étienne Marcel in the parliamentary and almost revolutionary movement which he directed in opposition to the party of the dauphin and of the aristocracy. It was a doctor of the Sorbonne, the Franciscan friar, Jean Petit, who wrote the “apologia” for the assassination of Louis of Orleans; and another doctor of the same institution, Jean Larcher, who, with the deputies of the university, publicly accused the dauphin of the murder on the bridge of Montereau, where, on the 10th of May, 1410, the Duke of Burgundy, Jean Sans-Peur, was assassinated by men belonging to the dauphin’s suite. To avenge this crime Philippe the Good, Jean’s son, seconded by the King of England, took possession on the 20th of June, 1420, of Montereau, which remained in the power of the English until 1428.

The Sorbonne, representing the Church, condemned Joan of Arc as a sorceress, communicated its judgment to the Duke of Bedford, and, in a petition addressed to the King of England, demanded her extradition. When the religious war was at its height this body fulminated decrees in favour of the League, the Guises, and Spain against Henry III. and Henry IV. It was to the Sorbonne that the Guises addressed themselves in order to obtain theological support for their projected usurpation. The learned assembly did not go so far as to recommend the assassination of Henry III., but it pronounced in favour of revolt, and consigned the partisans, first of Henry III. and afterwards of Henry IV., to eternal damnation, finally offering the crown of France to Philip II. of Spain. After the triumph of Henry IV. the Sorbonne continued for a time its seditious manifestations; when Cardinal de Bourbon, its “apostolic conservator,” was arrested on the denunciation of the Procurator-general, it at the same time received a reprimand from the Parliament of Paris.

Forced to submit to the new government, it retracted its doctrine as to the lawfulness of “tyrannicide,” supported in this not very startling retractation by the authority of the court of Rome. Finally, under Marie de Médicis, Louis XIII., Richelieu, and Louis XIV., the Sorbonne was a firm supporter of the Bourbon dynasty, together with the Church of France and the University of Paris. Richelieu was its constant patron. Under Louis XIV. it took part with the Gallican Church against the pretensions of the court of Rome. As to the evil done or attempted to be done by the Sorbonne, it will be sufficient to say that besides helping to bring Joan of Arc to the block, it condemned Vanini, whom the Parliament of Toulouse ordered to be burned alive. It pronounced also against Ramus and Descartes, the adversaries of the Aristotelian philosophy; Montesquieu for his “Esprit des Lois” and Buffon for his “Natural History”; besides Rousseau, Marmontel, Helvetius, Diderot, Mably, and the whole of the Encyclopædists. Defenders of the Sorbonne point out with justice that it also condemned the absurdities of many visionaries, charlatans, and impostors, and that if it was an obstacle in the way of science, it also showed itself at times a barrier against superstition. It opposed the Jesuits; but what, after all, can this count for against its condemnation of Jeanne d’Arc, John Hus, and Vanini, to say nothing of its encouragement and justification of the Saint-Bartholomew massacre? It condemned no one to death, not having power to do so; but, like the Inquisition, it handed over to the civil power the alleged infidels, apostates, and sorcerers, whom it deemed worthy of the severest punishment. The boldest decree it ever issued was the one already referred to, which was circulated throughout France during the wars between Protestants and Catholics. After exhorting the Parisians to defend against King Henry III. the Catholic religion as menaced by him, it declared that sovereign “degraded from his royal power,” and, after his assassination, consigned to eternal death everyone who dared to recognise Henry of Navarre as his successor. In this denunciation were specially included all those who treated with him or paid taxes to him. No true Catholic, declared the Sorbonne, could recognise as king, “without offending God, a prince who had lapsed into fatal heresies, even though he might afterwards have abjured them.” This decree, as issued by the Sorbonne, was signed by the clergy of Paris and put into circulation throughout France.

Of all the famous men connected with the Sorbonne, the most famous was the one known throughout the world as Cardinal de Richelieu, who represented politics without pity, as the Sorbonne represented theology without mercy. The tomb of the great man found its place naturally in the church of the Sorbonne, which he had himself erected. The head stolen from the coffin during the Revolution was carried back there not many years ago; his heart will follow, should it ever be discovered.

The ancient Sorbonne came to an end, as a matter of course, at the epoch of the Revolution. It was suppressed as soon as the Revolutionists had time to attend to it, in 1790. If the Sorbonne was greatly indebted to the minister of Louis XIII., it had again to thank a Richelieu for new life and new fame when, in 1821, the minister of Louis XVIII. made it the head and centre of teaching throughout France. At the same time a body of electors was appointed who represented, not the scholasticism and theology of the middle ages, but modern literature and modern science. Among those named in 1821, the year of the Sorbonne’s resuscitation, may be mentioned Biot, Poisson, Gay-Lussac, Thénard, Haüy, Brogniart, and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, who were to be followed by such men as Dumas (the celebrated chemist), Bulart, Dulong, Pouillet, Milne-Edwards, and Leverrier. Nor must the names of Guizot, Victor Cousin, Saint-Marc Girardin, Jules Simon, and Nisard be omitted from the list of those writers and professors who have given even greater reputation to the Sorbonne in the present day than it enjoyed of old. The Sorbonne, however, of history, the Sorbonne associated with severe theology and with still severer theological persecution, perished beneath the first blows of the Revolution; thus verifying a prophecy put forth when Richelieu, while reconstructing its walls, seemed disposed to modernise its spirit —

Instaurata ruet jamjam Sorbona. Caduca

Dum fuit, inconcussa stetit, renovata peribit.

“If,” wrote Mercier at the end of the eighteenth century, “the Académie Française is the seat of literary despotism, the Sorbonne may be called the throne of ignorance, superstition, and folly. This foundation is the work of an obscure priest, whose name it retained, though it was afterwards enlarged, beautified, and amply endowed by Cardinal Richelieu, who, as we have had occasion to mention in the foregoing description, never formed an establishment which did not tend in some measure to support his favourite plan of carrying arbitrary power beyond all bounds. Whilst his politics made slaves of the subjects, he supported this kind of spiritual inquisition in order to enthral their very minds. The Sorbonne was consulted on all occasions, and the decree of a few ignorant divines respected as the oracle of the Deity himself.”