Sorbonne and Around
From Paris Hotels Reviews
The Sorbonne and Around
"Making it" in France has always meant going to Paris, and it’s as true for students as for social climbers. In the heart of the Quartier Latin, on the south side of rue des Ecoles, cluster the modern heirs of the colleges that once sat atop the Montagne-Ste-Geneviève, attracting the finest scholars form all over medieval Europe. Paris doesn’t have quite the same world-beating status now, but the Lycée Louis-le-Grand attracts the cream of France’s would-be students, the Sorbonne remains one of France’s top universities for the arts, while the College de France is the leading research institution for the humanities. If you’re bright enough, you need never leave the quartier.
From rue des Ecoles, rue Champollion, with its huddle of arty cinemas and cinema café, Le Reflet (see p.331)leads to the place de la Sorbonne (M˚ Cluny-La Sorbonne). It’s a peaceful place to sit, in a café or just under the lime trees, listening to the play of the fountains and watching students toting their books about. Overshadowing the graceful ensemble is the Chapelle Ste-Ursule, built in the 1640s by the great Cardinal Richelieu, whose tomb it contains. A building of enormous influence in its unabashed emulation of the Roman Counter-Reformation style, it helped establish a trend for domes, which mushroomed over the city’s skyline in the latter part of the century. It is certainly the most architechurally distinctive part of the Sorbonne, as the university buildings were entirely (and unfortunately) rebuilt in the 1880s. Sadly, in the era of anti-terrorism measures – or “plans vigipirates” , as they’re known in France – you’re now unable to look into the Sorbonne’s main courtyard unless you can produce some kind of student ID and bluff convincingly in French. It’s a shame, as it’s a historic as well as a handsome spot: it was here, on May 3, 1968, that a riot broke out after police violently intervened to break up a political meeting – in a contravention of centuries of tradition separating the university and civic authorities. The faculty buildings were occupied by furious radicals and the college briefly became the flashpoint of France’s student-led rebellion against institutional stagnation, housing a vibrant, anarchic commune before finally being stormed by the police on June 16. The shake-up in the higher education system that followed transformed the Sorbonne into the more prosaic Paris IV (though the old name is still used unofficially), largely attended by arts and social science students.
The foundation of the Collège de France, alongside, was first mooted by the Renaissance King Francois I, in order to establish the study of Greek and Hebrew in France. Its modern incarnation, as a research institution, has attracted intellectual giants such as Michel Foucault and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Behind it, on rue St-Jacques, the Lycée Louis-le-Grand numbers Moliere, Robespierre, Sartre and Vicor Hugo among its former pupils. In some ways it’s an ordinary lycée, or secondary shool, but it’s also a portal to academic and political success, hothousing some France’s brightest students for their entry exams to the grandes écoles, France’s most elite colleges of higher education. The study programme is renowned for reducing the most brilliant pupils to stressed-out wreeks; just one in ten get through.
