THE SORBONNE.
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.
[Illustration: FAÇADE OF THE NEW SORBONNE.]
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.
[Illustration: THE CHURCH OF THE SORBONNE.]
“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.”