Sorbonne (building)

Inscription over the entrance to the Sorbonne

The name Sorbonne (La Sorbonne) is commonly used to refer to the historic University of Paris or one of its successor institutions (see below), but this is a recent usage, and "Sorbonne" has actually been used with different meanings over the centuries.

For information on the historic University of Paris, its successor institutions (of which the University of Paris I: Panthéon-Sorbonne, the University of Paris III: Sorbonne Nouvelle, and the University of Paris IV: Paris-Sorbonne are relevant in this context) or the Collège de Sorbonne, please refer to those articles.

The Collège de Sorbonne

The name is derived from the Collège de Sorbonne, founded in 1257 by Robert de Sorbon as one of the first significant colleges of the medieval University of Paris; the university as such predates the college with about a century, and minor colleges had been founded already in the late 12th century. The Collège de Sorbonne was suppressed during the French revolution, reopened by Napoleon in 1808 and finally closed in 1882. This was only one of the many colleges of the University of Paris that existed until the French revolution. Hastings Rashdall, in The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages (1895), which is still a standard reference on the topic, lists some 70 colleges of the university from the Middle Ages alone; some of these were short-lived and disappeared already before the end of the medieval period, but others were founded in the Early modern period, like the Collège des Quatre-Nations.

The Paris Faculty of Theology

With time the college, although only one of many colleges of the university, came to be the centre of theological studies and "Sorbonne" was frequently used as a synonym for the Paris Faculty of Theology.

The entire University of Paris

During the latter part of the 19th century, the buildings of the Collège de Sorbonne were re-used for the Faculties of Sciences and Letters of what was at the time known as the Academy of Paris, the name used for the faculties of the former University of Paris within the centralized structure known as the University of France, created in 1808 but dissolved into its constituent universities again in 1896. As a result of this, "Sorbonne" became a colloquial term for the entire University of Paris.

The use of Sorbonne for the Faculty of Theology is the usage still noted in the Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition (1910–1911) and the Catholic Encyclopedia from 1913, neither of which yet indicate that the word could stand for the university as a whole. Even though neither of these early 20th century English-language encyclopedias is likely to have been up-to-date with current French usage, it still shows that this was an innovation and not yet widely spread.

The successor institutions

After the historic university in 1970 was divided into thirteen different universities, three of these successor institutions include Sorbonne in their names: University of Paris I: Panthéon-Sorbonne, University of Paris III: Sorbonne Nouvelle, and University of Paris IV: Paris-Sorbonne. The thirteen universities still stand under a common rectorate with offices in the Sorbonne.