Sorbonne
La Sorbonne or the University of Paris was the most famous university of Paris, France, and one among the most ancient in Europe (founded in 1257). It is also the name of its main campus, which now houses several universities as well as the Paris rectorate.
It was originally created for the use of 20 theology students in 1257 as Collège de Sorbonne by Robert de Sorbon (1201-1274), a chaplain and confessor to King Louis IX of France. It quickly built a prodigious reputation as a center for learning, and by the 13th century there were as many as twenty thousand foreign students resident in the city, making Paris the capital of knowledge of the Western world. Today, foreign students still make up a significant part of its campus.
On June 23, 1894, Pierre de Coubertin organized an international congress at the Sorbonne, which led to the creation of the International Olympic Committee.
In 1968 it was the starting point of the cultural revolution commonly known as "the French May" (see also situationism), resulting in the closing of the university for the second time in history (the first being the Nazi invasion of 1940).
It is now distributed in several separate universities.
The historical campus is located in the Quartier Latin, in the 5th arrondissement of Paris. It features mural paintings by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes.
Persons of note who attended the University include:
- Alexander Alekhine
- Theo Angelopoulos
- Antoine Arnauld
- Joaquin Balaguer
- Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux
- John Calvin
- Roch Carrier
- Adrienne Clarkson
- Marie Curie
- Pierre Curie
- Simone de Beauvoir
- Raymond Duchamp-Villon
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti
- Jean-Luc Godard
- Francis Seymour Haden
- Mahmoud Hessaby
- Vilayat Inayat Khan
- Irène Joliot-Curie
- Norman Mailer
- Marsilius of Padua
- André Morellet
- Mikhail Vasilievich Ostrogradsky
- Peter of Blois
- Pope Alexander V
- Pauline Reage
- Vera Maria Rosenberg (Vera Atkins of SOE)
- Émile Saisset
- Jean-Pierre Serre
- Ali Shariati
- Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès
- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
- Pierre Trudeau
- Marina Tsvetaeva
- Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, Baron de Laune
- John Napier Turner
- Jacques Verges
- Sérgio Vieira de Mello
- Sam Waterston
- Walter of Chatillon
- Jean-Jacques Ampère
- François Victor Alphonse Aulard
- Victor Cousin
- Marie Curie
- Jean Philibert Damiron
- Jacques Derrida
- Claude Charles Fauriel
- Nicolas Eugène Géruzez
- François Pierre Guillaume Guizot
- Paul Janet
- Frédéric Joliot
- Irène Joliot-Curie
- Peter Martin Ngo-Dinh-Thuc
- Pierre Paul Royer-Collard
- Henri Poincaré
- Émile Saisset
- Étienne Vacherot
- Abel-Francois Villemain
