Absolutism and the Universities

Abstract

Fran9ois Mitterand incurred much criticism in the recent French presidential election campaign for being short on specific policies, though one promise which he did reiterate frequently was to increase significantly expenditure on universities and on scientific research, as a means of stimulating the national economy. As a preliminary gesture in this direction, M. Lionel Jospin, the minister responsible for education in the new Socialist government, has been given top ranking in the Cabinet, second only to the Prime Minister (and with the somewhat Gilbertian title: Ministre d'Etat, ministre de l'ducation nationale, de la jeunesse et du sport); his budget for next year has been increased to 5-5%, allowing for some 13,000 new jobs. This is all in stark contrast with the current status accorded to the DES and with its policies of retrenchment: the mere fact that such widely divergent philosophies about the role of universities and their usefulness to the state can coexist in two neighbouring, and not so dissimilar, countries, is extraordinary, and seems to go beyond any simple Left/ Right divide. Perhaps it is not surprising then that in recent years there has been an upsurge of interest among historians in the nature and function of 'higher education' in earlier ages, a trend epitomised by the creation in 1981 of a journal, History of Universities. The Anglo-Saxons have been prominent in writing the history of French universities, and following upon George Weisz's The Emergence of Modern Universities in France, 1863-1914 (Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 1983), L. W. B. Brockliss has now given us a definitive and immensely suggestive account of 'higher education' under the ancien regime. The first part of the book describes the different types of institution which existed in this period and looks at the day-to-day lives of the teachers and students who worked in them; the major part of the work is then devoted to a detailed consideration of the structure and content of the curriculum. Previous attempts to describe the teaching given in universities in the early-modern period have suffered from severe limitations, firstly because they were often limited to one institution only and so were rather narrow in scope, and secondly, and more importantly, because they based their descriptions of the curriculum on the provisions laid down in the various faculty statutes, theoretical statements of policy which were sometimes incomplete and often not implemented in practice. The great originality of this study is that it is founded on different and unmined source material-printed textbooks, manuscript transcriptions 371