La formation de l’identité étudiante sous la Troisième République et les obsèques de Jules Michelet

Abstract

Student Identity Formation in the Third Republic and the Public Burial of Jules Michelet On 18 May 1876, two years after his death, Michelet was buried on the Père Lachaise graveyard. This occasion attracted a large crowd and several republican leaders. Two months beforehand, the republicans had won important elections, a context that gave this burial the character of a victory celebration. However, the largest group of the attendance were the students of the Quartier latin. This paper will show that this public burial was the first large student manifestation in Paris since 1848. With the use of recent theories of the field of cultural memory studies, it will be argued that this occasion permitted the students to constitute themselves already as a group with its own identity when the organization of the university still impeded such an identity formation.