‘Une Véritable Question D’état’: Controversies over Ceremonial Robes and Corporate Citizenship at the University of Paris, 1766–1780*

Abstract

Abstract This article examines a series of disputes within the Faculty of Law at the University of Paris as a point of entry into the political culture and cultural politics of the late ancien régime. What began with a disagreement over ceremonial red robes among the faculty’s members escalated into a legal conflict pitting corporatist and egalitarian visions of social organization and collective decision-making against one another. The institutional and material specificity of the disputes, the evolution of the faculty members’ arguments across three cases within a fourteen-year period, and the ambiguous and ambivalent outcome of those cases highlight the incremental processes of culture change in pre-revolutionary France and the ancien régime origins of the legal and civic egalitarianism that would transform France in and after 1789.