The famous Sorbonne began as a royal chaplain's lodging house for poor scholars
Robert de Sorbon, chaplain to King Louis IX, noticed how hard it was for poor students to reach the rank of doctor. In February 1257 he founded a house where clergy could live together, free of money worries, and simply study and teach. His name eventually came to stand for Parisian learning itself.
The College of Sorbonne was one of many colleges within the medieval University of Paris, and it stood on the site of today's Sorbonne building. Revolutionary France closed it in 1793 along with every other Paris college. Napoleon's decree of 17 March 1808 created a humanities faculty housed there, which people simply called the Sorbonne. It drew 1,000 to 1,500 students a year under the restored Bourbons and around 2,000 under the July Monarchy, yet only 51 professors taught there between 1809 and 1878.
Cardinal Richelieu, then head of the university, built its chapel in 1622. In 1881 Jules Ferry decided to consolidate the scattered buildings into one, and architect Henri-Paul Nénot built the present structure between 1883 and 1901, folding the chapel into a grand courtyard. The sciences had moved in during 1826 and stayed until 1962, when they shifted to the Jussieu campus. Marie Sklodowska-Curie, who arrived from Poland in 1891, became the first woman to hold a professorship there, and she and Pierre Curie are regarded as founders of today's science faculty.
After a reunified University of Paris was inaugurated in November 1896, it lasted until 1971, when it was broken into several interdisciplinary universities. Some kept the Sorbonne name, and the historic building at 47 rue des Écoles still belongs jointly to all 13 successors. Its library, refurbished in 2013, holds 2.5 million books, 400,000 of them old, making it the biggest university library in Paris.
The current Sorbonne University dates only from 2018, when the humanities-focused Paris IV merged with the science and medicine university Paris VI, named for Pierre and Marie Curie. That year it won an open-ended endowment of 900 million euros through a national excellence programme. Oddly, it has no law school; law professors split off in 1971 to form Panthéon-Assas, which now teaches law for it as a separate university.
Source: Sorbonne University
