Here on the left bank of the Seine, where Abélard, in the twelfth century, “discoursed to all the earth,—to two popes, twenty cardinals, and fifty bishops, to all the orders, all the modern schools which descended from the mountain and inundated Europe”;[63] whither came Dante in the fourteenth century for the lectures of Siger de Brabant; the Greek Lascaris in the fifteenth and Calvin and Loyola in the sixteenth centuries; where the trouvère Rutebœuf in the thirteenth century and the poet Villon in the fifteenth carried on the propagande par l’exemple and even the propagande par le fait; where, in the early part of the fifteenth century, the Cabocherie decreed the reign of virtue and equality, pillaged the dwellings of the wealthy, and had all things common; where, in the sixteenth century, the Commune Catholique was set up at the instigation of an anti-royalist preacher of St. Sévérin; where, in the same century, François Rabelais, Clément Marot, and La Boétie (friend of Montaigne and social democrat before his time) prepared themselves, in their very different fashions, to alternately edify and castigate the civilisation of their epoch, and René Descartes, in the seventeenth century, to found modern philosophy and to destroy scholasticism; where the eighteenth-century Encyclopedists set themselves to solve the problem of human destiny, and begot the Revolution; where, in the century just closed, the trinity of the Collège de France, Michelet, Quinet, and Mickiewicz, formed the men who were to set up the Third Republic on the ruins of the Second Empire,—in this intellectual and nerve centre of Paris, of France, and at intervals of the world, revolutionary action has been so often suited to the revolutionary thought that no one dreams of crying out crime or mystery when, in the course of excavations, human bones are exhumed.
MÉGOTIERS OF THE PLACE MAUBERT
Revolutionary thinking has not been practised with impunity in the Quartier Latin. From Abélard to Michelet and Renan, religious, political, and philosophical heresies have called down ecclesiastical, governmental, and academical wrath with the usual result of helping to propagate the heresies.
Abélard was censured for heterodoxy, hounded from one monastery to another, and condemned finally to perpetual silence. Ramus, antagonist of the philosophy of Aristotle, was included in the massacre of St. Bartholomew. “In Ramus,” says Michelet, “they fancied they were killing a second Abélard. They thought to butcher mind.” Clément Marot was imprisoned, and forced to flee from France. Descartes, maltreated by Catholics and Protestants alike, forbidden to teach, and threatened with death, took refuge first in Holland and then in Sweden. Vanini was burned at the stake. Buffon was persecuted for his Histoire Naturelle, and Montesquieu for his Esprit des Lois. Michelet, who “scratched the heavens with his white hand,”[64] Mickiewicz, Quinet, and Renan were expelled from the Collège de France.
There have been periods, it is true, when the university faculties have been servile and cringing,—mere tools of the potentates of church and state,—and periods when the students have been craven or lethargic; but these periods are the exceptions. Speaking broadly, the Quartier has been from first to last a preserve of free living and free thinking, a stronghold of opposition, a centre of agitation, and a hot-bed of revolution.
Eugène Pelletan thus describes the students of the university’s beginnings:—