“A mixed, vagabond population, drifted together from nobody could say where, they live by the grace of God, they eat when they can, they sleep on straw, and carry their begging wallets proudly, as if conscious they hold there the word of the future.... When they do not dine, they have the resource of the cabaret; and, always noisy, always care-free, they prowl about at nightfall, they force now and then the door of a bourgeois, and, when the watch rushes to the uproar, they put it to rout, quit with answering for the misdemeanour to the rector, who invariably exonerates.”
“Scantily clad and almost vagabonds,” says another historian of this early period, “but not depriving themselves of good cheer, the future magistrates and theologians, who were to antagonise in parliament the will of the king, were already revolutionary.”
In the fourteenth century the faculties, morally, and the students, both morally and materially, cast in their lots with the revolution of Etienne Marcel, who is credited with having invented the barricade.
Reign succeeded reign, and still the good habit of thrashing the watch was kept up. Besides, there were battles-royal galore between the students and the troops of the king.
The students made themselves jugglers, fakirs, and buffoons on the Pont-Neuf, then a favourite, shop-lined promenade. They sacked cook-shops and taverns, and levied tribute from belated pedestrians. The lawless exploits of François Villon, singer of villanelles to Guillemette, the tapissière, and Jehanneton, the chaperonnière, in the reigns of Charles VII. and Louis XI., have become legendary.
That other great François (Rabelais) has portrayed the democratic and turbulent temper of the students of a somewhat later period.
During the reign of Louis XIV., the merry, strolling players and mountebanks, Tabarin and Gaultier-Garguille (the latter the inventor of the farce), had numerous imitators among the students; which jovial humour did not prevent the latter from entering heartily into the Fronde,[65] risking their lives on “the Day of the Barricades” and exercising their caustic wit against the court and the hated foreign minister, Mazarin, in lampoons called Mazarinades.
The trenchant criticisms and the comprehensive formulas, which appeared in the Encyclopedists’ published works, captivated many professors of the university,[66] and made a direct and profound impression on the students. But it seems to be no exaggeration to say that it was the cafés and cabarets of the Left Bank rather than the university that fanned the smouldering flame of discontent into a conflagration of rebellion. In them the fiercest revolutionary clubs of the epoch had their rendezvous. At the Café Procope,—transformed, alas! into a vulgar restaurant only a year or so back,—Hébert presided over a club which burned before the door the journals found too tame for its ideas, and Danton met with Marat, Legendre, and Fabre d’Eglantine; and the Procope was only one of a score. Indeed, it would take a volume to do full justice to the part played in French history by the Latin Quarter cafés from 1780 to Napoleon’s establishment of himself in power.
Under the Restoration the social and political Utopias of the Icarians, the Fourierites, and the Saint-Simonians, commanded the interest, if not the allegiance, of a considerable portion of the university. “The new Sorbonne,” says Vacherot, “far from viewing unmoved the liberal movement which was to culminate in the revolution of July, participated in it actively, lending it the prestige of its most spirituel, its most serious, and its most eloquent teaching.”