University of Montpellier

“ On 26th October 1289 Montpellier was raised by Nicholas IV. to the rank of a “studium generale,” a mark of favour which, in a region where papal influence was so potent, resulted in a considerable accession of prosperity. The university also now included a faculty of arts; and there is satisfactory evidence of the existence of a faculty of theology before the close of the 14th century, although not formally recognized by the pope before the year 1421. In the course of the same century several colleges for poor students were also founded. The university of Toulouse is to be Toulouse. ”

“ It is said that one of the special advantages that Montpellier had over Paris was its possession of so many important MSS., particularly those of the Arabian writers. Many "Compendia" were written containing extracts from various writers, and no doubt these were extensively copied and lent or sold to students. At Bologna and Padua, there were regulations as to the price of these MSS. The university controlled the production of them, and stationers were liable to fines for inaccurate copies. ”

“ In Montpellier, the university was, as in Paris, a centre for publishing undertakings, but in Angers, Rouen, Orleans, and Toulouse, in which there are various references to book-dealers as early as the beginning of the fourteenth century, the trade must have been supported by a public largely outside of the university organisation. The statutes of Orleans and of Toulouse, dating from 1341, regulate the supervision of the trade in manuscripts. ”

“ The right to confer degrees has been given back to the State alone; the privilege of the 'letter of obedience' has been abolished; religious teaching has been excluded from the primary schools; and after having 'laicized,' as the French phrase is, the curriculum, the effort was persistently made to 'laicize' the staff. .... From the University point of view, the territory of France is divided into seventeen academies, the chief towns of which are Paris, Douai, Caen, Rennes, Poitiers, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Montpellier, Aix, Grenoble, Chambéry, Lyons, Besançon, Nancy, Dijon, Clermont, and Algiers. ”

“ The city and the university were in the hands of the Huguenots, and Montpellier became Protestant on the spot.
Next year came the counter blow. There were heavy battles with the Catholics all round the neighbourhood, destruction of the suburbs, threatened siege and sack, and years of misery and poverty for Montpellier and all who were therein.
Horrible was the state of France in those times of the wars of religion which began in 1562; the times which are spoken of usually as “The Troubles,” as if men did not wish to allude to them too openly. ”

“ The majority of these colleges were founded by magnates of the church, and designed to maintain a certain number of bursars, or scholars, during their university course. ... Along with the University of Paris there existed in France, in the 14th century, the Universities of Orleans, Angers, Toulouse, and Montpellier. ”

“ Some years after the founding of the University of Paris, a great scientific movement occurred in the Occident. The Faculty of Montpellier had already acquired much celebrity. The College of Surgeons of Paris was established in 1271. Medical circles counted a brilliant galaxy of remarkable men, i.e. Richard de Wendmere, Jean de Saint Amand, Guillaume Saliceto, the great Albert, Bernard Gordon, Arnauld de Villeneuve, Lanfranc, and Roger Bacon. ”

“ Both as sources of amusement and instruction, I frequently attended the lectures on chemistry, mineralogy, and botany, at the college, and had reason to feel gratified by the general attention paid me, both by the professors and students. Montpellier appears a most desirable situation for prosecuting a course of study, as it abounds with excellent public lectures, literary societies, and good libraries. ”

“ The principal public buildings are the palace of justice—a modern structure, the theatre and the prefecture, also modern. Montpellier possesses old houses of the 15th and 16th centuries. The Lez is canalized so as to connect Montpellier with the canal du Midi and with the sea at Palavas. The town has a considerable trade in wine, brandy, fruit and silk. The principal industrial establishment is a manufactory for candles and soap. ”

“ There is a flourishing school of agriculture devoted to the study of wine and silk-culture. Montpellier is more celebrated, however, as an ancient city belonging to Aragon or to Navarre, before it finally became a French city in 1392. ”

“ Within the last century it has been fashionable in England to give the name of Montpellier to many places, new streets, rows of houses, terraces, and gardens, where the situation has been supposed to have been at all favourable ”

“ The roads have been fine but the ride not so pleasant as that of yesterday. Montpellier is simply a place to spend the night with nothing to see, a busy place of some sixty thousand people. The streets and sidewalks bubble and sparkle until a late hour with the life that is so dear to these people,—open cafés and tables all over the sidewalks, much wine but never a case of intoxication. No matter in what part of the world you find this nation, they will arrange some portion of their abiding place to resemble their beloved Paris. ”

“ CHAPTER XIII. URBAINE. From the Mediterranean the warm, luscious breezes of the south sweep up to where Montpellier stands ere they pass the city and waft to the summits of the Cévennes the perfume of the flowers and the odours of the rich fruits which grow upon the shores of the beauteous sea. And from Montpellier itself, from the old Place de Peyrou, may be obtained a view that is unsurpassed both in its beauty and in its power of recalling to the memory the loathsome cruelties which, perpetrated in the days of Louis the Great King, have smirched forever that beauty. ”

“ The old hotels were usually more concentrated; but the school of medicine passed for one of the attrac- tions of Montpellier. Long before Mentone was dis- covered or Colorado invented, British invalids travelled down through France in the post-chaise or the public coach to spend their winters in the wonderful place which boasted both a climate and a faculty. The air is mild, no doubt, but there are refinements of mild- ness which were not then suspected, and which in a more analytic age have carried the annual wave far beyond Montpellier. ”

“ In 1816 the Academie des sciences was reconstituted as a branch of the Institute. The new academy has reckoned among its members, besides many other brilliant men, Carnot the engineer, the physicists Fresnel, Ampere, Arago, Blot, the chemists Gay-Lussac and Thenard, the zoologists G. Cuvier and the two Geoffroy Saint-Hilaires. In France there were also considerable academies in most of the large towns. Montpellier, for example, had a royal academy of sciences, founded in 1706 by Louis XIV., on nearly the same footing as that of Paris, of which, indeed, it was in some measure the counterpart. ”

“ The inhabitants of this town are said to be the liveliest people in France, and it is probably that circumstance which gave rise to this ridiculous story. My mother’s carriage having been sent on before us to this place, we now pursued our journey by land, and proceeded by the high road to Montpellier, a city very famous for the purity of its air, and on that account the resort of strangers in search of a better climate than their own. Hence it has given its name to so many places in England as a recommendation of the air. ”

“ The general characteristics of the imitation, size and bombast, are well epitomised in the principal statue of Montpellier's fine Champ de Mars, which represents the high-heeled and luxurious Louis XIV in the unfitting armour of a Roman Imperator, mounted on a huge and restive charger. Such affectation in architectural subjects is the death-blow to all real beauty and originality, and Montpellier has gained little from its Bourbon patrons except a series of fine broad vistas. No [Pg 242] city could offer greater contrast to the ancient and dignified classicism of Nîmes. ”

“ LETTER XII NICE, December 6, 1763.
DEAR SIR,—The inhabitants of Montpellier are sociable, gay, and good-tempered. They have a spirit of commerce, and have erected several considerable manufactures, in the neighbourhood of the city. People assemble every day to take the air on the esplanade, where there is a very good walk, just without the gate of the citadel: but, on the other side of the town, there is another still more agreeable, called the peirou, from whence there is a prospect of the Mediterranean on one side, and of the Cevennes on the other. ”

“ He contemplated long its site, its aspect, its neighbourhood, and resolved to establish on this hill of Montpellier a temple for himself and his priests. All smiled on his desires. By the genius of the soil, by the character of the inhabitants, no town is more fit for the culture of letters, and above all of medicine. What site is more delicious and more lovely? A heaven pure and smiling; a city built with magnificence; men born for all the labours of the intellect. ”

“ More central and accessible than Oxford, safer than Bologna, freer than Naples, and founded on a wide and grand basis, the University of Paris soon grew into a formidable assemblage of men who, whilst ostensibly votaries of science, were not unprovided with excitable spirits and rough hands. ”

“ What to-day is the cathedral of Montpellier was built from 1364 to 1367 as a monastery church, so that it hardly falls within our scope. But if architecturally the city of Montpellier is of lesser importance, it has been for long centuries the intellectual stronghold of the Midi, and we know that cathedrals are built with more than stones. Montpellier’s school of medicine was famous in the XII century. The city was free of Albigensian taint; no trading town was more flourishing during the XIII century. ”

“ When order began to be re-established, he was led by his own natural tastes and the counsel of his friends to select as his career that of public instruction. He competed for and obtained, first the appointment of professor of literature at the École Centrale of Montpellier; then that of the higher mathematics, at the Lycée and in the faculty of science, of which he was nominated "Doyen." {141} As his merits established themselves by repeated proofs, his reputation increased; the papers of learned societies were filled with his contributions, and the École Polytechnique with his pupils. ”

“ Espousing the principles of the Revolution in 1789, he was commissioned by the noblesse of the province to draw up the cahier (statement of principles and grievances) ; and the sénéchaussée of Montpellier elected him deputy to the states-general of Versailles; but the election was annulled on a technical point. Nevertheless in 1792 the new department of Hérault, in which Montpellier is situated, sent him as one of its deputies to the Convention which assembled and proclaimed the Republic in September 1792. ”

“ He probably gained much by substituting Nice for Montpellier as a place to winter in, for although the climate of Montpellier is clear and bright in the highest degree, the cold is both piercing and treacherous. Days are frequent during the winter in which one may stand warmly wrapped in the brilliant sun and feel the protection of a greatcoat no more than that of a piece of gauze against the icy and penetrating blast that comes from "the roof of France." ”

“ College regulations in other countries add considerably to our knowledge of medieval student-life. In Paris, where the system had its humble beginning in the hire of a room for eighteen poor scholars, by a benevolent Englishman returning from a pilgrimage to Palestine in 1180, the college ideal progressed slowly and never reached its highest development. Even when most of the students of Paris came to live in colleges, the college was not the real unit of university life, nor was a Parisian college a self-governing community like Merton or Peterhouse. ”

“ I will place myself at your disposal at Montpellier on any day and at any hour that may be most convenient to you. We shall name four persons of literary standing to give us three subjects with which we are to deal for twenty-four hours. We shall be shut up together. ”

“ It is frightful to concentrate all the lights of the age in Paris, and to leave the departments in ignorance and idleness! I have sent M. de Candolle to Montpellier to stimulate others to activity.” Considering that the members of the Institute of France have always considered themselves the very cream of the cream of science, this was very shocking.
The new professor started with his wife, little boy, his library and herbarium, and with many a regret at leaving such friends as those who enlightened Paris as anatomists and botanists. ”

“ The five faculties of medicine, law, science, literature and Protestant theology, and the higher school of pharmacy, form the body of faculties, the association of which is known as the University of Paris. The faculties of science and literature, together with their library, are established at the Sorbonne, which is also the seat of the académie, of which Paris is the centre, and of the École des chartes. ”

“ He then decreed the purchase of a home for 4,500 ducats in gold, and ordered to pay out immediately 4,000 florins in gold for the next school year. Besides the college named, Urban V. had founded one at Montpellier for medical students, and another, which had its seat at first at Trets, later at Monosque. During his pontificate this Pope maintained no less than 1,000 students at various institutions. Toulouse also had several colleges for poor students, founded by high princes of the Church. ”