Foreigners’ law studies in France The vast majority (nearly 80 % in 1902) of foreign students enrolled in 1913 at the Paris Faculty of Law were taking bachelor’s and/or doctorate level courses, after having presented a secondary school diploma recognized as equivalent to the French baccalauréat ; a small number (18 %) were simple registrants who sought only a certificate of attendance that could be used in their country, often jurists in search of professional development. Some 60 Egyptians who had begun their studies at the French School of Law in Cairo and who came to take their examinations in Paris are added to the list because of their numerical importance. In the last years of the 19th century, in hopes of preventing foreign graduates from setting uppour lire la suite…
Author: Des facultés sur le front du droit
The right of Belgian student soldiers
The German invasion, in August 1914, pushed part of the student population into the army. They were forced to interrupt their higher education. The necessities of war prevented the resumption of structured scholarly activity in the first months after the German invasion. It was only a year later, in September 1915, that there was a desire among the army and conscripts for a resumption of studies. This desire was expressed by the army medical auxiliaries, who had not had the opportunity to take their last medical doctorate finals and who wanted to see an examination panel organized so that they could complete their education and obtain their degree. The War Department vetoed it : the organization of an examination panel for students of the 3rd doctoratepour lire la suite…
Students of the Lyon Faculty of Law in the First World War
On the eve of the first world conflict, with its 15 tenured professors and 585 students, the young Lyon State faculty held an intermediate rank in the cohort of French faculties of law. Its creation, it is true, was still recent, since it had taken the law of 1875 on the freedom of higher education and the prospect of seeing the old capital of the Gauls become the seat of a Catholic law school, animated by monarchist and very conservative aldermen of Lyon, for the creation of the state faculty to finally become an apparent necessity in the eyes of republican political leaders. Hastily improvised in the fall of 1875, the young institution of higher education quickly found its audience. Its recruitment pool was quitepour lire la suite…
Portraits of Toulouse students in the war
In Toulouse, the academic year of the first year of war began on November 9, 1914. It unfolded “normally”, Dean Maurice Hauriou reported to his assembled colleagues. And yet the numbers speak for themselves. After 1,032 enrollments in 1913, only 295 in 1914. By 1916, only 175 enrollments would be registered and, although the increase somewhat resumed later, it was not until 1930 that the threshold of a thousand new students would again be crossed. The Toulouse Faculty of Law of was hit hard by the outbreak of hostilities. While many had already joined their regiment or would gradually leave, those in the rear were expected to mobilize in their own way as well. For the deferred and exempted conscripts, though sometimes very temporarily, aspour lire la suite…
French law students in the Great War
In the 19th century, law students at the Faculty of Paris belonged to the middle or upper classes and, unsurprisingly, a fifth had a father practicing a legal profession (judge, lawyer, notary, etc.) ; 40 % were sons of landowners or annuitants, 13 % sons of traders, merchants or manufacturers, 11 % sons of civil servants, 4 % sons of doctors or pharmacists, and 3.5 % sons of teachers. More than their fellow students enrolled in medicine, literature or science, these students are from Paris and the Seine department (22 %), and not from a provincial city, which is an indication of material ease. Finally, while at the end of the century, 80 % of medical students lived on the left bank and 19.4 % on the right bank of the Seine, one thirdpour lire la suite…
Journeys of Students
15 June 20239 November 2023 Des facultés sur le front du droitJourneys of students French law students in the Great War In the 19th century, law students at the Faculty of Paris belonged to the middle or upper classes and, unsurprisingly, a fifth had a father practicing a legal profession (judge, lawyer, notary, etc.) ; 40 % were sons of landowners or annuitants, 13 % sons of traders, merchants or manufacturers, 11 % sons of civil servants, 4 % sons of doctors or pharmacists, and 3.5 % sons of teachers. More than their fellow students enrolled in medicine, literature or science, these students are from Paris and the Seine department (22 %), and not from a provincial city, which is an indication of material ease. Finally, while at the end of thepour lire la suite…
The men in the war
In The Sleepwalkers. How Europe went to war in 1914 (Penguin Books, 2013), historian Christopher Clark shows how European statesmen, each caught up in unilaterally rational political and institutional strategies, were collectively drawn into the Great War. Transposing the perspective, one may wonder whether, in determining the causes of the engagement of faculties in the war of law, men were the ones who involved their institutions, or institutions mobilized their men. As the movement ultimately appears largely circular, this part is interested in the involvement of this specific category of the population at war that were law professors and their students (French and foreign, men and women) to reveal the variety of commitments, collective and individual, to the war effort of the nation mobilized ; includingpour lire la suite…
Raymond Thamin (1857-1933) : Memoirs of the Rector of the Academy of Bordeaux in the Great War
Examining the past in search of information on the Bordeaux Faculty of law during the Great War, historians can only be compelled by the discovery of an unknown figure who was nevertheless an important public figure in the history of the Third Republic. Indeed, Raymond Thamin, rector of the Academy of Bordeaux during the Great War, was a scholar with an exceptionally brilliant career. Alumnus of the École Normale Supérieure (1877), professor of philosophy (1880), doctor of letters with a thesis on Saint Ambrose and Christian morality in the 4th century (1896), lecturer at the Faculty of Humanities (1884) and professor at the Lycée Condorcet in Lyon (1894), author in particular of a book on the philosophy of pedagogy titled “L’éducation et le positivisme”, encensedpour lire la suite…
The University Library of Dijon on the war front (14-18) : continuity and American influence
Forword The University of Burgundy was founded belatedly in 1722 as a single faculty of Law. Closed during the Revolution, it was one of only twelve Law Schools reinstated by decree in 1804. Inaugurated in 1806, it was joined in 1808-1809 by a faculty of Arts, a faculty of Sciences, and a “école spéciale de médecine et de pharmacie” [special school of Medicine and Pharmacy]. Having originally been limited to a faculty of law, this aspect thus remained dominant for a long time, particularly in the collections of the university library. During the First World War, Dijon was considered a “rear city”. Thanks to its geographical location, Dijon became a base for French and American military regiments, and a transit point for refugees and troopspour lire la suite…
The University Library of Lille in the Great War
History and functioning Until 1887, the Faculties of Law and Humanities and their library were located in Douai. On that date, the two faculties joined the faculties of science and medicine in Lille, with an organizational chart already merging all libraries. The four faculties were then reunited at the University of Lille in 1896. In 1914, the university library was housed in a recent building, inaugurated in 1907. This building was specially designed to serve as a library : it met the professional standards of the time. In 1903-1904, director of the library Paul Vanrycke took a study trip to Germany (then including Strasbourg), Belgium and the Netherlands to prepare his project. The building covered 1,570 m², or 16,900 sqft. The reading room was lit bypour lire la suite…