Bref regard historiographique sur l’impossible réforme de l’enseignement du droit dans la France de l’Ancien Régime (XVIe-XVIIIe siècle)

Abstract

The law schools of France’s past have been the subject of near constant criticism for several centuries now, with historians having taken up many pointed remarks ventured by students and other observers of university traditions
in their time. Criticism came with guns blazing: against the king, a reformer at times but a great purveyor of exemptions at others; against schoolteachers, seen as incompetent, lax, and corrupt; and against the magistrates that, subject to the market forces around the venality of their position, expected the university to fling open its doors to assume their position. However, in the midst of these diatribes, divergent opinions appeared that were less to save the teaching of law from its wayward course than to identify the person or persons bearing ultimate responsibility for the disaster. What we have sought to question through some classics of university history is, precisely, to whom this responsibility corresponds.