The School of the French Revolution: A Documentary History of the College of Louis-Le-Grand and Its Director, Jean-François Champagne, 1762-1814

by R.R. Palmer

The College of Louis-le-Grand, now the premier lycée of France, is the only school with a connected history of education from the ancien régime to modern times. It was the only school never to close during the French Revolution, and its experience offers a new perspective on the fate of educational institutions in times of revolutionary change. In this book a noted historian describes the French college of the ancien régime and tells how it withstood crises of dissolution and reconstruction, dispersion of teachers and students, academic radicalism, loss of endowments, war, inflation, and political terror, to emerge in 1808 as a key element in Napoleon's Imperial University.

R. R. Palmer's introduction illuminates the original documents, which are here translated for the first time. These documents supply valuable insight not only into the school's history, but also into the origins of the modern French educational system. From them emerges a portrait of the school's remarkable director, Jean-François Champagne, who guided his institution through the calamitous years of the Revolution.

Originally published in 1975.

312 pages, Hardcover

First published July 21, 1975

About the author

Robert Roswell Palmer (January 11, 1909 – June 11, 2002), commonly known as R. R. Palmer, was a distinguished American historian at Princeton and Yale universities, who specialized in eighteenth-century France. His most influential work of scholarship, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800 (1959 and 1964), examined an age of democratic revolution that swept the Atlantic civilization between 1760 and 1800. He was awarded the Bancroft Prize in History for the first volume. Palmer also achieved distinction as a history text writer.