French Academia in a Prosopographic Perspective: A collaborative Joint Project

International audienceThe history of French universities remains largely unwritten. The national structure of the teaching corps partly explains this phenomenon, as it has played a part in orienting the historiography towards an examination of the disciplines, as opposed to institutions. Only Parisian academics, the profession’s elite, have been the subject of profound studies. The lack of work on the academic corps as a whole hinders our ability to fully understand French academia as an institution. In an effort to remedy this, a prosopographic project dealing with the French academic corps in sciences, humanities, and law between 1800–1940, started in 2011. Like all large-scale prosopographic projects undertaken by a sizeable team of collaborators, it required serious preliminary reflection on the kind of data to be collected in order to foster a genuine social history of the academic profession. This article defines the conceptual framework and practices of the study in progress, thereby endorsing it as an alternative way of writing university history in contrast to the traditional jubilee history