"Making it" in France has always meant going to Paris, and it's as true for students as for social climbers. In the heart of the Quartier Latin, on the south side of rue des Écoles, lie a cluster of grim-looking buildings that constitute the major components of the brilliant and mandarin world of French intellectual activity: the Sorbonne, Collège de France and Lycée Louis-le-Grand. From rue des Écoles, Rue Champollion, with its huddle of arty cinemas and cinema café, Le Reflet, leads to the traffic-free place de la Sorbonne. It's a lovely place to sit, with its lime trees, fountains, cafés and book-toting students. The main front is dominated by the Chapelle Ste-Ursule, built in the 1640s by the great Cardinal Richelieu, whose tomb it contains. A building of enormous influence in its unabashed emulation of the Roman Counter-Reformation style, it helped establish a trend for domes, which mushroomed over the city's skyline in the latter part of the century.You can usually put your nose into the main courtyard of the Sorbonne without anyone objecting. Once the most important of the medieval colleges huddled on the top of the Montagne-Ste-Geneviève, it attracted the finest scholars from all over Europe to debate theology, as well as political questions such as relations between the king and the Pope. On 3 May 1968, the Sorbonne became a flashpoint in the student-led rebellion against institutional stagnation when a riot broke out after police attempted to break up a political meeting in the courtyard. The faculty buildings were occupied by radicals and the college briefly became a vibrant commune before it was finally stormed by the police on 16 June. The shake-up in the higher education system that followed transformed the Sorbonne into the more prosaic "Paris IV"; it's now largely attended by arts and social science students. The foundation of the Collège de France, alongside, was first mooted by the Renaissance king François I, in order to establish the study of Greek and Hebrew in France. It's now a leading research institution, attracting the giants of the intellectual world – Barthes, Foucault, Lévy-Strauss. Behind it, on rue St-Jacques, the Lycée Louis-le-Grand numbers Molière, Robespierre, Sartre and Victor Hugo among its former pupils. In some ways it's an ordinary lycée, or secondary school, but it's also a portal to academic and political success, hothousing some of France's brightest students for their entry exams to the grandes écoles, a kind of elite university. The study programme is renowned for reducing the most brilliant pupils to stressed-out wrecks; just one in ten get through.
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