Fearing God's rejection, young St. Louis calls the Paris scholars home

PARIS, 1230 AD — The schools of Paris emptied after a street fight in which townsmen and the city’s archers killed several students. The masters stopped teaching and left the city, and their students followed them into the provinces of France and beyond. Saint Louis IX of France, king since boyhood and fourteen when the fight broke out, called them back to Paris, and they returned more than two years after they had left.

The University of Paris was famous across Europe. The most renowned theologians of the day taught there, and it drew students from many nations. The last two kings of France had granted it special rights, and its masters insisted on every one of them.

St. Louis had been king since his father died in November 1226 AD, but he did not yet govern. His mother, Queen Blanche of Castile, ruled for him. What the masters could withhold from her government was their teaching: they could stop lecturing, and they could take their schools to any town that would have them.

The fight began over the price of wine. On the Monday before Lent, at the end of February, a party of students from Picardy quarrelled with an innkeeper in the suburb of Saint-Marcel, and his neighbours beat them and drove them off. The next day the students came back with friends, broke into the inn, smashed open the wine barrels and wounded many of the people who lived nearby.

The magistrates of Saint-Marcel complained to the Bishop of Paris, who had the right to try the case, and to the Pope’s legate in France, Cardinal Frangipani. Neither man liked the University. The bishop resented how often it had defied his authority, and four years earlier the students had rioted and wrecked the legate’s house after he took the cathedral clergy’s side against the University. So instead of trying the case, the two churchmen took it to the queen and urged her to punish the students hard.

Queen Blanche acted in haste. She sent the city’s provosts and their archers to the suburb with orders not to spare the guilty. The archers attacked the first groups of students they came across, whether or not those students had been at the inn, and townsmen joined in. Some students were killed or wounded, and others were pushed into the river and drowned.

The heads of the University stopped all lectures and went to the queen and the legate. They demanded that the two answer at once for the killings and for the attack on the University’s rights, and they were turned away. Most of the masters then left Paris, and the students went after them. Many swore not to come back until the University had been fully compensated. Groups of them settled at Reims, Angers, Orléans and Toulouse, and in Spain, England and Italy. Two of the crown’s enemies offered them a home. Peter, count of Brittany, the rebel baron the king’s army was fighting, invited them to Nantes, and King Henry III of England invited them to Oxford.

Guillaume de Nangis, a monk of Saint-Denis who wrote a chronicle of the king’s life after St. Louis died, says the king grieved to see learning leave his kingdom. It had come from Athens to Rome, and from Rome to France, and now it was going. The king was afraid the Lord would one day say to him Quia repulisti scientiam, repellam te (Because you have rejected knowledge, I will reject you). Nangis explains why the loss mattered so much to a French king: the lily on the French kings’ coat of arms and banners has three petals, for faith, learning and knighthood, and losing learning would spoil one of the three.

St. Louis sent word for the masters and students to come back to Paris. After Pope Gregory IX settled the quarrel in 1231 AD, the University came back to Paris on the king’s assurance that its rights would be respected and its injuries made good. St. Louis received the returning masters and students with great kindness, and he made the townsmen of Paris make amends for everything they had done to them.