I imagine that the school janitor of La Sorbonne University doesn’t have it so bad. When school is out and all the students and teachers have left, imagine roaming these halls and polishing the blackboards in classrooms that taught Voltaire, Balzac, Jean Paul Sartre, Marie Curie and T.S Eliot. Parisian photographer Ludwig Favre is not the janitor, nor was he ever a student at La Sorbonne University, but he always dreamed of getting inside the iconic institution. Thanks to his talent, Favre convinced someone at the university to let him inside the empty university and capture it in all its splendour.
Favre shot the university at 10 AM during the school holidays. “You can feel the history in there,” says Favre. This university’s exact founding is unclear; however, teaching from this university existed since 1096. The university was reorganized as 13 autonomous universities after the student protests of 1968 and became known officially as the Paris-Sorbonne University. All along with Oxford, Bolonia and Salamanca, the Sorbonne is one of the oldest and most prestigious universities. And judging by the grandeur of the classrooms, they certainly don’t want you to forget it.
If you’d like to wander the halls of Paris-Sorbonne University yourself, it’s not impossible. Tours by appointment allow visitors to discover the richness of the Sorbonne’s heritage. For more information, go here.
