History
The university emerged from a Lutheran humanist German Gymnasium, founded in 1538 by Johannes Sturm in the Free Imperial City of Strassburg. It was transformed to a university in 1621 and elevated to the ranks of a royal university in 1631. Among its earliest university students was Johann Scheffler who studied medicine and later converted to Catholicism and became the mystic and poet Angelus Silesius (1624-1677)
The Lutheran German university still persisted even after the annexation of the City by King Louis XIV in 1681 (one famous student was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in 1770/71), but mainly turned into a French university during the French Revolution.
The university was refounded as the German Kaiser-Wilhelm-Universität in 1872, after the Franco-Prussian war and the return of Alsace-Lorraine to Germany provoked a westwards exodus of Francophone teachers. During the German Empire the university was greatly expanded and numerous new buildings were erected because the university was intended to be a showcase of German against French culture in Alsace. In 1918, Alsace-Lorraine was returned to France, so a reverse exodus of Germanophone teachers took place.
During the Second World War, when France was occupied, personnel and equipment of the University of Strasbourg were transferred to Clermont-Ferrand. In its place, the short-lived German Reichsuniversität Straßburg was created.
In 1970, the university was subdivided into three separate institutions:
- Louis Pasteur University (Strasbourg I)
- Marc Bloch University (Strasbourg II)
- Robert Schuman University (Strasbourg III)
These were, however, reunited in 2009, a process that should finish in 2012, and were able to be among the first twenty French universities to gain greater autonomy.
Read more about this topic: University Of Strasbourg
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“If usually the “present age” is no very long time, still, at our pleasure, or in the service of some such unity of meaning as the history of civilization, or the study of geology, may suggest, we may conceive the present as extending over many centuries, or over a hundred thousand years.”
—Josiah Royce (1855–1916)