Paris

The University of Paris grew out of the cathedral school of Notre-Dame and the independent masters who taught on the hill across the river. Peter Abelard drew students there in the twelfth century by argument and reputation, and his method of setting authorities against one another and resolving the contradiction became the ordinary shape of theological work. Peter Lombard's Sentences, arranged as a set of questions with the authorities marshalled on each side, became the textbook every candidate in theology had to lecture on, so for four hundred years anyone teaching theology in Latin Europe began by commenting on a book written in Paris.

The masters organised themselves as a corporation, secured papal privileges that put them outside the chancellor's control, and won the right to strike, which they used. The arrival of the friars brought Albert the Great and, after him, Thomas Aquinas to the Dominican chair, and made the university the place where Aristotle, newly available in Latin through translations from Arabic and Greek, was absorbed into Christian theology or resisted.

Resistance was real. The bishop of Paris condemned lists of propositions taught in the arts faculty in 1270 and again, at far greater length, in 1277, some of which touched positions Aquinas held. The faculty of theology afterwards acted as an arbiter of orthodoxy for much of Latin Christendom, consulted by popes and kings, a role it kept into the sixteenth century.

Louis IX bought the Crown of Thorns from the Latin emperor of Constantinople, who had pawned it, and built the Sainte-Chapelle to hold it. The chapel is glass held up by the least stone that will do the job, and the relic cost several times what the building did, which states the medieval order of priorities exactly. The crown passed to Notre-Dame after the revolution and was carried out of the burning cathedral in April 2019.

The city was also where the French wars of religion turned at their worst. A royal wedding in August 1572 brought Protestant nobles to Paris; the killing of their leaders spread into a general massacre of Protestants in the streets over several days and then into the provinces, with deaths counted in the thousands. It is remembered in French as the Saint Bartholomew's Day massacre, and it made a Protestant France impossible.

The revolution attacked the church's position rather than religion in the abstract at first, nationalising its property and requiring clergy to swear to a civil constitution, which split the French clergy in two. It went further in 1793, when Notre-Dame was rededicated to a Cult of Reason with a festival in the nave, and again in 1794 under a Cult of the Supreme Being with rites written by Robespierre. Concordat and restoration followed, and the argument was finally settled by the law of 1905 separating the churches from the state. That settlement, laicite, remains the framework of French public life and the ground on which questions about religious dress in schools and public services are argued.